There was a commercial not too long ago where a young man looked out his window to the village green where a bundle of money had just fallen.  He calls his wife/girlfriend over to show her.  She suggests running down and getting it, but he says, no, let’s wait.  Next you see a frizzy headed guy down on the green who screams, “MONEY!!!!”  In seconds, people came out of the woodwork and scoffed up all the money while the young couple looked on.

The image of that commercial popped into my head as I considered the job summit being led by President Obama.  To me, the young couple represented the government pondering how to direct the economy to achieve this specific goal or that.  The mob on the green was the free market.  While the government dithers over what kind of legislation to write, which special interest groups to pay off to pass it, how to develop incentives to get private industry to do this or that, if they would just cut taxes and get out of the way, the free market would get to work creating jobs where they are needed, not where some bureaucrat thinks they should go.

Uncertainty

The biggest cloud overhanging this economy is uncertainty.  The Obama administration is slamming through enormous changes: a $787 billion Porkulus package, cap and trade, health care.  Businesses look at this combined with the accumulation of massive government debt, tax increases rather than cuts (yes letting the Bush tax cuts expire is a tax increase, not just the expiration of tax cuts as Speaker Pelosi tries to spin it) and they don’t know what hiring that extra employee is going to cost, let alone what it will cost to keep the employees they already have.  So they don’t hire until the dust  settles and they can calculate the impact.

“Tax incentives for job creation are “worthy of further consideration,” he said, while adding that the administration is also set on making a big push in the area of green jobs.” – President Obama at Jobs Summit

“Worthy of further consideration”?  Since conservatives have been calling for tax cuts for a year now, this kind of statement in Obama-ese translates thusly, “I have to make a nod to the right, to acknowledge that I heard them, but it ain’t happening.”  Couple that with the “big push in the area of green jobs.”  We are in the midst of the scientific scandal that the “settled science” of man-made global warming could be the greatest hoax since Bernie Madoff, and Obama wants a big push in the area of green jobs.  What if that area collapses because the urgency that Al Gore has been screaming about is no longer urgent?  It’s government planning on the order of Soviet five-year plans or Mao’s Great Leap Forward programs.  It harkens back to Jimmy Carter’s giant Synfuels project that was going to convert coal into oil, until oil prices fell and the project imploded, but not before billions of tax dollars were poured into that rat hole.

How Simulating!

If you listen to Joe Biden, the stimulus plan is working better than expected.  But let’s take a closer look.  As of about three weeks ago only $120 billion of the stimulus money had been spent. (So why is Congress looking at another stimulus with over $600 billion left to spend in the first one?)  Of that money, 80% went to the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Labor.  What about all the “shovel ready” projects?  Only about $4 billion has gone to the Department of Transportation.  Feel better?

Jobs Summit Attendees

So who is meeting with President Obama at the jobs summit?  Well first let’s look at who was not invited:

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce — they have butted heads with Obama over health care and climate change policies
• National Federation of Independent Businesses

I don’t know about you, but I think they might have an idea or two about how to create conditions that let the free market create jobs.  As for the attendees:

• Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officer
• President of the American Federation of Teachers — a union of workers in a government run monopoly
• United Food & Commercial Workers International Union
• CEOs of some Fortune 500 companies

How many jobs do unions create, not occupy, create?  Think of the auto industry, steel industry, public K-12 education, the Postal Service, and government in general.  Do they bring images of thriving, vibrant, engines of job creation?  Or is the image more of the basket cases of the U.S. economy?  This is not a slight against the union workers themselves, but rather of their leadership who create so many restrictions on job rules to artificially create the need for more jobs.  There motto is: why have three people do the work, when you have five do it?

As far as big business is concerned, let me dispel the thought that conservatives and big business go hand in hand.  In many cases big business looks to cut deals with the government to protect their industries and markets from upstart companies.  They have gotten big and lethargic, rather than nimble and vibrant.  Small businesses create about 80% of the jobs in the U.S. and they didn’t have a seat at the table.

So was the jobs summit about creating jobs or just jive talk?  If you want a real jobs summit see what American Solutions was hosting in Cincinnati, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi.  They actually discussed ideas that would work.

The Obama international charm offensive seems to be wearing thin.  As the first U.S. President to ever lobby to win an Olympic Games, President Obama failed in his effort as Chicago was eliminated in the first round.  The Olympic ideal was to divorce sports and politics and by doing so, promote peace by having athletes from around the world meet on a one-to-one basis and see each other as individuals rather than as the countries they represented.

