Posted on 02/02/2015 11:44:59 AM PST by blam
Jason Lange and Howard Schneider, Reuters
Feburary 2, 2015
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Beneath President Barack Obama's plan to fight income inequality lies a gloomy view of an economy that is growing slower and creating fewer rewards for its workers than it did in much of the last century.
In a budget proposal unveiled on Monday, the White House cut forecasts for an array of economic variables, depicting less growth, weaker inflation and lower interest rates than officials expected only a year ago.
This comes despite an unemployment rate that the Obama administration expects to hit the 5.2 percent level considered to be roughly in line with full employment sometime this year.
The administration's take on the economy moves it closer to the growing view among economists that the United States could be stuck in a prolonged period of stagnation.
"In the 21st century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be slower than it was in earlier eras," the budget proposal says.
Obama's $3.99 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2016 would mark a spending increase of about $240 billion from the current year.
The economic vision presented in the plan is all-the-more pessimistic given that it incorporates the impact of higher spending on infrastructure and education, as well as overhauls of tax and immigration laws. Many of those proposals are unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Congress.
Even with these measures, which are aimed to counter rising income inequality, weaker growth would leave the economy about $500 billion smaller in 2020 than the administration projected a year ago. The administration expects the share of national income going to labor - as opposed to capital - to hold near historic lows for years to come.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Simple solution: don't buy it. Don't buy his views or his budget.
Kinda like the drug thing: JUST SAY NO!
Obama’s Depressing and has been since day one.
He is not only depressing but somehow I think he himself is depressed. I cannot believe that he gets any real satisfaction from living.
Right, with almost 100 million people not working.
Whatever happened to the BILLION$ for the ‘Shovel Ready Jobs’ a few year back? Who got rich on that boondoggle? When will that be investigated? This looks like a do-over of that scam.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . ." - Declaration of Independence
The founding generation's chosen phrase to describe governments for protecting the "unalienable" and "Creator" endowed rights, was that such a government was one "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" individuals. In such a society, individuals might pursue happiness, under laws which protected the rights of other individuals.
The "Left" has an opposite idea about the role of government.
Example: The President loves to use the word "shared" to describe his vision.
Using a commonly friendly word like "shared" to describe a government policy of force and coercion is despicable on its face. Then, again, isn't that descriptive of how all totalitarian regimes initially present themselves in order to gain power?
In the course of his research for "Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile" (Harper Collins), Joseph Pearch traveled to Moscow to interview the writer. The excerpt below is from that interview:
Solzhenitsyn: "In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology." The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion." Solzhenitsyn
Even the current President, at a National Prayer Breakfast, attempted to tie his policy of forced "sharing" to Jesus's appeal for voluntary charity.
Coercive "taking" power, when wielded against the citizenry by either the government alone (taxing), or in combination with another power (unions), is destructive of freedom and prosperity.
The following statement by Sir Winston Churchill, upon leaving office as Prime Minister in 1945, was prophetic for Great Britain, and as it turns out, the United States and the world:
"I do not believe in the power of the State to plan and enforce. No matter how numerous are the committees they set up or the ever-growing hordes of officials they employ or the severity of the punishments they inflict or threaten, they can't approach the high level of internal economic production achieved under free enterprise. Personal initiative, competitive selection, and profit motive corrected by failure and the infinite processes of good housekeeping and personal ingenuity, these constitute the life of a free society. It is this vital creative impulse that I deeply fear the doctrines and policies of the socialist government has destroyed. Nothing that they can plan and order and rush around enforcing will take its place. They have broken the main spring and until we get a new one, the watch wil not go. Set the people free. Get out of the way and let them make the best of themselves. I am sure that this policy of equalizing misery and organizing society--instead of allowing diligence, self-interest and ingenuity to produce abundance--has only to be prolonged to kill this British Island stone dead."
In the early days of America's experiment in liberty, its Founders warned of oppressive taxation by those elected to represent the people. Under their "People's" Constitution, the people were left free, and the government was limited.
While Europe struggled with oppressive government intervention, the genius Founders of America recognized enduring truths about human nature, the human tendency to abuse power, and the possibilities of liberty for individuals. Richard Frothingham's 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States," Page 14, contained the following footnote item on the condition of citizens of France:
"Footnote 1. M. de Champagny (Dublin Review, April, 1868) says of France, 'We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or dine more than twenty together; or have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or lend a book to a friend: or put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in the street; or kill a partridge; or plant a tree near the road-side; or take coal out of our own land: or teach three or four children to read, . .. without permission from the civil government.'"
Clearly the government of France at that 1868 date laid an oppressive regulatory and tax burden on citizens, robbing them of their Creator-endowed liberty and enjoyment thereof. Frothingham observed that such coercive power constituted "a noble form robbed of its lifegiving spirit."
Thomas Jefferson warned Americans:
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
Note Jefferson's very last thought here. He declares that when government taxing and debt have reached certain levels, in order for individuals to survive, then their chosen "employment" becomes "hiring ourselves to rivet their (the government's) chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." Might that account for the large government bureaucracies which oppress "the People" today?
Inasmuch as government creates no wealth and has no money, the pay for every job in government must first come out of the pockets of hardworking citizens in the private sector or be borrowed (to be paid back eventually from the pockets of future generations).
Ahhh, guess that's what you call "redistributing" wealth! In Jefferson's words, it's called "rivet(ing) chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
100 million not working is now called full employment.
The most depressing thing of all is the fact that we all know that the GOP will bend over and give Dorkbama his budget.
Come on, we know we know it.
And still, we’ll vote for the uniparty candidate of our choice.
And no, I’m not a third party advocate, as such.
I am a conservative.
Now, and until I assume room temp.
Hmmmm, obama and depression, two things that just seem to go together naturally. I know that whenever I see or hear him I certainly get depressed, and if he is like carter that means I will be having bouts of depression for the rest of my life!
Yep, there was never any accounting on where that money went. They are still griping about infrastructure.
What a scam and a joke.
Dem pockets and cronies and unions and ...and..anything but infrastructure.
The legal and illegal invasion of the US by the turd world, prolonged wars and off shoring and destroying manufacturing, with all the multiplying wealth it creates, has ruined the US economy. GloBULLism and “Free trade” are the cause of stagnation, not O’Bastard. He is just an opportunistic parasite.
Idiot journolists unable to see (or unwilling to state) the obvious discrepency and contradiction between an economy thats simultaneously at full employment AND stagnating.
Which indicates that the employment numbers are either cooked (designed to underrepresent the numbers of unemployed by writing many of them out of the workforce completely) or severely (spike in part time and underemployed workers being seen as a positive).
Why can’t FedGov™ just print the money they want and leave me alone, quit taxing me?
Any President’s budget doesn’t mean a thing. Its the House that initiates the spending bills.
The importation of millions more of foreign workers will make matters worse, not better.
Government Data Reveal 5.5 Million New Work Permits Issued Since 2009
Government data reveal that more than 5.5 million new work permits were issued to aliens from 2009 to 2014, above and beyond the number of new green card and temporary worker admissions in those years. This is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration.
A huge number of work permits, 1.7 million, were issued to aliens whose status was unknown, not recorded by the adjudicator, or not disclosed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes the applications. This should be a concern; work permits are gateway documents to driver’s licenses and other benefits, and if the government agency issuing them does not know or will not disclose how the bearer arrived in the country how can others rely on the authenticity of an individual’s identity? It is equally disconcerting if the government does know and chooses not to disclose it
Trillion$
Boehner’s response should be the same one Tip O’Neil used, that Obama’s budget is “dead on arrival”.
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