The Obama legacy that can't be repealed
By Robert J. Samuelson December 18 at 7:16 PM
There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be swamped with analyses of Obama’s legacy. His foreign policy will be critiqued, as it is already. Once in the White House, Donald Trump may trash some of Obama’s favorite policies: the Affordable Care Act, the program on climate change, the Dodd-Frank law on financial regulation. All this may wrongly foster the notion that Obama accomplished almost nothing.
In its just-released annual report, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) explains why. Recall the dreadful numbers.
In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.
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