Although Hitler used the 1936 Olympic Games to showcase the revitalized Germany, it was Jimmy Carter who was the first to directly use the Games for political purposes when he pulled the U.S. team from competing in Moscow in 1980, to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.  There’s nothing like punishing your own young athletes who perhaps worked a lifetime for the opportunity to compete in an Olympic Games and perhaps never get another chance.  The Soviet’s returned the favor four years later by boycotting the Games in Los Angeles in 1984.

Let’s go back to the ideal of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who help found the modern Olympic Games:

May joy and good fellowship reign, and in this manner, may the Olympic Torch pursue its way through ages, increasing friendly understanding among nations, for the good of a humanity always more enthusiastic, more courageous and more pure.

So let’s leave the Olympic Games to the athletes and perhaps now, President Obama can get back to work.

When in doubt stick with what you know.  Barack Obama knows how to campaign.  As a result he has been campaigning non-stop since he was elected.  Instead of spending his time in the Oval Office making executive decisions and leading, he is the perpetual pitch man for everyone else.  The problem is the American people didn’t elect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as their president, nor did they elect a politburo of 30+ czars.  They elected the most inexperienced and inept chief executive since the Harding administration.

Biden’s Brushfires

Remember it was almost one year ago that Joe Biden said, “Mark my words…”  that within six months of taking office a President Obama would be faced with an international crisis.  Maybe it took a little longer than six months and maybe it is not yet a full blown crisis, but are there brushfires?  Let me count the ways:

• Ahmadinejad thumbs his nose at the world while buying time to finish building nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to Israel.  Obama had the opportunity to put the same kind of pressure on the mullahs that the mullahs put on the Shah of Iran in 1979, by speaking out strongly against the fraudulent election in Iran. Instead he issued a tepid response and the mullahs cracked down hard.  Now Obama is negotiating from a position of extreme weakness.
• The Poles and the Czechs are thrown under the bus, while the Russian bear licks its lips as the missile defense bases are cancelled by Obama
• Obama has spoken to his commander in Afghanistan but once in the 70 days that the commander has been on the ground.  The general says he need more troops.  Obama is calculating his response.
• Hugo Chavez is getting chummy with Ahmadinejad and would love to have nukes in Venezuela so he can take over as leftest strongman in South America as Castro fades away.
• And if the nukes can’t get to Venezuela fast enough, Chavez wants to put puppets throughout the region.  He is currently trying to re-install Zalaya in Honduras, after Zalaya was removed for trying to illegally alter the Honduran constitution.  Hillary and Obama are not helping the democratic government of Honduras, but Chavez and Zalaya.
• North Korea continues to play cat and mouse with Obama, while they also expand their nuclear and missile capabilities and see who they can sell the technolgy to for hard currency.

Amid all of this, one might expect President Obama to be burning the midnight oil in the Oval Office.  Well, not when there is another campaign that needs his special talents.  So he will travel to Copenhagen, to campaign for his hometown of Chicago, as they bid to be the host of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

It alsmost makes you pine for Jimmy Carter.

Stock Market Leads the Way

As I write this the stock market is up nearly 200 points, and it has risen in each of the last three months.  Commodity prices are rising based on encouraging manufacturing data from abroad.  Personal incomes rose 0.5% in April.  Chrysler could exit bankruptcy as soon as Monday.  Citigroup and GM are removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replaced by powerhouse Cisco and Travelers.  Ford motor’s shares rose 4.9% on news that it plans to expand production in the third quarter to try to gain market share from its rivals, and without government money.

The Stimulus Flop

Less than 10% of the $780 billion stimulus package has been spent.  President Obama told us we desparately needed or we may be mired in this recession/depression for years .  The free marketers said that this economy is strong enough to recover on its own, which the statists sneered at.  Government created this mess by their meddling in the housing market and how they mishandled interest rates and the money supply but we were told that “only government” can get us out of it.  More recently President Obama, who has been trying to spend every dime Congress will let him get his hands on has said we are out of money. Here’s a thought:  repeal the rest of the stimulus and get out of the way of the strongest economy on earth.

