The Great “Smoke and Mirrors” Obama Economy

The Great “Smoke and Mirrors” Obama Economy
By Dr. Bob Uda
2/6/2014

After President Barack Obama took over the country in January 2009, his economic policies caused great layoffs to ripple throughout the United States.  My six-figure salary job at BAE Systems ended in July 2009, and I was unemployed for three years.  I was on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks.  That was not a good situation as it made me do the bare minimum in my job search.  That is what the Obama administration job-loss bailout program did to the psyche of laid-off workers.  It makes unemployed workers lazy as they received Obama’s dangerous unemployment bailouts.

I had started on a PhD program in September 2006, which continued for nearly six years through July 2012 before I graduated.  I had taken a $25,000 Sallie Mae loan to finance my PhD program up front.  That was one of my better financial decisions that I had made as the cost for that same degree has about doubled during that six-year time period.

After my unemployment compensation ended in 2011, the government did not count me any longer as searching for a job.  My lack of actively searching for work contributed to the unemployment figure going down.  Alternatively, I continued working full time as a doctoral student at Northcentral University and worked towards graduation.

We were working through our savings to survive.  I sold off all of my stocks and got out of the Stock Market.  I had entered the Stock Market in year 2000 and lost 50% of my investments during 2001 when the Stock Market took a big dive during the “dot.com” fiasco.  During my 12 years in the Stock Market, I never recovered my losses, which ended about 40% loss from my initial investment of $100K in high-tech stocks.

After I graduated with a PhD degree in July 2012, I obtained an adjunct online teaching position with Colorado Technical University (CTU) teaching homeland security courses, which started in July 2012.  I had entered that new career field because of my PhD degree in business administration with specialization in homeland security.  My wife had a couple of major surgeries in 2011, which cost us well over $50K.

In 2013, I acquired two more adjunct teaching jobs in homeland security.  Hence, at one period during 2013, I held three part time teaching jobs and was working 120 hours per week on those three jobs.  Thus, the Obama government counted my three adjunct teaching jobs as three jobs.  At the peak point, I was teaching up to 138 students in eight courses in three online universities—yet I was making less than one-fifth I was making when I was working at my last company in the aerospace and defense industries.

I was getting three hours of sleep a night and running ragged working all of those hours each week.  It got too much for me such that I had to let one of those three part-time jobs go.  What is wrong with that picture, anyway?  There is nothing right with that picture.  That, typically, is the Obama economy in action.  Everything I have been experiencing concurs with the facts presented today by Fox News about a Wall Street Journal article.

Because of the dangerous ObamaCare, universities and companies have increased their part-time employment.  This is a good thing for businesses and educational institutions.  They tell us not to work over 29 hours a week, yet the amount of work we must do to survive is like holding a full-time job.  That is a good thing for universities, where they pay their part-time instructors low salaries and get full-time work out of them.  I think that this employment approach will increase and will be the wave of the future.  ObamaCare has caused this condition.

I do not see what the future holds except I will probably need to work until I am 90 years old.  Fortunately, working as a telecommuter and as an adjunct university online instructor is ideal as we work in our own homes and never need to get dressed, travel to and from a working location, and bearing all the expenses for gasoline, lunches, laundry, and other such expenses that full-time workers must bear while working at a brick-and-mortar location.

Now, all we need to do is to earn a decent salary.  As it goes, I am making less than minimum wage for all of the overtime I must work to get everything done.  The Obama government is working hard to increase the minimum wage to a ridiculous level.  That will make us part-time workers in the educational industry even more depressed in our salaries and making less per hour than high school and college kids working part time at fast-food restaurants.

No matter what President Obama does to this “Nanny State” economy, as long as I can work, I will never accept any of his ridiculous entitlement program benefits.  I strongly believe in a safety net for destitute people who cannot work, the invalid, and those who are down and out.  However, we have too many moochers dining at Obama’s feeding trough.  When people receive food stamps for generations on end, something is fraudulently wrong.  Our nation needs to re-enshrine the Protestant ethic of hard work and abolish the evils of the dole.

Everything that the Obama administration has done has caused available jobs to decrease, unemployment to increase, salaries to decrease, underemployment to increase, and unemployed workers to go on the dole.  These conditions result from the “smoke and mirrors” Obama economy.

###