THE ENTERPRISE--HOPE AND FEAR
TO THOSE WHO ARE ADMIRERS OF BARACK OBAMA--I APOLOGIZE--NOT BECAUSE I AM SORRY I CAN'T STAND HIM, RATHER BECAUSE I AM SORRY THAT YOU DON'T SEE THROUGH HIM, HIS LIES AND THE FACT THAT HIS POLICIES ARE DESTROYING AMERICA
But I will say this, George W. Bush started this deficit snowball rolling with his spending and a few foolish moves--like the Medicare Part D, Prescription Drug plan that made an out of control unfunded entitlement worse than ever. Bush also gets the credit (blame) for the TARP--but in retrospect, it didn't turn out costing anywhere near the $700+ billion that was advertised. Make no mistake, he and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen didn't know that--they just "hoped" it would help stop the financial meltdown and if it did, that would be cheap. (Watch the movie "Too Big To Fail"--it's a good, if scary movie--well cast, well acted, and with an interesting message.)
PEOPLE OFTEN TELEGRAPH THEIR MESSAGE BEFORE THEY SPEAK--OBAMA DOES!
A wise person once told me that whenever they started a statement with "Honestly" I should interrupt and ask them if they have not been honest with me in the past. I was warned that someone who started with "Truthfully," might not have been telling the truth in the past. Thus, when President Obama started one of his paragraph long sentences with "Here's the truth..." I only wondered which lies had preceded that statement or would follow it. With this President you don't have to wait long or look hard. The lies are fairly common, and spoken with such aplomb and conviction that they are almost indistinguishable from the truth--which is often mixed in randomly.
THE LIST OF BLATANT LIES IS TOO LONG TO DIG OUT AND PRINT HERE
Let's just take an obvious one: "I can't guarantee that Social Security checks will go out on August 3." Of course you can. The Federal government, even if horribly in debt, had an inbound cash flow of $2.5 trillion (revenue) divided by 52 weeks. That calculated out to an average of almost $50 billion per week. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid together amount to about 40% of what the government spends ($3.8 trillion annual spending times 40% divided by 52 weeks = $29 billion) so there is plenty of cash flow. Also, Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary works for President Obama. Thus Obama can guarantee that Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid checks can go out on August 3. He simply must order Geithner to make sure the administrative functions necessary stay in place and make sure the money is prioritized to pay these things first.
WANT A COUPLE MORE?
I like this one. "Eighty percent of Americans are for a tax increase..." [as part of the debt ceiling/deficit reduction debate] What nonsense. The polls I saw showed that about 30 percent favored a tax increase and closer to 40% favored a blend of spending cuts and tax increases. He must have polled his staff, because the only 80% number was the Democratic responses to those two combined.
Or how about, when talking about reducing America's dependence on oil as an energy source, and listing the benefits, "...and it will make businesses more efficient..." HUH? How would that work. Most businesses I know would need to convert their processes (and trucks and cars, etc.) to some other energy source at considerable cost--and then those machines, etc. would work just like they did before. Or, maybe I just don't understand. Perhaps electricity from solar or wind is somehow more efficient than electricity from oil and gas. I must have missed my Energy Conversion class that day in grad school.
WHAT AND WHO CAUSED THE MESS WE ARE IN? THERE ARE PLENTY OF CULPRITS TO SHARE THE BLAME.
1. The success of the Reagan administration in creating jobs and prosperity following the mess that was Jimmy Carter (who may go down in history as the second worst president--following Obama.) It proved Keynesian economics wrong, but gave too much credence to "trickle-down" supply-side economics. Future presidents and Congresses used this approach to excess, most notably, George W. Bush.
2. The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, in 1999, which allowed commercial banks to combine with investment banks and was like taking the "speed limit of the roads." Blame. President William Jefferson Clinton AND GOP controlled House and Senate did this one, by huge majorities. This allowed and encouraged the financial institutions to reward excessive risk taking which led to the financial crisis--but not without help. It took government intervention combined with market forces and greed to really move things along.
3. The largest problems are trackable back to the actions of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and Sen. Chris Dodd and former House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank, who were also the principal supporters and political protectors of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the government housing policies they implemented. Amidst a series of increasingly liberal laws regarding access to housing and low cost mortgages, a veritable landslide occurred. Mortgages with low interest rates became adjustable rates that started near zero and climbed fast as time went by. Low down payment mortgages became no down payment mortgages. Lax credit checks became no credit checks, then fraudulent credit checks as the frenzy grew to sell houses to people who couldn't afford them, and never should be buying them.
4. The second term of George W. Bush, in which, after undertaking not one, but expensive two wars he delegated the mismanagement of Iraq to people who ignored or failed to see their errors--or were simply fools (I doubt this, but ego and myopia are serious shortcomings). Thus Bush failed to stop spending to compensate for the cost of those wars. Number of spending vetoes by Bush--ZERO, NADA, NONE. His initial courage and resolve turned into foolish stubbornness and insularity.
5. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010. Reid gets off as being merely stupid or misguided or corrupt or something. Pelosi lives in her own little world where logic is suspended and ignorance is glorified (it's called California). The Democratic Congress, shirking their duties two consecutive years, failed to present or pass a budget for the USA in either of the past two years. This was fine with them since it allowed uncontrolled spending under continuing resolutions.
Barack Hussein Obama, a barely competent, rookie US Senator and undistinguished State Senator from IL (the home of crooked politics) parlayed a skill in speech-making (via teleprompter) and his ethnic (half-black) heritage into an opportunity of a lifetime for which he had been groom--to run for president. Obama was trained as a youth by expert socialists, communists, racist preachers and corrupt politicians. He learned those lessons well. He was elected by the single-minded support of the liberal elite, a biased, adoring mainstream media, voting blocs of minorities, the sympathetic idealists (heavily female), and the dependent, misinformed underclass who loved his community organizer wealth-redistribution concepts. Obama (in collusion with liberal Democrats) is methodically destroying America by putting it so deeply in debt and employing both class warfare and racial tactics to polarize the American people--with the help of the media who loves a good mud fight.
Now, America finds itself buried in debt, running record deficits, right at the time that the baby boomer population surge reaches access to the unfunded entitlements. The current financial deficit is so bad that if everything in the budget were cut except for the "biggies" --Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Interest--there would still be a deficit. That is how bad it has gotten. If America were a company, it would be insolvent, bankrupt and out of cash flow--ready to close the doors. However, the Treasury still owns the printing presses that can print money. And the more they do of it, the less all of our money is worth. Now the debate is that we must raise the debt ceiling even higher or face "default" or downgrading of our credit rating, and even higher interest costs.
To be continued.
BEST, JOHN
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