Excerpts below are from the article I found at Zerohedge.com:
The Shocking Truth About How Barack Obama Was Able To Prop Up The U.S. Economy
which originally came from Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
“Barack Obama is one of the biggest “Keynesians” of all time, but unfortunately most Americans don’t even understand what that means… If Barack Obama had not taken the extreme measures [massive debt] that he did, we would be in the midst of a historic economic depression right now. But by propping things up in the short-term, he has absolutely demolished our long-term economic future. But like most politicians, Obama has been willing to sacrifice the future for short-term political gain.
If you take any basic college course in economics, you are going to learn about John Maynard Keynes. [Keynes argued that] by injecting additional funds into the economy during a time of crisis, he believed that the severity of recessions and depressions could be reduced. This approach ultimately become known as “Keynesian economics”, and in the post-World War II era virtually the entire world embraced it at least to some degree. Here is more on Keynes from Investopedia…
An economic theory of total spending in the economy and its effects on output and inflation. Keynesian economics was developed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes during the 1930s in an attempt to understand the Great Depression. Keynes advocated increased government expenditures and lower taxes to stimulate demand and pull the global economy out of the Depression. Subsequently, the term “Keynesian economics” was used to refer to the concept that optimal economic performance could be achieved – and economic slumps prevented – by influencing aggregate demand through activist stabilization and economic intervention policies by the government. Keynesian economics is considered to be a “demand-side” theory that focuses on changes in the economy over the short run.
Keynesian economists correctly point out that there is a “multiplier effect” to government spending. In other words, when the government spends money it ends up in the hands of ordinary people. In turn, those people spend that money on various goods and services that they need, thus boosting overall economic activity. And the more the money circulates, the more the economy is stimulated. So one dollar of additional government spending does not just add one dollar to GDP. Rather, the impact on GDP is often significantly greater than that.
Of course the bad news is that whenever the government borrows money it is stealing consumption from the future. So we are literally destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have in order to make the present look a little bit brighter….
At this moment, the U.S. national debt is a whopping $19,901,545,151,126.51, and it will cross the 20 trillion dollar mark by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th.
But when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the national debt was only 10.6 trillion dollars. That means that we have added about 9.3 trillion dollars to the debt since that time.
So we have borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars under Obama that we did not have. But because of the “multiplier effect”, that 9.3 trillion dollars actually had a far greater impact on the U.S. economy. Let’s be conservative and just double that number. So that would give us an 18.6 trillion dollar overall impact on U.S. economic activity. Spread over eight years, that comes to an average GDP impact of 2.325 trillion dollars a year.
But over the last eight years U.S. GDP has only been averaging about 16 trillion dollars a year. So if you took away 2.3 trillion dollars a year, that would be about one-eighth of our entire economy.
In other words, without all of this debt that Barack Obama and Congress have been getting us into, we would be in the worst economic depression in U.S. history right now.
And I haven’t even factored in state and local government debt, corporate debt or household debt. The truth is that I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that we are enjoying a debt-fueled standard of living that we simply do not deserve.
But even with all of this debt, the U.S. economy has still not been performing really well. In fact, Barack Obama is going to be the only president in U.S. history to not have a single year when U.S. GDP grew by at least three percent.
Despite what many in the mainstream media are telling you, the reality of the matter is that Donald Trump is going to inherit an economy that is deeply troubled. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “11 Very Depressing Economic Realities That Donald Trump Will Inherit From Barack Obama“.
Donald Trump is talking about cutting taxes and reducing regulations, and all of those things are good, but ultimately those measures are not going to matter that much.
What is going to matter is what Donald Trump decides to do about our exploding debt.
If Donald Trump wants the U.S. economy to continue to remain at least somewhat stable in the short-term, he is going to have to keep piling up debt like Obama has. Because if Trump and the Republicans decide that they want to get our debt under control, that will plunge us into a horrifying economic depression almost immediately.
But if Donald Trump continues to steal money from future generations of Americans at the same pace that Barack Obama has been doing, he will literally be destroying the future of America…. So Donald Trump is really in a no-win situation when it comes to the economy.
The only way that he can match Obama’s performance is to do what Obama did, but by doing so he would literally be killing the future.
As a nation we have been consuming far more wealth than we produce for a very, very long time, and the only way that we have been able to do this is because we have been able to go into so much debt. But now a day of reckoning is fast approaching…”
Communist leaders in Russia always understood how massive debts could destroy the West. Lenin was the first to portray such debt as capitalist democracy making the rope hey would hang themselves with. One could even argue that Obama is like a communist Manchurian Candidate who never liked the America he grew up in – and that he was all to happy to intentionally try to kill the American economy under the burden of oppressive debt. Even Dinesh D’Souza has made similar arguments. I would go further: I don’t think Obama would lose any sleep over the prospect of an economic collapse leading to crisis and dictatorship on his watch – especially if the severity “justifies” an extension of his leadership because it seems too risky to cede power during the collapse…
As a recent article at SHTFplan.com starts off warning us: “Trump hasn’t sworn into office as president yet. As a matter of fact, things are happening that may very well derail that inauguration. There’s an old Irish expression: “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” and there’s quite a few slippery deeds in the works in particular that bear mentioning. January 20, 2017 is still a long way off, and Obama isn’t done just yet.”
[That would certainly fit with Queen Elizabeth II’s warning a year ago that we should enjoy our last Christmas – 2015 – what did she know – what was she thinking about?]
Assuming there is no immediate collapse into an Obama dictatorship, Trump inherits the massive debts. As another recent article: “Trump About to Preside Over New Global Financial Crisis: “Not His Fault, Merely His Misfortune” suggests:
“While the world celebrates the political demise of the wicked witch of the west and braces for a Trump-style president, the real crisis is coming, in the form of a financial avalanche that could dump on everyone’s parade.
The warning signs have been up every mile for a long stretch now. The build up of pressure, and the creaking fault lines have been evident. The monetary policy has long been triggering what may prove to be an inevitable collapse…
And it may have been planned for the Donald Trump administration….
If the bankers are getting close to Trump and taking over his cabinet and advisors, it is because they wish to benefit from the solution to economic catastrophe. They have plans.”
Just great.
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