Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
The order in the Middle East has been crumbling, but it seems that the only place President Barack Obama knows where to lead is on the dance floor or when ramming through his socialist programs. When it comes to real solutions to fix the economy or on foreign policy he is utterly lost.
The common themes in each presidential race turn on a hope and dream for the future, defining a common purpose and a call to action. Candidates usually win on the success of their ability to marshal these themes into a cohesive series of arguments for their nomination and eventually election to office. Few were as effective as Ronald Reagan at recruiting the support of the average listener. If he could get your ear, he could get your vote. Candidate Barack Obama frequently compared himself with Ronald Reagan during his campaign. His media cohorts happily aligned themselves with this maladapted relationship, with the centrist and even right leaning (business friendly and low/fair taxes) themes hinted by Obama’s vague comparisons.
When President Obama and his team stood before their supporters and introduced ObamaCare you could almost hear them sing in unison the Carly Simon song, “Nobody does it better…”. They were going to bring us the health care we had been waiting for. Magically covering every soul in America whether they wanted it or not. If they did not, the government would be just like granny used to be, “Open wide, this won’t hurt a bit.” Come to think of it, was that granny or… never mind.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Unknown (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville)
An article in The Hill newspaper titled “Teachers union expands playing field for midterms” describes how the teachers’ union is getting out supporting certain candidates.
The news coming out this week are not favorable to the Obama administration. The National Bureau of Economic Research pegged the end of the recession to have occurred in June of 2009. Considering that Obama’s vaunted “must have” stimulus was only passed toward the end of February and with the necessary ramp up process, it is pretty clear the recession ended without the benefit of the stimulus. To put it another way, we wasted $1 trillion on the stimulus and handed the bill to our children and grandchildren, a burden that they will have to work off.
Obama is now pushing hard to raise taxes by $700 billion which will further apply the brakes to the economy. The only way to get out of the mess of unemployment and debt, besides stopping the spending to keep from making it worse, is to grow the economy. Growing the economy will bring in more tax revenues and create more jobs. Despite the Obama rhetoric, which has to be either outright incompetence or lying, his policies are not those that will grow the economy.
For all the hand wringing by the Republican establishment over Christine O’Donnell’s fitness for office two points must be made. One, who is calling the kettle black? Two, has anyone bothered to look at who she is running against?
In the desperate attempt to throw anything and everything they can find at Christine O’Donnell to try to derail her roaring comeback, her critics have gone all the way back to probe who her friends were in high school. High school. If that is a criteria for being unfit for government office, how about these gems:
Is that enough or should I continue? And these people and their supporters say, Christine O’Donnell is not fit for office? Maybe she should rob a bank so that her resume would be more in line with these icons of the Democrat firmament.
Who would you trust to better invest a million dollars in the economy, Bill Gates or Joe Biden? Do the richest people in America bury their money in a pit in their back yard or do they either spend it or invest it? Are taxes cuts where the American people give less of the wealth they created to the government or is it where the government gives money to the American people?
If you are like the overwhelming majority of Americans you would answer those questions as follows: Bill Gates; spend or invest it; give less to the government. But the Obama administration and their acolytes live in an alternate reality where Joe Biden, who President Obama put in charge of watching carefully how the stimulus money was spent because “nobody messes with Joe,” is in charge of spending $700+ billion; where they think nothing good happens from the most productive people in the economy when they have more resources to work with; where all money belongs to the government and the government gets to decide who and how much we can keep.
By excluding “the rich” from any tax cuts because we “can’t afford to give the rich a $700 billion tax cut”, this administration is saying that by giving Joe Biden $700 billion he will spend it in such a spectacular way that the economy will be humming before Recovery Summer has ended. We are still waiting.
