Don't know much about history or economics--Obama edition

IBD:

 "You're-on-your-own economics" doesn't work, President Obama asserted Friday, just as the World Bank reported a halving of world poverty due mainly to — you guessed it — you're-on-your-own economics.

If anything puts our president, the leader of the Free World, squarely outside the global mainstream, it's statements like the one he made to students at a University of Vermont fundraiser Friday:

"The American story is not just about what we do on our own," the president said. "We have always understood that we wouldn't win the race for new jobs and businesses and middle class security if we were just applying some you're-on-your-own economics. It's been tried in history and it hasn't worked. It didn't work when we tried it in the decade before the Great Depression. It didn't work when we tried it in the last decade."

Well, maybe he's never heard of the Roaring '20s.

And perhaps he didn't try free-market economics himself in the past decade, but all six global regions observed by the World Bank did try it — and the stunning result is that global poverty has been slashed in half, and well ahead of the United Nations' 2015 Millennium Challenge deadline.

That's right, global poverty has been slashed in half. It started with the advent of free markets in Chile in 1975, gained speed with the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, took off with the Asian Tiger states and has been crescendo-ing around the globe ever since.

... 

It is one of many false narratives Obama has been pushing as he becomes more desperate in his drive for a second term.