Things to Ponder

• Obama opposed bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler.  Free marketers said it should be allowed to happen.  That’s how the free market works.  After pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into these two, where are we?  Both are in bankruptcy.
• Bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler would be an extraordinarily long and drawn out process costing millions of jobs and killing the auto industry in the U.S.  Where are we?  Chrysler may emerge from bankruptcy as early as Monday, Ford is ramping up for the third quarter.
• Without the stimulus package, we were told the unemployment rate could hit 9% by 2Q2010, whereas with the stimulus it will peak at 8% at the 3Q2009.  Where are we?  It is now at 8.6% and we are in 2Q2009.  The stimulus passed, little has been spent and the administration has been wrong again.  The free marketers say that unemployment will likely rise quickly and if left alone, the recovery will happen more quickly.  If the government meddles and tinkers, we will likely see what happened in the 1930s where this drags on for years.
• President Obama says we’re out of money.  So stop spending.  Repeal the stimulus that is accomplishing nothing because the bulk of the spending isn’t due to happen for another year or more.
• Watching the Information Technology job boards, I see a big rise in the job postings for sales people.  When companies are confident that the economy is turning, they step on the gas for sales to beat the competition.  The operational folks will soon follow.

If the Obama administration is not careful and doesn’t reverse course before he bankrupts us, we may be faced with accelerating inflation and sky high interest rates.  Shall we get nostalgic for the days of Jimmy Carter?

Paying the Bill

Elected by the drumbeat of bashing Bush, President Obama now faces reality, and the American people see example after example of Obama’s lack of experience.  He campaigned on how he was going to change the Bush Policies, and where are we?

• One of his first acts in office was an Executive Order to close Guantanamo.  Now, he doesn’t have a plan to make it happen and is saying exactly what Bush said, that there is not clear alternative.  Going further, he is turning Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan into his own version of Guantanamo
• He was going exit Iraq within 16 months.  Now, not so fast.  It’s not that easy, when you actually have responsibility, to follow through on shooting from the hip or lip.
• Military Tribunals were the wrong way to go.  Now, the military tribunals will continue
• The release of pictures demanded by the ACLU. Obama was in favor.  Now? Not so much.
• Obama now supports covert action in Pakistan

Bush’s Legacy

If Obama’s not careful he’s going to make Bush look like a genius.  But with every flip-flop, he puts America at risk.  Our allies such as Australia, wonder if we are the same strong world leader that we were before.

“President Barack Obama’s administration has continued this trend {against fighting a conventional war}, and risks unsettling America’s longstanding democratic allies in Asia by skimping on defense” — Australia Bulks Up, WSJ, May 6, 2009

Our enemies see this as signs of weakness and look for ways to exploit it.  Think Jimmy Carter and the Soviets in Afganistan, Khomeini in Iran, Sandanistas in Nicaragua…

Joe Biden said we would have a crisis withing six months.  I don’t know about the timing, but the pieces seem to be falling into place.

On President Obama’s 100th day in office, as part of his never ending election campaign he said, “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit…. That wasn’t me.”  The “blame it all on Bush” mantra is getting old, but this one is becoming particularly grating.  I would like to direct President Obama’s attention to the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 9:

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;”

Congress has the power of the purse, not the President.  That means that President Bush couldn’t spend a thin dime without the approval of Congress.  For the last two years of the Bush presidency, who controlled the United States Congress?  The Democrats.  And lest we forget, before he became President Obama, he was Senator Obama, a member in good standing of that same United States Congress.  Does anyone think for a minute that the Democratic Congress run by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi was a rubber stamp for Bush?  Anything they disagreed with Bush on they would have fought tooth and nail.

Remember during the campaign when the Democrats were putting together their rescue package how the Republicans were locked out of the room and John McCain “suspended” his campaign to return to Washington to make something happen?  Remember as well that Obama was too busy campaigning to similarly get involved even though he was still a sitting Senator.

Now with the shoe on the other foot, and President Obama pushing to triple the deficit, the only people fighting him in Congress are the Republicans.  So this impending debt disaster is a joint effort by Obama and the Congressional Democrats.

President Obama can’t claim, like Bill Clinton, “don’t blame me, I came from Arkansas.”  President Obama can’t claim, like Jimmy Carter, “don’t blame me, I came from Georgia.”  President Obama came to the presidency from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  He was an insider, not an outsider.  He owns just as much of this mess as Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

So, Mr. President, stop playing the blame game, take responsibility and do your job.

Goodbye Liberty

The cat is finally out of the bag.  President Obama, after passing a huge spending increase, proposed cutting the budget deficit in half by the end of his current term primarily by raising taxes and cutting defense spending.  This is the same old tired liberal policies that brought us the economic morass of Jimmy Carter, the unpreparedness to deal with al Queda under Clinton, and now in the midst of a deep recession, President Obama wants to spend more and tax more.

Just when we need to move more money into the private economy, President Obama wants to take out his Hoover vacuum cleaner and suck up whatever cash he can find and hoard it in Washington.

