Michele “Nostradamus” Bachmann Falsely Asserts Obama Has Taken Over 51% Of The US Economy

Michele Bachmann claims she has the predictive powers of Nostradamus, and continues to assert that President Obama has anti-American views.

Chris Wallace: Do you really believe the president of the United States has anti-American views.

Bachmann: What I’m concerned about are the policies of the last fifteen months. It’s stunning, what’s happened in our economy.  We’ve gone from the United States have a hundred percent of the private economy private, to today, the federal government effectively owns or controls 51% of the private economy.

Raw Story explains why this is just not true.

Her insistence that President Obama has nationalized the banks and other institutions is fundamentally incorrect. None of the major economic steps taken by the president have involved nationalization: a fact the Obama administration was lauded for in the face of the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

…

“On the one hand, [the bailouts are] not nationalization because [the government] didn’t buy common stock with voting rights, so they don’t have a seat at the table,” a senior Yale economics lecturer told NPR in the final months of the Bush administration. “[But the] government has all sorts of ways to influence a bank without owning shares in it.”

This resulted in the U.S. offering to bail out banks by purchasing some of their assets, but not becoming a controlling member. According to The New York Times, by the beginning of 2009 the government owned six percent of Bank of America and 7.8 percent of Citigroup: far from nationalization and amounting to nowhere near 51 percent of the nation’s economy.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.