Posted on 02/13/2013 6:49:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It is terribly appropriate that President Obama gave his halting and graceless State of the Union address on Mardi Gras: He spent the evening shouting “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” at every liberal constituency in sight, promising new spending for public-sector unions (“Fix-It-First”), demanding (yet again) that banks renegotiate mortgages on politically driven terms, offering handouts to Al Gore–style enviropreneurs (reviving cap-and-trade, offering yet more subsidies to politically connected energy firms), and promising a $9-an-hour minimum wage.
In the real world, Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday and a season of fasting and penance. For the free-spending Barack Obama, Fat Tuesday is followed by Fat Wednesday, Fat Thursday, Fat Friday, fat federal spending the whole way through. (Don’t tell the first lady.) Austerity is reserved for the taxpayer, the so-called rich on whom the president just secured tax increases before demanding, two minutes later, yet more tax increases. That includes new taxes on Medicare recipients (“ask more from the wealthiest seniors”).
Exhibiting the new liberal vogue for jingoism, the president blamed our economic straits on China three times in the first part of the speech, turned up his nose at imported cars, and abominated the always-popular scourge of “foreign oil.” (Blast you, Canada!) But a $9-an-hour minimum wage is a boon to a Chinese manufacturing sector still dependent upon cheap labor, and expensive emission controls make overseas industries relatively competitive, while one of the biggest threats to U.S.-made cars and U.S.-produced oil is the raft of new environmental regulations the president says he wishes to see enacted.
The high-income may sigh at the tax proposals, but the president’s proposals weigh particularly heavily upon the low-income young. They will have to pay his debt. They will also be the ones most affected by the proposal to raise the minimum wage: The result of artificial wages increases, as economists have documented over and over, is fewer jobs. The president proposes to cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder, which is of much more concern to those born at the bottom.
The president has a strange sense of language. The word “economy” used to be a synonym for “thrift.” Barack Obama has managed to turn that on its head. His speech gave every indication that he remains a hostage to the superstition that we can spend our way to national prosperity — or that we can pass laws that will force employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other businesses to spend our way to prosperity for us. That has failed for four years because it is bad economics and wishful thinking.
In reality, the state of our union is this: The United States is today $6 trillion deeper in debt than it was before Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. That represents an increase of 57 percent in just four years. Put another way: Out of every dollar the country owes in government debt, 36 cents was acquired under the Obama administration.
The state of our union is this: Today there are more than 4 million fewer Americans working than there were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president — not including those who have retired. The work-force-participation rate is at a historic low. Never before have so many Americans simply abandoned the hope of a job.
The state of our union is this: Economic growth is weaker than it has been during any recovery in recent memory; in fact, the economy shrank in the last quarter. Those figures may be revised, but in any case growth is so weak that the difference between what President Obama calls a recovery and what economists fear is the beginning of a new recession is within the margin of measurement error.
The state of our union is this: Incomes are lower today than they were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. True, he became president during a recession, and incomes dropped 2.6 percent during the recession. Since the end of the recession, they have dropped another 4.8 percent — which is to say, incomes have fallen almost twice as fast during President Obama’s so-called recovery than they fell during what he (inaccurately) called “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
How strange, then, that the president declared during his annual address: “A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” That is a remarkably brass-faced assertion for a president whose policies have neither achieved strong growth nor attracted more jobs to our shores nor improved the ability of workers to secure high-skilled jobs nor strengthened the relationship between hard work and a decent living. Barack Obama is incapable of grappling with his own record.
He further promised that his policies would not add “a single dime” to the national debt when he already has added some 60 trillion dimes to it, and while the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the president’s 2013 spending blueprint would add another 64 trillion dimes to the deficit in the coming years. That on top of the tax increases he already has demanded and secured.
But there is more to the state of our union than the feeble state of our economy. The president boasted that a decade of war is coming to an end. It is, and a new decade of war is beginning. He boasted that al-Qaeda is decimated, but that news has not reached Bengazi or most of North Africa. So the state of our union also is this: North Korea sets off nuclear weapons with impunity. Iran seeks them without fear. Islamists slaughter our diplomatic personnel while the president’s national-defense team keeps bankers’ hours. Our allies are unsure, our enemies are emboldened. Our troops may be coming home, but it is not clear that we have secured the objectives for which we dispatched them. It is even less clear that President Obama has any intention of doing so.
