Obama had the wrong economic advisers and that is why his economy lagged

Fred Barnes:

We now know why President Obama had to struggle so hard to spur the economy and allow it to grow more than 2 percent a year. And that was the high-water mark. In the last quarter of his presidency, growth had slipped to 1.5 percent. Today it’s obvious what Obama’s problem was. He had the wrong policies‚ lots of them.

How do we know this? Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, and the Republican Congress reversed Obama’s policies. The result, from the day Trump was elected, has been a more robust economy. Nearly 4 million jobs have been added, and unemployment has dipped to the lowest point in nearly a half-century. Let’s compare what Obama did with what Trump is doing.

Obama raised taxes. Trump cut them. Obama was a regulatory zealot. Trump is passionate about deregulation. Obama’s Clean Power Plan killed the coal industry. Trump is reviving it. Obama downgraded the role of entrepreneurs and free markets in boosting the economy and lauded the wonderful things government does.

Obama’s biggest breakthrough was the Affordable Care Act, a big step toward a single-payer, government-run health care system. Trump got rid of the individual mandate that forced everyone to buy expensive insurance or be fined—a big step toward a return to free markets in health care.

The entire Obama economic agenda was “systematically reversed,” says economics writer Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser in the 2016 campaign. He and Arthur Laffer are authors of the new book Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.

Presidents love to tout their achievements. In Trump’s case, a White House report issued last week said his administration had produced 289 accomplishments in 20 months. We all know Trump exaggerates and brags. But many of the economic gains were impressive, especially the fact that job openings outnumber job seekers for the first time on record.

Being a liberal himself, Obama relied on liberal economists. They led him astray, as they did President Kennedy in the 1960s. They favored higher taxes and increased spending, policies that caused an economic downturn.

Kennedy was smarter than Obama. He finally turned to his Republican Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, who recommended tax cuts. JFK grabbed onto them and the result was an economic boom, the Roaring ’60s.
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Obama was an ignorant man who thought he knew more than his advisors and his advisors weren't all that smart.  They tried to devise an economic model that allowed them to pursue liberalism which led to a greatly restricted economy.