America Will Need Another Ronald Reagan to Reverse President Obama’s Pitiful Legacy of US Decline
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on the White House lawn. Photo: The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – NILE GARDINER: The Obama administration is bracing itself for more bad news this week with the release of stunning census figures which are projected to show the biggest increase in poverty in the United States since the 1960s. As Associated Press reports:

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. Census figures for 2009 — the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency — are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

The new figures are an indictment of President Obama’s handling of the economy, and will add to the growing perception that his Big Government agenda has been a spectacular flop. Despite a huge $787 billion stimulus package (with another $50 billion in spending on the way), and a wave of public bailouts, unemployment continues to rise towards 10 percent, and the housing market remains on a downward trajectory.

Added to this grim picture is a spiraling budget deficit which threatens America’s long-term economic prosperity. As I’ve noted before, the United States is drowning under a mountain of debt, with a Greek-style financial crisis a strong possibility. Under its alternative fiscal scenario, the Congressional Budget Office projects that US debt could rise to a staggering 87 percent of GDP by 2020, to 109 percent of GDP by 2025, and to 185 percent of GDP in 2035. >>> Nile Gardiner | Tuesday, September 14, 2010