President Obama continues to deny ownership of the floundering economy:
President Barack Obama said on Monday he inherited many of the country's problems with high debt and deficits when he entered the White House, sounding a theme likely to dominate his 2012 re-election campaign.
I don't buy it. Our problems today are not the ones Obama inherited but the ones caused by his response to those earlier concerns, as the WSJ aptly pointed out:
Upon taking office, Mr. Obama proceeded to unleash the entire liberal economic and social policy arsenal in the name of ending the panic. Whether or not these were his own convictions, the President allowed the Pelosi Congress to use that rare political opening—and 60 Senate Democrats—to pursue a 40-year wish list.
And pursue it Democrats did. To an economy recovering from excessive private leverage, they poured on trillions in new public spending and debt. Amid a financial system suffering from a nervous breakdown, they castigated bankers for causing the panic and then added 2,000 pages of new rules. They spent nearly two years redesigning one-sixth of the economy to realize their ambitions for national health care. They unleashed regulators to rewrite the nation's energy and labor laws.
It was, to put it in market terms, one of the most audacious political bets in U.S. history. Blow out the national balance sheet on the assumption that they could cover the bet later with tax increases.
Having made that bet, Obama must now pay for having lost. He owns the aftermath.
