White House won’t take blame for economy, downgrade

North Korea’s government has always had an excuse for the starvation of its people. One year, the country says flooding is responsible for the loss of crops. The next year, it’s a horrible drought. Yet somehow, just across the 38th parallel on the same peninsula, lucky South Koreans thrived, their bellies full.

Of course, the real reason for North Korea’s perpetual misery is the incompetent central planning of its Stalinist dictatorship and its devotion to a failed economic ideology.

The North Korean folly comes to mind after watching the Obama administration grope in the dark for 30 months trying to “create jobs” and revitalize a struggling economy. Empty-handed in the success department, this president refuses to re-evaluate the wisdom of his big spending and instead points fingers elsewhere. President Obama went so far last week as to blame “the Arab Spring’s effect on oil and gas prices … the Japanese earthquake and tsunami’s effect on supply chains (and) … the extraordinary economic uncertainty in Europe” for our under-performing economy.

Apparently, it’s all out of his control.

In fact, President Obama has thrown more money at the country’s economic woes than any White House. In 2008, spending was 20.7 percent of GDP, and the national debt was 40.3 percent of GDP. This year, spending is 25 percent of GDP, while the debt is estimated to hit 72 percent of GDP.

Now Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the exploding long-term debt of the United States from AAA to AA+. The credit-rating agency had warned such an embarrassing step would be inevitable if Congress continued its suicidal, three-year spending spree without taking major steps to get its fiscal house in order. The president and Congress responded with a plan to grow the national debt from nearly $14 trillion today to more than $20 trillion by 2021.

Yes, House Republicans provided the votes necessary to pass the debt-ceiling deal, but at least they’ve acknowledged the reason the country finds itself in fiscal peril: It’s the spending, stupid. But Democrats refuse to believe it. Some actually argue the S&P downgrade is a signal that Washington needs to spend even more. The downgrade and the market selloff, they insist, are the result of the tea party movement’s demands for austerity.

On Monday, President Obama lamented “the insistence on drawing lines in the sand — a refusal to put what’s best for the country ahead of self-interest or party or ideology.” The Dow Jones industrial average plunged an additional 400 points after the conclusion of his address.

S&P on Monday also downgraded entities linked to Washington: the housing black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; farm lenders; U.S. debt backed by large banks. And Democrats think we can tax our way back to prosperity?

Not when the real national jobless rate — the one that accounts for Americans who’ve given up looking for work — is closer to 20 percent. The Obama administration needs to get serious about debt and unveil a pro-growth agenda that relies on low taxes, entrepreneurship and free markets to revive the U.S. economy, put people back to work and restore confidence in Washington’s ability to reverse our eroding financial condition. Because what they’ve done so far hasn’t worked.