Are you better now?

Here in the islands, not so good, we lost one of our major employers, electricity costs have gone out the roof and gasoline just keeps getting more and more expensive every week. Business's are closing for lack of demand and we have a 15% unemployment rate that is killing us. Did President Obama cause this...no...the international oil market caused our problem and nothing President Obama could have done would have changed our reality.

Four years ago the sky was falling, banks were on the brink of shutting down, money markets were telling us our dollars weren't worth a dollar any more, financial institutions were under threat of total collapse, the stock market was in free fall, houses were being foreclosed, real estate values were tumbling, people were losing their jobs and all of us rich and poor alike were on edge.

Is the nation better off than four years ago...HELL YES. 

You know that old saying that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it well i don't want to and i haven't forgotten where the Bush administration left this country after eight years in 2008.

Most of the rest of the world thinks we are better off too. They have their money tied up in our Treasury bonds and they wouldn't invest here if they didn't think we were not a good bet. We aren't bleeding jobs the way we were in 09 and the unemployment rate has been slowly going down. Taxes are lower than they were four years ago and international polls show the US is VASTLY more respected than it was during the Bush administration.

But the real question should be is the nation better off than it was three years ago because that's when things really started to turn around. Today Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive. The market is higher than its been in four years, real estate values have stopped going down, jobs are coming back and the bleeding has been stanched.

On another note:

Romney really put his foot in it this morning and yesterday...phony outrage, no facts, then creating lies to cover up, his statement about the embassy crisis was incoherent and inappropriate. Let a real President handle this please we need grownups running the country not political grand-standers playing games with a nation of real people.

If you want to know how our president makes decisions that affect millions of people every day read the latest article in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama

And for any Republicans reading this that live here or have a second home on island and are thinking about their investments, think long and hard about who will have our backs.

See ya next week.