McCroy: Waiting for the punchline to Obama’s joke of an administration

With little over a month since the presidential election, analyzing what went wrong with the Romney campaign is a moot point. 3 million registered republican voters stayed home while President Obama was able to capture enough votes in several swing counties within Virginia, Ohio and Florida to win his second term. To attempt to go over exit polls – which by their nature are inexact surveys – would be to lose focus on the current direction of the country.

In order to analyze the immediate and long term ramifications of Nov. 6, it is appropriate and beneficial to analyze the past 30 days, the next 60 days and what we’ve elected for ourselves. The president got what he wanted, his second term. If we take what we told the former Russian President Medvedev in March 2012, the president feels he’ll have more flexibility to really do what he wants this term.

But what does that mean? Does that mean that the entire U.S. economy will be boosted by more part time employment figures? It most likely means we’re all going to feel a rush of patriotism and adrenaline as we collectively fall off the fiscal cliff.

That’s because the president has been on a month long victory lap since his reelection. Forget the fact that the country is doing its best rendition of the Titanic and heading straight for the iceberg of government spending. But lets give the President a break, he hasn’t passed a budget in years, so we’ll understand if he doesn’t quite know how to handle a fiscal debt crisis.

At least the president was honest about who he wanted to tax. And is it any surprise that polling showed the biggest issue for democratic voters on election day was taxing the rich? They want to spend the money, as long as someone else – one of those “fat cats” – foots the bill. Just last week, the President insisted that Congress not only agree to raise taxes on the “rich,” but also to adopt his previously ignored full budget. Obama demands a $1.6 trillion tax increase over the next decade. He is firm in his stance that higher revenues – a fancy political way to say taxes – must come from marginal-rate increases and yet, he offers no policy rationale. He even wants to treat $900 billion in spending cuts he agreed to in 2011 as if they count as new cuts. On top of that, the president wants to take the power of raising the debt ceiling away from Congress and place, yes you guessed it, in his hands. Well that makes sense; let’s give the power to raise our debt ceiling to the person who blatantly wants to raise national debt. At this point, I’m assuming that the president wants to go for a record; the President to blew the most cash during an administration.

But at least we’re all going to keep our insurance. As long as you ignore the fact that in response to Obamacare’s provisions and business-killing agenda, more and more companies are cutting insurance for newly hired employees. Maybe the president should finally look into that Supply & Demand 101 course. Raise demand for health insurance, lower supply – since doctors can’t justify the personal investment of medical school if they won’t be able to make enough to even pay back student loans (see Bloomberg Aug. 29, article about how the doctor shortage may swell to 130,000 due to Affordable Healthcare Act cap) – and what do you get? Companies opting out of employee insurance and higher prices for health care.

And what about the great leaps in oil and natural gas production? The president sat down and lied to all of our faces when he talked about how he was the reason why gas and oil production has risen during his administration. How many times did we hear the president talk about his part in the growth in our nation’s oil and natural gas production? Yet, with the election not a week old, the Department of the Interior issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land originally slated for oil shale development. That’s exactly what Mitt Romney attacked the president on during the debates. This administration has played no real part in the growth of oil and natural gas production; the country’s production has risen in spite of the president’s actions. But we’ve seen this kind of behavior before; “you didn’t build this” could easily have been “you didn’t drill this.”

So lets analyze what we’ve got here. A nation headed to fiscal disaster, higher health insurance costs and fewer people under coverage thanks to the worst domestic agenda in decades and an administration that is actively hampering domestic oil production. At least we’ve got a strong Commander-in-Chief who does all he can to protect the lives of American ambassadors and CIA operatives. This is the president that 65 million Americans thought would be a good guy, as long as we ignored everything he said in his first term. Maybe if we stick our heads in the sand for the next four years, it’ll all be better. I’ll be waiting for the punch line to this joke of an administration.

McCroy is a senior majoring in economics from Des Moines, Iowa.

Dylan Lysen is a senior from Andover majoring in journalism. Read more from Dylan Lysen.

• Updated Dec. 5, 2012 at 8:19 pm