9 Major Achievements of Barack Obama, the 44th U.S. President

Massive Military pull out from Iraq

The Iraq War, which started in 2003 two years after the September 11 attacks, had become a thorn in the flesh of many Americans. After about 8 years of senseless chaos and intervention, many Americans believed quite frankly that America had overstayed in Iraq.

During Obama’s latter stages of his first term, the president order a sizable pull out of American troops from Iraq. When news of this broke out in 2011, the American public welcomed it with open arms.

President Obama believed that excessive amounts of U.S. troops in the region in one way or the other was counterproductive. Hence, the Obama administration focused solely on keeping only a few specialized US force in Iraq. The goal was to build the Iraqi security agencies so that they themselves can meet their security needs.

Read More: Major Achievements of Abraham Lincoln

Unemployment and Poverty fell during his administration

Related to earlier point of Obama installing regulations to arrest the 2007/-08 financial crisis is the issue of unemployment and poverty. The records show that as at the time Obama was sworn into his first term, the US unemployment rate hovered at around 9%. However, by the time the president bid farewell to America (in February 2017), the US unemployment rate stood at slightly below 5%. Similarly, impressive feats were accomplished by Obama with regard to reducing poverty and homelessness across the nation.

Obama Healthcare Reforms

The healthcare reforms, famously called the ObamaCare, began by Obama came to the aid of several millions of Americans that could not afford a decent health care. For a very long time in America’s history a large chunk of the have-nots in the society lived in a nightmare because they simply had no health care.

In 2010, this all a changed as Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. What Obamacare did was to add an additional 32 million Americans to the nation’s healthcare. Not many presidents in U.S. history can boast of such impressive accomplishment.

Barack Obama accomplishments

Barack Obama invested heavily in Green and renewable energy

Barack Obama was big advocate of renewable clean energy

During Obama’s presidency, the United States of America saw its commitment to green and sustainable energy increase in leaps and bounds. The president did not just talk the talk and issue speeches about how the U.S. was committed to green energy; he walked the walk by committing $90 billion dollars into the green energy sector.

The Obama administration believed that fossil fuels had outlived their relevance. Hence in order to tackle the myriad of harm that fossil fuel accrues to the earth, Obama rolled out tax cuts to clean energy companies and producers of solar panels and wind turbines. These tax cuts helped bring down the production cost in those sectors by about 50%. Thus, the share of clean energy in America’s energy grid increased owing to Obama’s clean energy policies.

Obama also worked very hard to make sure that the United States took its energy needs into her own hands. The president reduced the nation’s dependency on imported crude oil by about 30%. Compared to the figures in 2008, the US produced about 77% more crude oil in 2016. What this did was that it helped to improve the nation’s trade deficit situation.