150 Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History (4 page)

Five months later, Obama informed Congress that he would provide $450 million in emergency aid for Egypt’s new government, now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group with a history of supporting terrorism.
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Left unexplained was just what “emergency” required the American taxpayer to fund a Muslim Brotherhood government. To put it in to perspective, Osama bin Laden, his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed all once belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood before bin Laden formed al Qaeda. Hamas considers itself to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
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Indeed, prior to the fall of the old Mubarak regime in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had been suppressed as a terrorist organization in Egypt. With our national debt skyrocketing and a budget sequester forcing Americans to adjust to less government money available, it is impossible to understand why Obama believes our tax dollars should been given to foreign enemies of the United States.

Obama wasn’t just a disappointment when it came to the economy. He may have campaigned on being a new kind of politician, one who would change the way government worked, but instead he became the epitome of everything that it is wrong with government.

Obama’s time in office has been defined by a long list of broken promises and flip-flops. Instead of transparency, we got secrecy and thuggery. Instead of humility, we got narcissism.

Under Barack Obama, the American Dream has become increasingly difficult to achieve.
Instead of offering a balanced approach to the nation’s problems, we got bad policy. In Barack Obama, we got a president who, when he saw tragedy and disaster, looked for political opportunity, not solutions. In a time when the country needed leadership, we got incompetence.

30.
Transparency Failure

Barack Obama promised that he would post all bills online for five days prior to signing them. Obama said he’d do this to allow the American people to see what is being proposed and to comment on it, thus giving the President greater input on whether a particular bill should be signed. It would have been a great precedent to set for the presidency, but Obama managed to break this promise a mere nine days after assuming office. On January 29, 2009, President Obama signed the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” which had been passed through Congress only two days earlier. When Obama broke his promise the second time (on the signing of an expanded S-CHIP law on February 4, 2009), administration officials were asked why; the explanation was that it was “too difficult” to get the legislation up online for five days prior to signing and they were working on the problem. Apparently, they are still working on this, because bills
still
aren’t posted five days prior to signing.
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31.
Skyrocketing College Costs

Under President Obama, the average cost of college tuition has increased by 8 percent across all types of institutions, be they public, private, two-year or four-year schools.
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Despite campaigning on increasing access to Pell Grants, Obama actually cut Pell Grants, which increased the cost the college by nearly a thousand dollars per year.
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These increases in college costs are more than double the rate of inflation,
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and combined with the decline of family incomes significantly increased the burden of obtaining a higher education on Obama’s watch.

Obama forgot to mention this to all those youngsters who voted for his reelection. Adding insult to injury, Obama’s policies have prevented the robust economic growth necessary to absorb each year’s graduating class into the workforce.

32.
Hypocrisy on No-Bid Contracts

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama promised that he would end the practice of awarding contracts over $25,000 without bidding. This was in response to the leftist complaint during the Bush Administration that Halliburton—once run by Vice President Dick Cheney—had received no-bid contracts for work in Iraq. Obama broke his promise here for much the same reason he broke his promise to close Guantanamo Bay prison camp: reality.
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While it is often in the public’s interest that government contracts be bid upon by various firms, sometimes certain types of jobs can only be done by certain firms. Obama, living in a liberal fantasy world and anxious to fire up his leftwing base, made the promise to end no-bid contracts without thinking the matter through.

As a candidate, Obama may have just been ignorant of how things work. As president, though, his ignorance became hypocrisy when he awarded a $433 million no-bid contract to Siga Technologies, the maker of an experimental smallpox vaccine that also happens to be a major donor for Democrats. The conflict of interest was so blatant that Claire McCaskill, a top Democrat in the Senate, called for an investigation into a potential conflict of interest and possible waste of tax dollars.
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33.
Youth Crushed Under Student Loans

On March 30, 2010, President Obama signed a law taking over the student loan program from private lenders. Under the law, all guaranteed student loans would be provided by the United States government after July 1, 2010. While the American people have gotten rid of a total of $1.6 trillion in debt since the 2008 financial crisis, student loan debt has risen.

Since 2008, the amount of student loan debt has increased by $303 billion. In fact, it increased by $10 billion just between March and June of 2012. Unlike all other types of debt, student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Once a young man or woman takes on student debt, that burden will stay with them for the rest of their lives unless they can repay. Due to an increasing number of college graduates that can’t find a job after leaving school, student loan delinquency rates are higher than ever before; 8.9 percent of all student loans were 90 days or more delinquent as of June 2012.
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Now that the United States government has taken over student loans, this delinquency hurts more than just the recent graduates who are having a harder time finding work after school—given Obama’s history, it seems likely he will eventually call for a taxpayer bail out of taxpayer-funded student loans.

34.
Supporting A Minimum Wage Hike

Increasing the minimum wage is a hardy perennial in Democrat politics. That it makes no economic sense and can actually hurt the poor is meaningless.
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But, Democrats see it as way of garnering support. Raising the minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $9.50 has long been part of Obama’s domestic agenda.
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No action was ever taken—even when Obama’s party controlled both Houses of Congress. This would have been simple to do and would have probably been politically popular, especially during 2009 when the economy was bad and average folks were mad about the bailout money that went to corporations.

Yet, he did nothing.

