Obama supporters would like to think that President Obama
left a legacy to be proud of, and certainly a better legacy than they
anticipate will follow President Trump. How realistic is that? Let’s look at President Obama’s tenure:
He was proudest of ObamaCare, a bill that was driven through
Congress hurriedly with hardball politics without a single Republican vote. Critics predicted that it was fiscally unsupportable.
Where is it now?
· Of 23 non-profit State Insurance Cooperatives initially funded by taxpayer money under ObamaCare, only 7 remain, at a loss to date of $1.7 billion in taxpayer money. And several of the 7 remaining are expected to fail this year.
· We were promised that insurance rates would fall under ObamaCare. That certainly didn’t happen. The average increase across the nation this year is estimated at 22%. Over the eight Obama years studies show that insurance premiums rose on average about 50% across the nation.
· Major insurance companies (Humana, Aetna, United Healthcare) have withdrawn from all or most of ObamaCare because they are losing money – too many sick people vs healthy people signed up - just as critics predicted.
· Obama promised that ObamaCare would insure 32 million people who didn’t have health care insurance. The actual number in 2017 turns out to be a little more than 10 million, almost 90% of them subsidized by taxpayer funds. As I have mentioned before, he could have simply subsidized them in the first place and not disrupted everyone else’s plans.
Hardly a legacy to be proud of.
When Obama took office, the national debt stood at $10.6
trillion. When he left office it stood at $19.9 trillion, so it almost doubled under
Obama’s administration. The US GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in 2016 is
estimated at $18.6 trillion, so in essence the national debt now stands at more
than the entire nation’s output in a year.
When third world nations have this sort of balance they are considered
to be in deep, deep financial trouble.
Hardly a legacy to be proud of.
Obama drew his red line in Syria at the use of chemical
weapons against civilians. When Assad crossed that red line he did nothing.
Then he acceded to a Russian plan to have all of Assad’s chemical weapons removed
from the country, and assured the world it had been done. Then last week Assad’s forces used Sarin gas
against a rebel village - so much for Obama’s
promise that all the chemical weapons had been removed. He was clearly suckered by Putin and Assad,
or at least by Assad.
Hardly a legacy to be proud of.
He negotiated the Paris Agreement to attack climate change.
It certainly got a lot of press and spin, and the greens loved it. But in fact
the agreement has no teeth – no enforcement mechanism and no penalties for not
meeting its goals, just like previous agreements in this area. So in fact it is really nothing but a set of
promises by politicians, and we all know what they are worth.
In fact both the US and China have more than met their goals
thus far, but not because of any agreement; simply because economics drove improvement. The Chinese needed to deal with the terrible
level of coal-derived smog in their cities.
In the US fracking technology made natural gas cheaper than coal, and so
drove a movement of power stations away from coal, which produces more
greenhouse gas.
Not much of a legacy here, despite the spin
North Korea now has working nuclear weapons, and working
short and intermediate-range missiles, and is working hard on long-range ballistic
missiles. Most of these advances came during the Obama administration, and
Obama appears to have done nothing to try to slow the progress. If he did
things behind the scenes they certainly didn’t work. He certainly didn’t seem
to get China to do anything to help restrain North Korea, and it is not clear
that he even tried.
Hardly a legacy to be proud of.
So I’m at a loss to see much of an Obama legacy to be proud
of here. He did on occasion avoid doing
stupid things, especially in the Middle East – I guess that counts for
something. On the other hand American influence and soft power around the world
fell noticeably, and he was outmaneuvered by Russian President Putin a number
of times.
To be fair, lots of events are simply beyond the President’s
control. So I don’t necessarily blame
him for many of the things he didn’t manage to fix. But on the other hand a legacy is built on
doing things that make a difference to the nation in the long run, and I don’t
see much of that in the Obama legacy. Diehard liberals may see things differently (they may need to in order to avoid cognitive dissonance), but as an independent I'm not that impressed.
Posts
