Editorials
If Obama Were A CEO, Would He Still Have His Job?
President Obama has missed every economic forecast he's made as president. (AP)
When Obama came into office, he would often publicly complain about CEOs being paid too much.
“What gets people upset — and rightfully so — are executives being rewarded for failure,” he said at press conference in early 2009. Later he opined that “the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance.”
It’s a complaint Democrats have made repeatedly over the years, as though they have a better way than the free market to determine the right compensation package.
But what if we were to hold Obama — the nation’s chief executive — to his own standard?
At the start of each year, the president’s economists forecast economic growth for that year. The number is included in every presidential budget. And every single year, GDP growth has come in below what Obama had projected. Every year.
These weren’t just small misses, either. In February 2015, for example, Obama said the economy would grow that year by 3.1%. On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the actual result: 2.4%. That works out to a $114.7 billion miss — or almost $1,000 per household.
Looked at another way, if the economy had performed each year the way Obama said it would, the nation’s GDP would be $642 billion bigger than it is today.
And keep in mind that CEO Obama set extremely modest goals for growth — well below the average of all the economic recoveries since World War II. In fact, had Obama’s economic recovery been merely average, GDP would be more than $2 trillion bigger than it is today.
And each time the economy underperformed, Obama pointed fingers, blaming everything from a tsunami, a cold winter, the Arab Spring, gas prices and budget cuts to George Bush.
All the while he’s ignored the harm that his own policies have done: ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, massive EPA regulations, new labor costs, higher taxes and a failed Keynesian stimulus. Absent those shackles, the economy would have almost certainly recovered from the deep recession fast and furiously.
And for this lousy performance, Obama gets a $400,000 salary (more than twice the average for all CEOs), roughly $1.5 million in annual pension benefits, free room and board, gourmet chefs, generous expense accounts and paid vacations. IBD’s Andrew Malcolm discovered that Obama’s vacations alone have cost taxpayers more than $70 million, so far.
Most CEOs could only dream of living so well. Does anyone think Obama’s compensation matches up to his performance?
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