Obama went into the Senate in Jan '07. That's when things went south. He & the Democrats helped create the mess he inherited.
I looked at the chart a little while ago..noticed it hovered and basically baselined at around 28mm for 2007-08 (would love to see the numbers going back 20+ years). My best guess is that prior to 2008, that steady number were the "lifers", of which, I'm certain many were the serial scammers doing stuff as mentioned in this thread. The recent stairstepping higher is most definitely a part of the real economic pain. No matter how you slice it, 28mm to 46.3mm in literally 3+ years is a staggering number. We'll more than likely hit 50mm by mid-2012...and then how the hell are we going to continue these programs for e v e r?
Needless to say, the Great Recession was not caused by Obama. It was well underway before Obama took office. The foolish policies that caused the mortgage crisis and the massive deficit spending were put into place by both parties more than a decade before Obama was elected. Are Obama's policies going to get us out of the Great Recession? Of course not. But frankly at this point the problems seem unfixable by anybody.
I'm not that pessimistic. But many prominent economists thought the stimulus was too small to do much good. Do you think Obama could have passed a bigger stimulus, or would he have been blocked? By whom? (Yes, I know, it sucks borrowing money to get yourself back on your feet, but who blew the surplus we were running?)
Obama went into the Senate in Jan '07, which is when things started to go south. Obama helped create the mess he inherited. That's what liberals keep saying. And we know liberals don't know how to run a country.
Many prominent economists are a bunch of Marxists who don't know how to run a country. And they recently figured out they can't print jobs.