"No, the expansion was to 47 million people on food stamps."-johnforbes
Huh? Nobody disputed that the program was expanded to 47 million.
When W. was elected, there were 17.5 million of food stamps.
When he left office there were 31.7 million on food stamps.
When W. crashed the economy, another 16 million went on food stamps in the next few years of his great recession.
Now the numbers are coming down. So even if you don't give Obama credit for this, at least you can't blame him for it.
What has any of that got to do with Obama? If Romney had been elected the same thing would have happened.
But you're suggesting this huge increase in the number on food stamps was just the result of 'expanding the program' when 90% of the increase was caused by unemployment, not anything to do with Obama.
"The Dept of Agri seems to want MORE on food stamps."-johnforbes
Well, duh...
Any bureaucracy will perpetuate itself. That's not news.
And it has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican.
It's the nature of the beast.
"But the only reason the overall quantity of illegals didn't increase much was the lousy economy under Obama."-johnforbes
Ya gotta love this one. In his earlier post johnforbes blames the "12 million illegal immigrants" problem on Obama. Then he says Obama was so bad with the economy that he didn't cause the illegal immigrant problem to get worse than it already was.
See? When you don't think about the things you say, you stick your foot in your mouth.
"But, when people discuss the trend, that distracts from the sad fact of where we are. And where we are is 11.5 percent U-6 real unemployment."-johnforbes
I see. You have no problem assigning blame to Obama for the U-6 of 11.5%, but you just can't give credit for the 2.5% decline since he took office.
This is what the reactionaries do. If the rate goes up, they are happy to assign blame to the other party. But if the rate improves dramatically, they refuse to give credit for the improvement to the other party.
"Time" caused the improvement, but the other party caused the damage, regardless of the fact that things have only improved since they took power.
" I'm doing much, much better than in 2008, but that's due to my own discipline and not the federal govt."-johnforbes
This is corollary to the previous attitude. When johnforbes was doing much worse, it was Obama's fault, regardless of the market crash precipitated before Obama was even in office.
But if he's doing much better now, then it's not the responsibility of Obama, but of his own "discipline".
Yeah, it's john's "discipline" that made the Dow go up 10,000 points. :lol:
The Dow is up over 10,000 points since 2009, 150% in just 6 years, all years of Obama tenure, but, to johnforbes, Obama is not responsible for any of it. Yet somehow Obama is still responsible for every bad aspect of the economy.
If the Dow was up 10,000 points under a Romney Presidency, every last reactionary clown here would be crowing about how this proved the thesis of conservative values and policies.
It's uncanny how that works.
"Obama added more to the 18 trillion debt than all prior presidents combined."-johnforbes
Wrong.
W. Bush left office with a national debt of nearly $10.7 trillion on the books. ($5 trillion of that was W's)
Obama has added $7 trillion.
To make john's statement true, Obama would need to have added $10.8 trillion to the debt, which he hasn't.
"This is another disaster which will burden our grandkids. The only way out is defaulting on the debt or high inflation. America cannot pay this off."-johnforbes
Then for God's sake tell your Republican Presidents to stop their huge percentage increases in the debt.
Reagan was a disaster and the start of the nightmare.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
But hey, as one great Republican said, "Deficits don't matter."
So you can stop worrying so much, johnny.