Barack Obama for President

Perhaps one-day years from now President Barack Obama’s greatest legacy will be his prevention of an economic depression in the face of a financial crisis that was even more severe than the one that occurred in 1929. As Obama took office, the U.S. economy was shedding approximately 800,000 jobs per month. Home foreclosures were skyrocketing while stock markets plummeted. I wrote a more lengthy post regarding the recession and current economic recovery, but suffice to say, the circumstances in which President Obama took office were the worst any president has faced since Franklin Roosevelt. From the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Recovery Act, to the emergency bailout of General Motors and Chrysler and quantitative easing, policies pursued by the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve helped to put a floor on the recession and return the U.S. economy to sustained growth. The GDP growth rate turned around from negative 5.3 percent during the first quarter of 2009 to positive growth by the third quarter. The unemployment rate today is lower than it has been at any point during Obama’s term in office and we’ve had 31 consecutive months of private sector job growth. The stock market indices have more than doubled from their low point, observed just six weeks after Obama took office. Corporate profits of the Fortune 500 reached an all-time high in 2011 and consumer confidence is now higher than it has been at any point since 2007. The housing market is making a noticeable recovery, with home prices, sales, and construction rates rising significantly in 2012. The Obama administration’s handling of the economy has not been flawless. Nonetheless, their accomplishments have been impressive given the unprecedented Congressional Republican obstructionism of the past four years.

An Economy on the Rebound

When President Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009, the U.S. economy was in free fall. During the preceding year and half, some of the nation’s largest and most important financial institutions went bankrupt, including Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and Lehman Brothers, as risky loans and other investments failed. Many other large banks were on the verge of collapse. The downfall of the financial sector had been preceded by a spectacular end to a massive speculative housing bubble that almost instantly wiped out trillions of dollars of Americans’ net worth. When Lehman Brothers and AIG went into bankruptcy during the same weekend in September 2008, panic ensued all across the economy. It felt like 1929 all over again. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush and was implemented by President Obama, stopped the bleeding in the financial sector, but the damage to the broader economy had already been done as other sectors of the economy continued to rapidly deteriorate. The stock markets plummeted, losing more than half of their peak market capitalization just six weeks after Obama took office. Many retirees and workers nearing retirement saw their investment portfolio lose much of its value. Millions of people lost their jobs due to no fault of their own after the U.S. entered a recession in December 2007. Over 1.2 million Americans were laid off between the election and Obama’s inauguration. All told, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 8.7 million jobs were lost due to the Great Recession. No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has begun their tenure in the White House under such dire circumstances. An evaluation of each segment of the economy around the time Obama took office compared to now shows that we are definitely better off four years later.

The Case Against Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney’s nomination as the 2012 Republican candidate for President is an important and historical moment for me and many other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across the U.S. and the world. A thick glass ceiling was shattered when Romney, a prominent member of my faith, overcame anti-Mormon bigotry prevalent in parts of the Republican primary electorate to clinch the GOP nomination. During the past twelve years we have been witnesses to a triumph over a wide array of social prejudices in American politics with the nomination of Senator Joseph Lieberman, who is Jewish, as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate in 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic run as the first serious female contender for the White House in 2008, and Barack Obama’s election as the county’s first African-American president. We may very well have a Mormon as our President starting next January. While I admire Romney’s dedicated unpaid service in my church as a bishop and stake president, believe that he is a good family man who also cares deeply about our country, and am thrilled by Romney’s ascension to the GOP nomination in this Mormon moment, I am confident that he is the wrong person for the job of President of the United States.