From ThinkProgress: Failed Republican predictions about Obama's economy

4 Predictions Republicans Made About The Economy That Are Really Embarrassing Now

by Judd Legum

Nov 6, 2015 10:48am

 

CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his vice presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., get ready to order as they make an unscheduled stop at a Wendy's restaurant in Richmond Heights, Ohio, on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012.

Republicans have consistently claimed that President Obama’s policies will kill jobs. Today, the Department of Labor announced that 271,000 jobs had been created. Overall, there have been 68 straight months of job growth creating 13.5 million new jobs. It is the longest streak of job growth on record in American history.

Here are some predictions Republicans made that are pretty embarrassing in light of the new data.

1. Obamacare will “destroy our economy… It’s going to push us into a total economic collapse.”

These are the words of Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), in 2013, just before the official start of the health care exchanges.




The notion that Obamacare is a job-killer has become a rallying for Republicans from the moment it became law. In 2011, former Speaker John Boehner predicted that Obamacare “will bankrupt our nation, and it will ruin our economy” during a press conference where he used the phrase “job-killing” once every two minutes.

The entire Republican leadership in the House, including current Speaker Paul Ryan, signed onto this report:



On Twitter, columnist Dan Diamond charted the actual very positive trend.

2. Wall Street reform is “a symbol of government overreach that is killing jobs.”

On the campaign trail in 2011, Mitt Romney and other top Republicans blasted Dodd-Frank, a Wall Street reform bill signed by Obama, as “a symbol of government overreach that is killing jobs.” The legislation was signed into law in July 2010.

Republicans say Dodd-Frank is the root of some of today’s economic problems. It has stopped banks from lending to “job creators,” they contend, and is a direct cause of high unemployment. “It created such uncertainty that the bankers, instead of making loans, pulled back,” said Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a South Carolina rally over Labor Day weekend where he again called for the law’s repeal.

Other candidates who called for the immediate repeal of Dodd-Frank, blaming it for high unemployment, include Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann.

3. “Burdensome and ineffective” EPA regulations are “creating barriers for needed capital investment and job growth.”

In his 2012 budget, Rep. Paul Ryan wrote that the EPA’s “[b]urdensome and ineffective regulations on businesses in the service of dubious environmental goals have driven up the prices of many products and services, while creating barriers for needed capital investment and job creation.”

The inflation rate in 2015 is near zero.

Ryan’s running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney, blasted the “the job-crushing over-regulation of the EPA.”

4. The 2009 stimulus bill is “affirmatively job killing” and “about to get worse.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also a candidate for President in 2012, blasted the 2009 stimulus bill — a package designed to save the American economy when it was losing 750,000 jobs per month — as an example of “the Obama administration’s job-killing policies [that] are hurting America.”

Romney described the stimulus as a “bill that gave us Solyndra but left us with record unemployment.”

The White House estimated that the stimulus “saved or created an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years through the end of 2012.”


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Mitt Romney claimed that by rolling back these policies — repealing Obamacare, replacing Dodd-Frank, reining in the EPA, cutting government spending — he could reduce unemployment to 6 percent by January 2017.

The unemployment rate currently stands at 5 percent.