What happens if Bill Gates has an extra million? I could see three things. One, he spends it. Although he is not known to be an extravagant spender like his competitor Larry Ellison, I understand that Mr. Gates lives in a very nice state of the art house. He may choose to upgrade it. That will probably involve architects, engineers, general contractors, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, laborers, and on and on. In other words, jobs. Isn’t that we need now? How many stimulus projects are there that have sucked up money but created no jobs? (If you are struggling with that question go to www.recovery.gov and sample some of the projects) Two, he could invest it. He might fund a start-up which would again create jobs. If the start up was successful, he might buy it outright which would put money back in the hands of the entrepreneurs who started the company and perhaps they would start another. More jobs, more spending, a growing economy. Three, he may put the money in his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is a charity that does good things, but with a difference. Because it is a charity not a government program, there will be people watching how the money is spent with the discretion to modify the program if it gets off track. Government programs are built upon rules. If a crook gets a copy of the rulebook, he can rip off the program until someone gets around to re-writing the rules. In the meantime it is ka-ching for the crook.
The incumbents in government believe that tax revenues are their money and tax cuts are gifts from the government to the people. Taxes are what we the people give to the government. We need to starve the beast and put it back in its cage. Government is trying to run every aspect of our lives. This country was founded because a tone deaf government was taxing America to the eyeballs. It is that time again. We should make the Bush tax cuts permanent now and clean house in November.
The Sherrod incident is the latest in a long line of shoot from the lip misfires from the Obama administration, from the president on down. Here is a review of some of the more egregious of them:
Is this just the lack of experience or does the Obama administration need adult supervision? They jump to these wild conclusions and then end up backtracking days later. After eighteen months in office you would think they would have learned by now how to govern.
Another case without as quick a trigger is the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. After taking office President Obama appointed a commission, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the root causes of the crisis. A prudent person might say, let’s hear what the commission finds out and then write legislation to address those root causes. With months more to go before that commission’s work will be done, we have another 2,000+ page bill coming out of Congress and signed by the president to put new regulations in place on the financial services industry. Why the rush? Wouldn’t it be better to fix the real problems rather than what Chris Dodd and Barney Frank think are the problems and let them paper over their own culpability in the creating the crisis? Why were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac excluded? In one of the hearings before the commission an argument was made that AIG did not have to be bailed out, that there were measures in place to ride out the crisis and that in the long run their policies would be fine. Whether that is true or not, will have to wait for the final report, but the “just don’t stand there, do something,” mentality is disconcerting. I certainly hope we are never faced with another Cuban Missile Crisis with this team in place.
This week we saw President Obama come out swinging to that old class warfare tune. Lashing out at Republicans in Congress for not adding to the deficit by extending unemployment benefits, he implied they were heartless and cruel. The president used the same tired prop of the straw man, that is, accusing “the same people” without naming any of those people. He uses this tactic because if he actually named the people he was accusing he would have to produce facts to back up the charges and Obama, as usual, doesn’t have any.
But here’s what he does have. He has a record of focusing his energy on passing ObamaCare instead of focusing on growing the economy. He is layering on more uncertainty of huge government programs and impending taxes that are scaring most small businesses from any hiring until the dust settles and they can tally up the bill. He has Republicans who are ready to go along with the extension in benefits, if and only if, they are paid for. With only about half of the $787 billion stimulus bill money spent, which is working fabulously by the way, taking the needed $30 billion from that kitty should be obvious.
President Obama also has a chief economic advisor named Larry Summers. Mr. Summers wrote an article on unemployment for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics while at Harvard and in it he raised the following points:
It seems as if President Obama has painted himself into a corner. The stubbornly high unemployment numbers are poised to ravage the Democrats in the mid-term elections. But if his advisor, Mr. Summers, is to be believed, the unemployment benefits he is trying to use as a campaign issue against the Republicans is probably propping up the unemployment numbers.
The American people have reached their limit on deficit spending and want it reined in. The Democrats put in place something called Paygo, which means pay as you go. If you want something, you have to pay for it. However, the Democrats are bypassing their own rule at every turn. You can’t have it both ways, ceremoniously pass a Paygo rule for the purpose of the photo op and to look responsible, and then spend recklessly once the klieg lights go dark.
What prompted this president to conduct his Rose Garden show with three unemployed Americans used as props? Could it be that Nancy Pelosi is hopping mad that this president has not been helping Democrats to get reelected in the fall? If so, perhaps that was the point of the Rose Garden performance, nothing but election year politics. And you wonder why the American people are becoming increasingly cynical about their government?