The president’s confrontational, hectoring, and highly ideological speech ought to be a wake-up call to the country. The Republican majority in the House is the only real check on his power. Supplementing that check with a Republican majority in the Senate is imperative. Even through all of President Obama’s obfuscations, that much is clear.
Michael Tanner of the CATO INSTITUTE says it all:
Let’s be clear: There have been no spending cuts since Obama became president. In 2010, the first year that President Obama was fully responsible for federal spending (President Obama signed the 2009 budget, but it’s fair to blame most of the spending in it on President Bush, who essentially proposed it), the federal government spent $3.45 trillion.
Last year, we spent $3.54 trillion, nearly $100 billion more. And, outlays for the first four months of FY 2013 are $39.3 billion more than in the first four months of FY 2012. If we have seen a slight reduction in budget deficits, it is due exclusively to tax hikes and additional increased revenue as the economy comes out of recession.
And given the presidential wish list, we aren’t going to see any spending cuts anytime soon. The president wants to spend more money on education, infrastructure, “green energy,” manufacturing subsidies, universal preschool, and pretty much everything else. At the same time, the president warned that the upcoming sequester, a 2.4 percent reduction in projected future federal spending, would return us to something akin to the Dark Ages.
The Impostor's previous budgets have garnered exactly zero votes.
This one should be no different.
Bronco Bama was talking to low-information people, those who glean what little they know of the news from Comedy Channel’s Daily Show. Jon Stewart is the best journalist they know. And WAY funnier than Chris Matthews.
No minds were changed, no revelations appeared in the sky written in fire.
Meanwhile, his approval ratings remain in the mid- to high-50s. Though today’s polling doesn’t include the audience that watched the SOTU, the sheeple are no doubt loving all this. They’re standing by their man.
Problem is, that all sails over the pointy little heads of most Americans. It simply doesn't matter that this nation is headed full-tilt toward the thick, brick wall of default. All that matters to them is whether they get their scoop from the bowl.
Ha! Good luck with that.
"The country" is more interested in who wore what at The Grammies the other night.
Ah, well. The fight goes on.
Obama has only a few opportunities to speak to the nation, and he blew this one (but is anybody even aware of this?)
It was so hackish, so devoid of any theme or purpose, that it makes one wonder whether part of Obama just wants to see how bad he can be before his worshippers in the lamestream media (yes, I’m talking to you Chirs Matthews) can see it.
Just listen to him talk about climate change for instance.
His attitude was this -—’either do what I say or I will just start issuing executive orders’.
Is anybody in the lamestream media going to point out that his back handed plan is to make his green energy cronies rich in the process?
He then said the word “deficit,” but don’t hold your breath for anything there. He spoke of it as if it had just magically appeared yesterday when, in fact, he has been ignoring it for four years while running it up.
Is anybody in the lamestream media going to point out and EMPHASIZE how it took him just 4 years to run up our debt by $6 Trillion, when it took the hapless Dubya twice that time?
Obama could've announced the dissolution of the United States and the confiscation of every piece of private property of every American, and the "media" would've lauded the speech as "visionary" and "courageous."
WHY ARE WE JUST STANDING AROUND AND LETTING HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS?
He is breaking our laws on a daily basis, gloating, and flaunting it, sticking his finger in our eye. Surely, there is someone who can stop him before it’s too late! Where are our Checks and Balances? Who is going to enforce our Constitution and protect the separation of powers? What are we doing?
Their role is to propagandize and administer his government.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Ted Nugent’s thoughts on the State of the Nation
Rock legend and Second Amendment rights activist Ted Nugent sat with Texas Congresssman Steve Stockman Tuesday night during President Obama’s State of the Union Address. Nugent spoke with Breitbart.com shortly before the event and was characteristically blunt about his assessment of the state of the nation:
“I come from the streets,” Nugent said. “I’m a street fighting guy. If I want to make money, I got to get a great bunch of talented guys together and a crew of 12 guys or 15 guys that can get the job done of 200, or if the government was in charge 2,000. I have got to set my alarm clock. I have got to keep myself healthy so I can go on the road and rock my balls off 75 or 80 nights a year, so that I can take the hunting season off.
“I can’t wait for a check. I don’t get any sick days. I don’t believe in sick days, so I take care of myself so I’m not sick because if I don’t go to work, I don’t get a paycheck. This is how most of America operates. We would be offended to be a recipient of this vulgar food stamp orgy or the Obama phones or any of the bloodsucking orgy that is crippling America today.”
“Bronco Bama was talking to low-information people,”
Congress.
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