The real problem is government has gotten too big, too wasteful, too profligate, and too out of touch with the American people.  Instead of the original vision of the founding fathers of limited federal government, pretty soon your lives will be directed by four people:  your Congressman/Congresswoman, your two US Senators, and the President.  All local government will become irrelevant.  You can see the beginnings of it now.  We have the federal government paying for local roads, local schools, local police, local unemployment.  And you can also see the power plays:  you do the will of the federal government or you get no money.  The federal government takes your money in the form of taxes and will refuse to give it back unless you follow their liberal agenda.

Goodbye Liberty.

Don't Anyone Dare Say Government Caused This Mess

You can never solve a problem if you do not face up to the full scope of the problem.  In listening to President Obama, and reading liberal columnists like Maureen Dowd, in the description of what caused the current economic calamity, the government is always given a pass.

We are in an economic morass because of the eight years of failed Bush policies, greed on Wall Street, tax breaks for the rich, etc.  Government’s culpability which, I believe, is really the gravamen of our economic problems is never mentioned at all.  Democrats and Liberals don’t dare point to Democrats and liberal policies as having anything to do with the collapsing economy.  That is why they always say that this is the worst economy since the Great Depression, as they also said when Clinton ran for President.  They don’t dare say it is the worst economy since Jimmy Carter, since that would remind the American people that the Democrats screwed up that one as well.

Unmentionable Causes of the Current Economic Mess

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of control.  Explosive increases in debt taken on under the leadership of Franklin Raines (Democrat), and Jaime Gorelick (Democrat), remember she also gave us the firewall between the CIA and FBI that hamstrung the investigation of al Queda.  Raines made over $90 million while at Fannie Mae and at the same time was accused of overstating earnings by $10.6 billion.  So, where’s the demand for a clawback of Raines’s salary?
• Barney Frank (Democrat) and Chris Dodd (Democrat) — Frank blocked every attempt to put in place greater regulation over Fannie Mae.  The Bush Administration tried to increase regulation over Fannie Mae, but Frank blocked it.  What you hear today is that the reason for the economic problems are a lack of regulation.  Chris Dodd got VIP mortgage treatment from Countrywide mortgage before they went belly-up.  Asked to come clean on the mortgages, Dodd first said sure, we’ll get around to it.  Then he made some papers available for viewing, but not copying, and has since clammed up.
• Community Reinvestment Act — Carter (Democrat) administration program to push home ownership for low income people, by forcing banks to report how much they were offering loans in low income neighborhoods and face the consequences if it wasn’t enough.
• Janet Reno (Democrat) — in the Clinton Administration Reno threatened action against financial institutions if they weren’t lending enough low income individuals.  What bank doesn’t want to be publicly branded a racist institution?

So we have homeowners, who should have never qualified for a mortgage, about to receive bailouts from all the responsible people who took mortgages they could afford, when they could afford them.  Do you ever hear about any of this cast of characters mentioned by President Obama or the main stream media? No.  It wasn’t the government actively pushing social policy on those people least able to handle it.  It was greedy banks and unscrupulous lenders, trying to avoid being branded racists, who took advantage of these poor ignorant people.  Perhaps if the government hadn’t destroyed our education system, these people might have read what they were about to sign.

How Do you Solve Only Half a Problem?

As these characters are never mentioned as having a role in the problem, how can you ever hope to fix the problem if these bad actors are still going about their business doing what caused the crisis and blaming everyone else.  President Obama demonstrates his inexperience more profoundly every day, seemingly making things up as he goes along.  That is not leadership and what we need now in times of crisis is leadership.  Obama has never shown the courage or willingness to take on his own party.  Without rooting out these characters and really fixing the whole problem, it will only happen again down the road.

What we need now is a leader.  Someone who actually has experience running the executive branch of a state.  Someone who is not afraid to take on the entrenched power of their own party and has succeeded in doing so.  Is there anyone out there who fits that bill?  Gee, that sounds like Sarah Palin.

The balloons and bunting have been picked up, the Washington Mall has been swept, the ball gowns put away.  The campaign, the election, the historic celebration are now in the history books.  It’s time to govern.  Sadly, with only three weeks in office, President Obama’s lack of experience is on full display.

Due to the looming financial crisis, the transition in power was unprecedented in the level of cooperation between the departing Bush administration and the incoming Obama team.  Obama said he needed the second half of the $700 billion, Bush put in the request.  Everyone knew what problem number one was.  The economy was in crisis.

When Dealing With a Crisis, You Lead, You Don’t Delegate

When United Airways Flight 1549, which would end up in the Hudson River, was climbing after takeoff, the co-pilot was at the controls.  When the plane struck a flight of birds and lost power, Captain Sullenberger cooly said two words, “My aircraft.”  The co-pilot responded, “Your aircraft,” the captain took the controls and the first officer then set about trying to re-start the engines.

