The Media Ignores the Good Things Happening in Our Economy

 

For those of you who are partial to reality, you’re going to get a real kick out of the President’s weekly address.
Here’s a hint “(I)f you look beyond those headlines, there are some good things happening in our economy.” Perhaps he’s referring to the surging markets, as seen this summer and fall with the DOW hitting a record high of 16,000 or the huge, record surplus in June.
Booya. The repugicans, and hence the MSM, do not want to talk about the good things happening in the economy. That’s why they’re so busy making Kardashian mountains out of tech glitches, and why before that they distracted you with Darrell Issa’s Benghazi and IRS witch hunts, all based on repugican aides telling stories to the media and the media buying it without sourcing it. If anyone faces the fact that this President cut the deficits by more than half, repugicans could no longer justify trying to use their austerity measures to kill Social Security and Medicare.
President Obama said our economy is moving in the right direction. He mentioned that we cut our deficits by more than half (by the way, in June we had a record surplus), businesses have created millions of new jobs, and we have taken significant steps to fix our broken health care system.
Watch here:

The President acknowledged that people must be frustrated with the government shutdown and the launch of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, “But if you look beyond those headlines, there are some good things happening in our economy. And that’s been my top priority since the day I walked into the Oval Office.”
The President is very aware of the vast and increasing income disparity and he has tried to address those issues with policies like ending oil subsidies, raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure and his jobs bill. None of these things have gone over well with the repugican cabal. “After decades in which the middle class was working harder and harder just to keep up, and a punishing recession that made it worse, we made the tough choices required not just to recover from crisis, but to rebuild on a new foundation for stronger, more durable economic growth.”
But things are improving. Obama noted, “Five years later, we have fought our way back. Our businesses have created 7.8 million new jobs in the past 44 months. Another 200,000 Americans went back to work last month.”
Another way Obama addressed the growing income disparity was through healthcare reform. So, even though the rollout was “rough”, he said “about 500,000 Americans are poised to gain health coverage starting January 1st. And by the way, health care costs are growing at the slowest rate in 50 years.”
He wasn’t done schooling the press and repugicans.
“And one more thing: since I took office, we’ve cut our deficits by more than half. And that makes it easier to invest in the things that create jobs – education, research, and infrastructure.
Imagine how much farther along we could be if both parties were working together.”
And the velvet glove came off… “Think about what we could do if a reckless few didn’t hold the economy hostage every few months, or waste time on dozens of votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act rather than try to help us fix it.”
Yes, imagine where we could be if repugicans actually wanted to help this country – if they put this country and her citizens ahead of covering up the fact that they have no ideas.
That’s a lot of good news that we hear almost nothing about. Of course, Obama won’t be remembered for any of that if you believe the beltway press. Oh, no. He’ll be remembered for that time desperate Americans without health insurance had to spend hours trying to log on to ObamaCare exchange, because it’s so annoying when you can’t get everything you want right when you want it.
According to beltway logic, when these Americans finally have affordable healthcare for the first times in their lives, all they will be able to think about was the hours it took to log on. They will never forgive Obama for being half as irritating tech wise as trying to pay their credit card bills. When their lives are saved by having free mammorgrams or access to doctors other than the emergency room, they’ll only be thinking about that tech glitch.
The only way this conclusion makes any sense is if you realize that the beltway press has always had insurance and has no clue what the rest of the country is going through, so for them, maybe waiting a few hours really is the End of the World as they know it.
In reality, the political press was so busy being led around by the nose by fake repugican scandals that they never asked themselves what all of the hoopla might have been distracting them from noticing.
If the press were really concerned with political implications and Obama’s legacy, they’d have been telling you for months that the impressive economic news is more likely to be something Obama is remembered for given the near Depression he walked into when he took office. If they want to talk legacy, they’d dig into his stimulus to find the hidden nuggets of liberal paradigm changers. But that would be hard. Much easier to follow the repugican cabal’s playbook from accusation to accusation, never pausing to wonder why.
Obama will be the president who saved us from a depression, in spite of unprecedented obstruction from the repugican cabal. He will be the president who saw the financial collapse as a time to address the growing income disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and although many of these policies were blocked by the repugicans, the Affordable Care Act was a huge step forward in protecting the middle class and working poor.