Barack Obama recently campaigned in Ohio about the importance of his policies, solar energy efforts. Solyndra, endorsed enthusiastically by Department of Energy and the president, declared bankruptcy less than 12 months after receiving Obama’s “investment” of $534 million dollars. Unfortunately, Solyndra was not Obama’s only poorly performing solar energy investment. Obama has, so far, lost over 2 billion dollars in poorly performing solar companies that, soon after huge infusions of taxpayer dollars, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Consider Obama’s investment in “green jobs”. After three and a half years and almost one hundred billion dollars of “investments”, Obama’s programs have been able to create only a few thousand jobs, certainly not the 5 million “green jobs” originally promised by the president. And, many of those few thousand jobs created are actually existing government jobs that have been re-categorized by Team Obama.
Consider Obama’s investment in “shovel ready” projects, which he promised would reduce unemployment dramatically and revitalize the engine of our economy. The only problem was that Team Obama didn’t understand their own government regulations, and they allowed themselves to be “snookered” into allocating Stimulus infrastructure funds for pet projects such as the San Francisco Harvest Marsh Mouse research. Two years later, the president admitted that perhaps he did not understand what it took to make a project shovel ready. Obama seemed to think it was a joke, but it turned out to be yet another bad investment for the American taxpayer. Unfortunately, the president’s $787 million dollar “investment” was lost—and the American taxpayer was, once again, left holding the empty bag.
Investment advisors in the private sector also are evaluated on the investments they passed on. For example, some of the investments that Obama decided to pass on were investments in the Keystone pipeline and additional nuclear energy plants, denying our nation energy independence and preventing hundreds of thousands of new jobs from being created.
Any way that Americans look at it, Obama’s record as an investor is appalling. He has blown through trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, added another 5 trillion dollars of debt and has little to show for all the spending. Time and again, his touted investments have gone bust, and never has he been able to achieve the returns he has promised. Curiously, despite these poor returns, the president continues to campaign on the promise of making even more “investments” for the American people.
In the private sector, when an investment advisor performs as poorly as Obama has, investors take their money and go elsewhere. Perhaps, in November, American voters need to follow that same example.
Let’s remember, too, that most investment prospectuses post a warning: “past performance does not guarantee future results”, but in Obama’s case, maybe it does.