If we judge Barack Obama by his own promises, we must conclude that he has failed miserably. After all, it was he–not others in his stead–who spent the 2008 campaign promising to “provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless,” blah, blah, blah. It was he who used rhetoric so far removed from reality that some people actually thought Obama’s election would mark the end of every conceivable worry a human could possess. People grounded in reality knew this wasn’t true, but many among us who were already accustomed to living off the mercy of the government were easily fooled.
Think about it this way:
What good has Obama’s stimulus package done? Our national unemployment is ranging between 8.6 & 9.1%, and it only appears that low because those keeping tabs on it stopped counting people who have given up on ever finding jobs. Moreover, because of the Democrat’s tax and spend approach, our national debt is now at $15, 182,756,264,288.80, and Obama’s plan to change this is “more EPA, more NLRB, more Dodd-Frank, and more Obamacare.”
As Larry Kudlow put it: “Obama’s economic policies have failed.”
And if you want a microcosm of Obama’s failed presidency, of his ridiculous approach to economic policy, look no further than the Chevy Volt. The sticker price on a Volt is $40,000, but the cars are so technologically challenged that each one is subsidized to the tune of approximately $250,000. Now that’s Obama-nomics in a nutshell: Brag about your car company’s $40,000 electric car, but never mention that the $40,000 price tag costs tax payers a quarter of a million dollars per car.
To date, Obama has spent approximately $3,000,000,000.00 subsidizing Volts. And what have the American people gotten in return? A car that only a handful of people want and that has a tendency to catch on fire while sitting in the garages of the few purchasers Obama’s been able to scrounge up.
No wonder this guy has our economy in the tank.
And it gets worse. Apart from the asinine price per vehicle, the Chevy Volt is an electric car with a range of 30 miles (and that’s if you’re driving downhill). Actual range is closer to 25 miles or so. What good is a car that goes 30 miles? That’s like hunting with a gun that shoots 2 feet or boarding a cruise ship that never leaves dock. What’s the point? (To be fair, the Volt has a gasoline engine that kicks in once the charge is gone, and on the gas engine it can travel another 300 miles.)
Yet I don’t know about you, but a car that travels 300 miles on gasoline and only 25 miles on electricity sounds more like a fossil fuel vehicle than an electric one to me. And that’s precisely why it’s the perfect microcosm of Obama’s presidency. It’s all show, no substance. It’s sentimental mumbo jumbo about hope and change divorced from any real way to fix economies or create jobs or stop the dollar from imploding.
If GM were honest, their advertisement for the car would feature a photo of a Volt captioned thus:
The Chevy Volt: an electric car that runs on gasoline, proudly brought to you by Barack Obama, a president who knows even less about car manufacturing that he does about economics.
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