drawscore wrote:>>>And what did Obama do that makes you think that with the exception of the stuff Trump made up?<<<
Not so much what he did, but what he didn't do. He did not secure the borders; he did not keep his promise about keeping your doctor and health plan; he did not fix the problems with the VA; he did not stop the DoJ and the IRS when they broke the law; military retirees, disabled vets, and people on Social Security, did not get a COLA in three of the last four years; he gives away billions to countries that hate us, but ignores homeless veterans. Shall I go on?
Securing the borders: how was Obama different from every previous president? News flash: Mexico is NOT going to pay for a wall, even though I've joked that they would to block the millions of Americans fleeing a Trump presidency.
On keeping doctor and health plan, all he was really promising was all he could promise: that the _government_ would not take away your doctor or your health plan. You couldn't reasonably expect him to forbid your doctor from ever retiring, could you? Nor could he force your employer to keep the same plan you had last year, nor force insurance companies to keep offering exactly what they offered the year before, nor from dropping your doctor from their preferred provider list, nor your doctor from withdrawing from their preferred provider list. I had all that happen to me years before Obamacare.
I need specifics on what you claim the DoJ was doing wrong. IRS, I presume you're talking about Lois Lerner and the long delays in granting 501(c)(4) status. That has to do with the uncertainties in whether a 501(c)(4) group has engaged in political activities that are illegal for groups holding 501(c)(4) tax exempt status. More on this at the end.
COLA: *headdesk* COLA stands for Cost of Living Adjustment. It is meant to protect recipients against inflation, not to increase their real income. For Social Security, it was enacted into law in 1973 and is based on the Consumer Price Index. We have had very low inflation. Therefore we have had little or no COLA. It is an automatic mechanism, and not at the discretion of the president! Blaming Obama for no COLA is as silly as blaming Obama for your not winning the lottery when you didn't buy a ticket. The only way Obama could have caused a bigger COLA would have been to adopt policies to boost inflation - but they wouldn't really have been better off, because everything would have cost more! It doesn't help you to double your salary if all the things you pay for also double in price. You can learn about the history of Social Security COLA at
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/latestCOLA.html. Military retiree COLA is likewise an automatic formula, not a presidential gift that mean old Obama chose to withhold.
Homeless veterans? See
http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Art ... since-2010. Doesn't sound like Obama was ignoring homeless veterans to me. It sounds like you are ignoring facts and getting your "news" from liars.
Last point: Just like every other president, Obama was not allowed to just spend as much money as he wanted on anything he wanted. There is this thing called a Congress - have you ever heard of it? - that decides on what the budget is. It also makes up the tax laws, including things like 501(c)(4) nonprofit status with messy, complicated rules about what such groups can and cannot do that the IRS bureaucrats have to figure out how to enforce.
The president can propose a budget, but Congress is free to ignore it (and has done so). All the president can do is veto the budget Congress passes, not change it. For the past several years, Congress has been controlled by the Republicans. Even when the Democrats nominally held control, the Republicans in the Senate were able to block pretty much everything by using a parliamentary tactic called a filibuster, where they can keep a vote from ever taking place. They even blocked his executive and judicial appointments to an unprecedented degree. Now, maybe Obama's policies would have failed, but he was never given a fair chance to even try them. So maybe you should be blaming the Republicans in Congress for some of the things you're unhappy about.