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Republicans love to twist the facts about unemployment on whatever they can invent to
make it sound horrible. They count retirees and children under 16 and add them to those
“not in the labor force,” or they claim all the jobs are part-time. The simple truth is that
when Bush left office the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rising due the recession
he caused. As of August, 2015, that number is down to 5.1 percent. The way that number
is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t change because the president is black.

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The GOP base for some reason thinks that the President wakes up, reads the paper,
has a cup of coffee and sets the price of gas for the day. That’s not at all true. The President
has little to nothing to do with the cost of gas, unless his policies affect the areas where oil
is abundant. Places like Iraq and Iran come to mind. There’s also some selective amnesia,
with people remembering the price of gas being $1 per gallon under George Bush. Nothing
could be further from the truth. On 15 July, 2008, gas hit an all-time high of $4.12 per gallon.
AAA reports that on 22 September, 2015, gas averaged $2.28 per gallon.

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Obamacare was supposed to not only destroy America but replace the uninsured poor
with the uninsured middle class. Premiums would be so out-of-control from the new law that
hard-working people would pay for the poor to be insured for free while going bankrupt and
losing their own plan. The repeal of Obamacare is a major part of the GOP’s plan to “take
America back.” Back to what? Back to the more than 14 percent uninsured rate we had under
Bush. Obamacare has dropped that number to 9.2 percent, with 17.6 million fewer people
uninsured today than in 2008.

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When Republicans are in control, they remove the basic things that stop our teens
from getting pregnant. They replace sex-ed and birth control programs with abstinence only
nonsense. They defund clinics that “murder babies,” cutting much-needed birth control funding,
causing spikes in the teen birth and abortion rates. Their archaic methods don’t work. The proof
is in the raw data, which shows that under Bush, the teen pregnancy rate was 40.2 per thousand,
down to 25.6 per thousand today. It seems a little bit of knowledge and a little less religious
rhetoric go a long way.

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Republicans like to talk about the growth of the bank accounts of the wealthy when
they talk economy. One of Bush’s favorite campaign slogans in 2004 was “are you better
off today than you were 4 years ago?” The answer for anyone who got a paycheck was yes.
The answer for anyone who paid the lowered capital gains rate was yes. The reason wasn’t
because of growth, it wasn’t because of a booming economy, it was because of payroll and
income tax cuts we couldn’t come close to affording. Giving money away while financing
two wars and a prescription drug benefit that was nothing but a gift to big pharma is a
major factor in the cause of the Great Recession. Were you better off for a few years?
Have a look down the road a bit and ask your retirement fund the same question. By the
time Dubyah left, GDP wasn’t growing, it was declining. As he and Cheney smiled and
waved on their way to count their war profits, GDP was at negative .03 percent. As of
July 2015, GDP growth is at 3.7 percent.

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Perhaps the best gauge of the U.S. economy is the Dow. Republicans have nothing
to say about the Dow…ever. Without anything to complain about they simply pretend it
doesn’t exist. Unfortunately for every GOP Presidential candidate, it does exist, and when
the time comes for the eventual Democratic nominee to stand behind the policies of the
President, the Dow will be a strong point in an argument full of trump cards. On 16 January
2009, just before GWB left office, the Dow stood at $8,281. On 22 September 2015 it
closed at $16,330, or nearly double.