George W. Bush Was Quite Responsible In Comparison

Seriously, there's no real comparison:

I have a piece in The American today showing what Obama's era of fiscal responsibility looks like. Of course, no one at The Corner will be surprised that it doesn't look good. However, what the following chart shows is that for each month that goes by, it looks worse and worse.

A few things to note about this chart:

* Each year under Obama is worse than any year under Bush.

* While Obama claims to have inherited a deficit, this chart shows how much he is adding to it (the red part).

* This is likely to get much worse as not one of the health-care costs are included in these numbers.

Read the whole thing here.

On a related note...

The jump in unemployment this August was no accident, and no fluke. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that mass layoff events, where a single employer lays off 50 or more employees, increased 24.7% from July, by far a high for this year. Initial jobless claims also hit a high, giving an indication that the economy is far from recovery...

The August plunge did not come from any one industry. According to the BLS, seven of the 19 industry categories recorded their highest number of initial job-loss claimants this year. Manufacturing took the biggest hit, accounting for 31% of all mass layoff events.

Until the unemployment numbers hit for August, the Obama administration had insisted that they had turned the corner on job losses. Even afterward, they still claimed to expect that the labor market had stabilized. This shows just the opposite. Larger employers have accelerated layoffs, and that will have secondary impacts on local economies, forcing smaller employers to shed jobs as business declines. Manufacturing losses mean less goods to push through the distribution chain.

It looks like we’re still declining in economic power. The stimulus package has not kept mass layoffs from jumping substantially this summer, and now we will have to see whether that trend continues this month. With initial jobless claims still averaging 563,000 for the past four weeks ... it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

How's that hope-n-change working out for tens of millions of Americans? Not too well. It's time for another change, I think...

There's my two cents.