Has Obama Really Been Bad for Business?

If you’re to believe the Republican Party this election season (believe anything the political parties say at your own peril!), you’d think President Barack Obama has been bad for business, economic growth, and job creation. It’s true that we have not yet fully recovered from the effects of the greatest financial crisis in nearly a hundred years. Obviously, any reasonable person would expect it to take more than four years to dig our way out of such a deep hole.

Nevertheless, what is obvious and reasonable to you and me is a political opportunity for the Republicans. So, inevitably, they have seized upon our current economic state to justify their allegations against Obama. Of course, when it comes to politics, the most important thing, and often the most elusive, is the truth, as revealed by the facts. So... let’s look at the facts.

Let’s start by looking at it from the perspective of investors and business people. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up by more than half since Obama took office. If you had invested in an S&P 500 Index Fund the week Obama was sworn in, your investment would be up nearly 70% as of today. And the Nasdaq has almost doubled in the time Obama has been president! So much for the claims that Obama has created an unfavorable business environment! I’ll take the investment returns of the past four years over the returns of just about any other four-year period!

Now let’s look at jobs. The Republican presidential candidate has reminded voters over and over how President Obama promised unemployment would be down to 5.3% by the end of his first term. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is around 7.8%. However, I remember when the president stood before Congress and proposed the American Jobs Act. Did the Republican-controlled Congress pass this bill? No! Of course, Obama is not going to pass the buck, but there really wasn’t much he could do if the Republicans were holding just about everything he proposed hostage in the hopes of putting one of their own in the Oval Office on January 20, 2013. Would the American Jobs Act have brought unemployment down to 5.3%? Who knows? I guess the Republicans thought potentially keeping millions of people out of work was a small price to pay for the sake of gaining political power.

Finally, let’s look at the overall approach of the Obama administration when it came to handling the Great Recession. That approach can be summed up in one word: stimulus. While economists can and will argue for years, if not decades, about how best to have handled this crisis, it’s been fairly evident that the stimulus approach adopted by the U.S. has helped us recover faster than the austerity measures taken by our European Union counterparts.

All in all, whether you’re an investor, a job seeker, or an economist, the past four years coming out of the worst financial crisis in almost a century have been much better than they could have been, especially considering how bad things really were. So, it appears that, despite how desperately the Republicans might want you to believe otherwise, President Barack Obama has actually been pretty good for business!

Remember to vote on November 6!