Posted on 07/26/2016 6:30:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
This week, the Democrats officially appoint the battered Hillary Clinton to be torchbearer of the party. She has slouched to the finish line. She is tired and the country is tired of her. Sorry, Democrats, no do-overs. You're stuck with her.
But it isn't just Clinton who is out of touch and in tragic decline. It's the whole Democratic Party. My friends at the American Enterprise Institute reported last week that the Democratic platform is silent on economic growth. Maybe that is because across the country during the past eight years of Obamanomics, economic growth has been silent.
This is an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. We have had 2 percent growth under Obama, but that's an economy treading water. It's sister-kissing growth that, yes, has thankfully kept us out of recession, but doesn't lead to much, if any, rise in living standards.
Just as Obama refuses to utter the words "Islamic terrorism," now the whole party can't seem to bring itself to endorse "economic growth." For the left, growth isn't really the goal. They want redistribution of wealth.
The language of a party platform doesn't matter much, if at all. But if you're not for growth, you probably aren't going to produce it, just as if you're not even trying to get in shape, it's a good bet you're not going to shed those extra 16 pounds.
Amazingly, the last great growth hawk of the Democratic Party of modern times, John F. Kennedy, ran against Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 on the issue of the "growth deficit." The economy in the 1950s was fairly prosperous, much more so than over the last eight years. But JFK said we can "do bettah" and convinced Americans we could see much faster wage gains with greater opportunities.
Through tax cuts and free trade, the JFK era sparked growth rates of 4, 5 and even 6 percent in the go-go '60s until LBJ crashed the economy with New Deal welfare statism.
Now we have this weird austerity-worship that has taken over the party. The rich and businesses are portrayed as scalpers and scoundrels. And employers are exploiters in the "you didn't build that" mindset. Radical environmentalists, a bedrock of the party, are anti-growth and believe that when people get richer, it's worse for the planet. (They should go live in India or Mexico City and see how well the environment is doing there.) They ridicule what they call "growth-mania" on the right. Human economic activity, they warn, is causing catastrophic global warming.
Perhaps this explains the litany of economic failures during the Obama years. We have had $8 trillion of new debt; minimum-wage increases; Obamacare; an $800 billion stimulus plan (with "shovel-ready" projects); tax increases on the rich; more than $100 billion in green energy subsidies; auto company and union pension bailouts; re-regulation of the financial industry and banks; and a Federal Reserve that has manufactured near zero short-term interest rates for seven years with up to $4 trillion of bond acquisitions. ?All of these were designed primarily to redistribute income, so is it a shock that they haven't produced growth?
Poor Hillary Clinton has the unenviable task of persuading Americans to open up wide and swallow four more years of this swill.
Here's a question that Donald Trump and Mike Pence should be asking every day: What would Clinton offer that is any different? She is promising minimum-wage increases, tax hikes on the rich and more infrastructure spending. This is new? This is change?
The left's defense of growth anemia is that 2 percent growth is the new normal, so get used to it. Obama's first economic guru, Larry Summers, calls this secular stagnation that is here to stay. This past week at a Politico economic forum I made the claim that we could have 4 percent growth easily, and the jaws of the media dropped in collective disbelief, as if I suggested that we could suspend the laws of gravity.
Actually, 4 percent growth isn't that hard to achieve. A pro-America energy production policy, including putting coal back in business, could produce $150 billion more output each year. Another percentage ?point of growth could come from tax reform with reductions in business taxes to spur investment and hiring, according to the folks at the Tax Foundation.
But Democrats will never get us there, because they aren't even trying. They will celebrate 2 percent growth -- the weakest recovery in half a century -- as a glittering achievement. The party that once stood with the working class now says Americans have to work more and settle for less? That's not just wrong; it's sad.
Don’t write them off yet.
Remember, FREE SH*T CONQUERS ALL!!!
Voter fraud is the bigger issue, even over freebees.
The Democratic Party as we know is DYING.
Party of divide in conquer.
To blacks: White man wants to put y’all back in chains.
To all Americans: Push your grandmother over the cliff.
To women: Take away your jobs, birth control pills, and abortions.
To gays: Put you back in the closet.
Dems are the party of fear and division and they do it every election.
They’re silent on economic growth because economic growth hinders the fundamental transformation of the US into a third-world nation where moocher outnumber producers and people will give up any freedom for free stuff.
Remember, every Progressive you know is not a misguided neighbor or friend or relative. They are your mortal enemy who is not wearing a uniform.
The Great Social Experiment has failed miserably. Unfortunately it put many of us in the poor house at the expense of enriching others who don’t deserve it.
You got that right!
America is going through its Brexit.
And I bet this election has already been paid for. They just got to make it look like its neck and neck til the finish line to fool the Sheeple.
Only one man can pull us back from the edge of the precipice and into the land of freedom and prosperity and his name is Donald Trump
.....Yet these folks you post about will be in for a very big surprise.
Second it. This is America’s Brexit.
There's nothing democratic about the Democrat Party.
True. It is turning into a much more brazen and in-your-face European-style Socialist Party.
Which we call "The RATs!"
This is America’s version of Brexit.
We don’t need stinkin’ growth as long as the state takes care of every one.
Unanswered is the question of where the state will find the wherewithal to do it in the absence of continued growth.
Don’t pester Democrats with such an impertinent question. Things are fine the way they are.
Now....
If we could just get the Libertarians and "Perfect candidate" conservatives together, to replace the RATs as an opposition party....maybe we'd have something.
“as long as the state takes care of every one.”
They don’t realize that when the dems say the state will give you what you need, that the state will determine what you need.
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