Debacle: Hope & Change Betrayed

The book Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future quickly cuts to the chase and attacks the problems that are facing America.

“On many issues, he campaigned as a sensible moderate and even repeatedly advocated conservative positions such as cutting the size of government and deficits,” the book notes. “But once in office, he took a hard left turn: overseeing a massive 21 percent increase in federal government spending from 2008 to 2011.”

It traces the origins of the mortgage crisis to the Clinton years, where bureaucrats and politicians, who feared accusations of racial discrimination by denying minorities their housing and mortgage applications, approved shaky mortgages and housing deals. It also did not help that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had sketchy mortgage bundles to begin with, and investors believed in their fictitious book-keeping and security ratings. When the mortgage crisis ballooned, both Freddie and Fannie went under, taking the government (who backed their shaky loans and mortgages) and their private investors with them.

Also, the book outlines the inherent problems of President Obama’s claim that his economic stimulus package lowered unemployment and boosted the economy with more jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth. In comparing Obama’s economic record with Ronald Reagan’s, we can see that President Obama had lost up to 1.9 million jobs and had tepid growth while Reagan oversaw an increase of 6.3 million more jobs and a growth rate of 6% in his first term. The authors make the point that President Obama’s record cannot hold a candle to President Reagan’s and is more similar to that of Richard Nixon.

The book’s authors—Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist and economist John Lott— go into great detail and depth regarding Obama’s bailout strategies and the regulatory burdens of Obamacare and other executive branch agencies such as the EPA. The authors outline ten steps to fix America’s current economic situation, ranging from not raising taxes, reforming the tax code, reducing government spending, and decreasing the regulatory burdens on Americans. It is a no-nonsense list of ten steps to fix America.

Overall, the book is a great read on the real reasons behind the Second Coming of the Great Recession (and how it is called a Great Recession and not the Second Great Depression escapes both Norquist and Lott). It is a distinction that the reader may ponder as well.

Spencer Irvine is a research assistant at Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.