Reagan recovery vs Obama recovery
The right wing is comparing the jobs recovery of Ronald Reagan to the jobs recovery of Barack Obama as a way to show that Reagan's policies were much better. And they say that Reagan's recession was worse than Obama's because unemployment went up to 10.4%. However, they say, at the same time in the recovery, Reagan was creating many more jobs. They cite this as evidence of the failure of Obama's policies and the success of Reagan's policies. No doubt, the Reagan recession was very serious.
However, the two economic downturns were as different as night and day. With the Reagan recession, we were recovering from the first oil shocks and embargoes and the first wave of inflation to hit our country in a long time. This was also left over from the spending of the Vietnam War. Reagan and the Republicans blamed Jimmy Carter but Nixon and Ford did nothing to prevent or to cushion the inflation blow, other than to print out WIN buttons. It was a severe recession.
But with the "Obama recession", which really began before he took office also, it was deeper and worldwide in its scope. It was on a depression level, with the collapse of the banks and the bubble bursting on the housing market, like none we had seen in our lifetimes. We were in dire straits. In many ways, we are still there. We have never recovered.
History will likely record that Barack Obama saved the capitalist system just as much as FDR did, or maybe even moreso, and prevented the nation from sliding into a deep depression with 20% unemployment. We are actually very, very lucky to only have 8.3% unemployment at this time. Obama inherited a much more dangerous economic downturn than did Ronald Reagan, there is little doubt.
Unfortunately, the President did not do a good job communicating the depth of the problem to the country or the time it might take to recover from the depression. Perhaps they underestimated the severity of the problem or they did not want to put too much of a negative spin on the disastrous situation we were in?
Regardless, the Republicans are now able to spin the economy as a failure on Obama's part by comparing it to Reagan at the same time in his recovery. In hindsight, it may have been better to have informed and warned the people from the beginning that this would take more than one term to fix? Perhaps it would have been better to move people's expectations a little more slowly?
Now, the Republicans are taking advantage of the slow recovery by saying that it is a failure of the Obama Administration. It didn't have to be this way.
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