In the midst of this economic crisis, that President Obama keeps saying we have to fix now, he let Nancy Pelosi run the show, while he took a victory lap, visiting the White House press pool, writing exectutive orders closing Guantanamo, and speaking to el Arabiya.  Nancy Pelosi was furiously stuffing the stimulus turkey with pork, and President Obama was inviting Republicans in for tea, thinking that by doing so, a new era of bipartisanship would emerge.

In several corporate jobs that I have had there were times of crisis.  If we had to drastically cut expenses to deal with the crisis, it was all hands on deck.  It wasn’t see what you can do and get back to me.  It was, “Be on the conference call at 3PM prepared to tell the Chief, how you are meeting your expense reduction targets.”  All senior managers were on the call and all got a turn to tell the Chief what they were contributing or, gulp, where they were falling short. If you were falling short, make no mistake, you better have a damn good reason and whether or not you did, your future career was now under a microscope.  The point is, like Captain Sullenberger, in times of crisis, the leader is unmistakenly in charge.

President Obama let Nancy Pelosi craft this disaster, without strong guidelines of what he would or would not accept, and did not demand that Republicans be involved from the start.  You reap what you sew.  Now he is scrambling to drag this stinking corpse across the finish line and it’s not pretty.

Why did this happen?  Because President Obama was a Community Organizer.  He never ran a business. He never held an executive position in government.  His gossamery resume was obvious, but ignored.  Sarah Palin must be shaking her head in disbelief.

Running Back to Safety Zone of Campaigning

Barack Obama was a master on the campaign trail, first dispatching Hillary Clinton, and then deftly outmaneuvering John McCain.  So what does the inexperienced man do when he’s under stress?  Go back to what he’s good at.  This week we saw President Obama back on the campaign trail, with the same rhetoric.  The problem is, you can take a fair degree of license with what you say on the campaign trail.  When you govern, you have to deal with reality.  George Bush is gone.  Bashing Bush may have gotten Obama elected, but he’s got to put that one out to pasture.  His claim that tax cuts caused this financial problem, and that the past eight years have been an economic disaster, just don’t hold up.  It makes him look clueless.  Sure it fires up the base, but so what.  We need solutions, not pep rallies.  Tax cuts boosted the economy for Kennedy, for Reagan, for Bush.  In short, they work.  Obama may not like them, but they work.  To say otherwise is like hanging a sign over his head, saying Under Construction.

Cabinet Picks

And the late night talk show hosts were wondering what they were going to do without Bush in office.  The hits just keep coming.  Once again, you have to ask, who’s in charge?  How did all of these slip through the cracks?  Richardson, Geithner, Daschle, Soldis, Nancy Killefer, Eric Holder.  Sure it’s noble that Obama took responsibility for Daschle.  But if you stay with him too long you look, uh, inexperienced?  With all of these problems, someone’s head should roll.  The President is delegating what he shouldn’t and what he should delegate is a mess.

International

President Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of harmony in our relations with other countries.  But what has happened?

• Ahmadinijad — Candidate Obama said he would talk with Iran without preconditions.  Ahmadinijad said he wanted an apology before he would meet with Obama
• Several countries harshly criticize the stimulus package and its “Buy American” provision, raising the spector of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that deepened the Great Depression
• Iran shoots a missle into space to celebrate the Iranian revolution, with the subtext, “That was when we boldly took over your Embassy and held it for 444 days during the weak presidency of Jimmy Carter.”
• Pakastan releases A.Q. Khan the nuclear proliferator in a snub to the U.S.
• Kyrgyzstan tells U.S. to close military base that is key supply route to Afghanistan

I hope President Obama is a quick study, or we’re in for a long grim four years.

“When the incoming Democratic president asked the outgoing GOP president to request the second $350 billion in rescue money, Mr. Bush graciously complied. At which point the Democratic majority informed the Democratic president that he’d see not a dime until they decided how to spend it.” — WSJ 01/16/2009

If Barack Obama wants to continue to be the “annointed one,”  and if he wants to achieve and maintain rock star status, just like his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, he should take another look at Clinton’s history.

If he wants to have a truly successful presidency, he better go get himself a Republican Congress.  If you look at a graph of the performance of the economy during Clinton’s term, you will see that the first two years were pretty lethargic.  But in 1994, the Republicans took over control for the first time in 40 years, and the economy took off, with Bill taking all the credit.  The last president to have a Democratic Congress during his entire tenure, was Jimmy Carter, and we all know how that turned out.