Obama's mourning in America: Presidential weakness is the key to reducing the debt

President Obama's policies aren't just harmful to the economy, they're undermining America's morale. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama referred to congressional Republicans as "hostage-takers" for resisting White House efforts to increase taxes. He then gave in to GOP demands, explaining, "I think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed." One can only hope that Osama bin Laden was unable to tune in to a press conference in which the president of the United States delivered the weakest appraisal of how to handle a hostage situation since the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was inhabited by a Georgia peanut farmer.

The weakness extends to the world stage where Mr. Obama has apologized for America's failure to appreciate Europe's "leading role in the world." He bows before foreign leaders, including a Saudi king, a Japanese emperor and China's President Hu Jintao. It's no wonder, then, that on Wednesday a National Journal poll found that Americans mistakenly believe our economy lacks the strength found in China's. According to the survey, only one out of five Americans rated the United States as the world's strongest economic power; nearly half thought that honor belonged to the Middle Kingdom.

Never mind that the output of 310 million Americans far exceeds the wealth generation capacity of the 1.6 billion souls living in Japan, China and Germany combined. What the U.S. public sees is a president who talks down his own country's greatness and talks up that of our largest creditor. China currently owns $1 trillion in U.S. debt in the form of Treasury bonds and notes. While this certainly is a large sum, it's not even a third of the staggering $3,211,613,265,584.56 in red ink added to the nation's ledgers under Mr. Obama's watch....

DeMint Memo on Tax Deal

Friday, December 10, 2010
MEMO

TO: SCF Members

FROM: Jim DeMint

SUBJECT: Why I Oppose the Tax Deal

Many of you have contacted me about the bipartisan tax deal reached between President Obama and Republican leaders. I’ve carefully reviewed the legislation and I wanted to explain to you why I cannot support it.

First, I do not want to see anyone’s taxes go up and I have been fighting for years to permanently extend all the tax rates. I disagree with the President that we cannot afford to extend these rates for everyone. It’s the people’s money and we should not raise taxes on hardworking American families.

But this bill does much more than simply extend tax rates.

For starters, it includes approximately $200 billion in new deficit spending and stimulus gimmicks. That’s a lot of money that will have to be borrowed from China and repaid by our children and grandchildren. If we’re going to increase spending on new programs, we must reduce other spending to pay for it.

The bill also only extends rates for two years. We don’t have a temporary economy so we shouldn’t have temporary tax rates. Individuals and businesses make decisions looking at the long-term and we’re not going to create jobs without giving people certainty as to what their taxes will be in future.

The bill also fails to extend all of the tax rates. It actually increases the death tax from its current rate of zero percent all the way up to 35 percent. One economic study shows that this tax increase alone will kill over 800,000 jobs over the next ten years.

Finally, the bill now includes dozens of earmarks for special interests, including ethanol subsidies, tax breaks for film and television producers, give aways for Puerto Rican rum manufacturers, favors for auto racing track owners, and a hand out for businesses in American Samoa.

The President called Republicans “hostage takers” this week but he should be pointing his figure squarely at himself. We’ve known for years that these tax rates were going to expire but he did nothing about it until the last minute. Now Americans are being told they have to accept hundreds of billions in new spending and stimulus gimmicks, an increase the death tax, and a bunch of unnecessary earmarks or their taxes will go up.

I’m not going to be bullied into voting for things that will hurt our country because politicians in Washington ignored the problem until it was a crisis.

Many of you fought hard to elect new leaders to the Senate this year with the expectation that they would fight deficit spending, tax hikes, and backroom deals. I take that commitment very seriously and I’m prepared to vote against this bill even if I’m the only one in the Senate to do so.

I appreciate the efforts made by my party’s leaders to negotiate this deal but I believe Americans deserve much better. This deal should be rejected and then fixed. We can easily extend these tax rates without increasing spending once the new crop of Republican senators, including Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson, are sworn in. The President has already conceded that taxes cannot go up and we’ll have more Republicans in Congress in a few weeks to fight for a better deal.

Thank you for supporting the principles of freedom and for your continued encouragement. I will continue to do my very best to be your voice in the United States Senate.

http://senateconservatives.com/site/post/449/demint-memo-on-tax-deal

I think America has gone crazy. We have people talking about how Sarah Palin is unqualified to be POTUS. Yet these fools believe that Barack Obama is. I don’t understand.
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It has become a religion to them, they have FAITH in Obama, blind, unreasoning faith. If Obama is their messiah then Palin must be their devil. Trying to reason with these people is like trying to load a water wagon with a pitchfork.

Yes, much of America HAS gone crazy, when people who claim to be able to take the temperature of the planet Earth to an accuracy of two places to the right of the decimal are taken seriously you may know that those who believe this stuff are crazy. It makes no more sense than trying to measure the volume of the oceans out to a hundredth of a gallon.

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