Yglesias: Yet Another Conservative Economist Thinks Barack Obama Can Travel Through Time

Gary Becker explains that the left-wing policies of Barack Obama and the 111th Congress slowed business investment:

... Congress passed and the president signed a financial reform bill that is a complicated and a politically driven mixture of sensible reforms, and senseless changes that have little to do with stabilizing the financial architecture, or correcting what was defective in prior regulations.

It is no surprise that this rhetoric and the proposed and actual policies discouraged business investment and slowed down the recovery.

,,,business investment started trending [down] way back in 2006 and did the bulk of its plunging in 2008. It also seems to me that George W Bush was president at this time. Soon after Barack Obama took office, investment bottomed-out and began to rebound. Neither Obama’s rhetoric nor his policies can possibly be responsible for the Obama-era drop in investment for the simple reason that no such drop occurred. [source] (via DeLong