Here's The Chart That Will Get Obama Fired [View All]

[dkf]

As the chart makes instantly crystal clear, the Obama administration drastically underestimated how bad the economy was and drastically overestimated its ability to do something about it.

Could the Obama Administration have fixed the economy in four years had they had done something different?
In my opinion, no.

Given the extent of the damage—and the kind of damage—that Obama inherited, this was always going to be a long slog. As a quick glance at debt-to-GDP charts show, this recession was not a run-of-the-mill cyclical recession. It was a debt-fueled balance sheet recession. And if there's one thing history shows about those, they take years if not decades to fix. (See Japan and the Great Depression).

But Obama certainly could have given himself a better chance to get re-elected despite the horrible economy. If Obama had recognized how bad things were, asked for a much bigger stimulus than he ended up asking for, and, importantly, set the appropriate expectations, he'd probably have been able to pin the blame for the mess where it belongs: On the three decades of decisions that facilitated the debt build-up that eventually culminated in the financial crisis.

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-chart-that-will-get-obama-fired-2011-10