As an almost insulting after-the-fact effort, House Democrats did propose an increase in the minimum wage, in July of 2012—eighteen months after they had lost their House majority, and four months before the presidential election.
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It is clear that Obama sees the minimum wage as economic wedge issue, more than “keeping the American Dream alive” for poor Americans.

35.
Collapse of Home Values

In September of 2012, the average value of an American home had climbed back to prices last seen in 2003.
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This is actually considered an improvement because earlier in the Obama Administration prices had dropped, in some estimates, to levels not seen since the 1990s. This means most people who bought a home from about 2004 until the housing collapse in 2007 now own a home worth less than they paid for it. For most Americans, their home is their largest source of wealth so this collapse in home values has been devastating, especially to the middle class. Furthermore, the slight rise in home values since 2010 has been built on financial sand. As it turns out, when the US taxpayer was forced to bail out the failed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lenders, most of the money wound up being used to merely transfer the bad loans to the Federal Housing Administration. As a lot of the loans were non-performing when sent to the FHA and the economy has not improved, all that was done was to move the disaster from one government-backed entity to another.

The only way this would have worked is if the American economy took off like a rocket. If we had had economic growth of 4 or 5 percent per year over the past four years, this would not have been a problem, but we didn’t have that. Our anemic growth has not only stunted American wages and reduced American employment; it has also ensured that the FHA will need to be bailed out. Recent reports indicate that the FHA is over-leveraged as much as Lehman Brothers was before it triggered the 2008 financial crisis.
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Estimates are that in 2013 the FHA will need a taxpayer bailout to the tune of at least $34.5 billion.
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36.
Inaction on Housing Foreclosures

In 2006, there were 717,522 foreclosure filings of American homes. After the housing crash, this jumped up to the 2.8 million range for 2009 and 2010 as the housing market appeared to hit a bottom.
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All through 2012, there was a lot of happy talk in the media about a housing recovery, but for 2012, the number of properties subjected to foreclosure was still a staggering 1.8 million.
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The happy talk was, of course, at the service of Obama’s re-election effort, but around the country, foreclosures continue to affect Americans. 57 percent of the metro areas monitored by RealtyTrac showed an increase in foreclosure activity.
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Additionally, there are some worrying signs that 2013 could see a rise in filings.
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This is because people who have tried desperately to save their homes in the stagnant Obama economy are now running out of options: unable to refinance, unable to sell and also unable to afford their homes due to job cuts, pay cuts and tax hikes, people are now throwing in the towel and giving their homes back to the banks. Regardless, foreclosures are occurring about three times more often in the Obama
recovery
than they would be in a healthy economy.

While Obama was shoveling huge amounts of taxpayer dollars in to General Motors and banks, when it came to helping out average, American homeowners, Obama suddenly discovered that it was time to be cautious. Obama did not press legislation to force lenders to come to terms with borrowers whose homes were worth vastly less than the mortgage amount, nor did Obama pay attention to homeowners who found that lenders were being very uncooperative in working out deals to stave off foreclosure.
¹⁰²

Perhaps not so unexpectedly, a certain scandal came to Obama’s rescue in the matter of home foreclosures. The so-called “robo-signing” scandal—where it emerged that banks were falsely creating foreclosure documents—put a hold on many banks’ foreclosure activities and allowed many Americans to remain in their homes (sometimes for a period of years) after normal foreclosure would have occurred.
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It was, perhaps, this slowdown in foreclosures that helped people to believe the economy wasn’t in too bad a shape in 2012, thus helping Obama get reelected. But now that the robo-signing scandal is past, analysts are expecting a spike in foreclosures, and Obama still doesn’t have a plan to help the American homeowner.
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37.
Narcissist in Chief

A person has to be at least a bit self-absorbed to run for president. But most presidents manage to balance this with at least a bit of humility. Obama doesn’t possess this quality.

In April of 2009, Obama chose as a gift to the Queen of England an iPod loaded with his inauguration speech and his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
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She reportedly already owned an iPod.
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When Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the Moon, died in 2012, President Obama “honored” him by posting a picture of Obama looking at the Moon.
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When it came time to honor the great civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, Obama “honored” her by posting a picture of himself sitting in the bus in which Parks bravely refused to give up her seat.
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When Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye died in December 2012, Obama eulogized the senator and war hero by talking about himself, constantly referring to Inouye’s life through his own, and even devoting some time to talk about his own family vacation.
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Obama had the biographies of past President’s on the White House website updated to include references to Obama and his policies. For instance, in the biography of Calvin Coolidge, the first President to address the nation via radio, it was added that Obama was the first to use Twitter at a town hall meeting!
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This has gone beyond just odd—it’s Cult of Personality stuff, unworthy of a President of the United States. Someone really needs to advise Obama that the history of the United States did not begin with him even if Michelle only became proud of the United States when her husband ran for President.

38.
Government Response To The BP Oil Spill

On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed eleven workers and injured another sixteen. The rig burned and sank, resulting in what would become the worst oil spill in American history. The response of the Obama administration was shameful.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal described the Obama administration’s response as lackadaisical, with Obama far more concerned with his image and the criticism he was getting than addressing the actual problem.
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Karl Rove explained that the Obama administration’s response to the BP Oil spill was worse than the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina: