Obama’s the change all right, and your kids and grandkids are holding the change bag. I have offered the chart below in the past to show you just how the Change Guy has fueled his grand mission of Marxist income redistribution.
Look, the federal government has no bank account—a printing press yes, but not a bank account. What the federal government does have is a checkbook. The checkbook, however, is linked to your bank account. America could not afford progressive income redistribution even prior to the travesty of a failed Obama presidency. Now the debt burden is so crushing that America has, under the Obama watch, lost its AAA-credit rating. Mr. Fred Siegel outlines the living constitution, greater role for government theme of perhaps the four most destructive presidents in American history: Wilson, FDR, Johnson and Obama. And that’s omitting the most deserving Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Siegel writes of Obama’s “lurching efforts to maneuver America into a Scandinavia-style uberwelfare state.” Mr. Siegel’s reasoning is clear, and I trust he is up to date on all the good things going on in Sweden. Be that as it may, a welfare-state theme is sure not pointed to here by Mr. Siegel as a good thing. The Change Guy is way over his head and lacking in any real world experience that could make a difference.
In my nearly five decades of advising America’s small-business owners and conservative savers, I have never witnessed such a level of distrust, disbelief and angst. My clients do not wish to add employees for a wide variety of obvious reasons, foremost being the onerous potential burdens and regulations of Obamacare. America’s small-business owners provide the majority of new jobs in this country. A vote for Barack Obama this November is a vote for fewer jobs for your family, friends and neighbors. No ifs, ands or buts about it. The Change Guy is not the Jobs Guy.
If the goal is to get the jobs engine going, the fundamental appeal must be to the very individuals who can provide jobs. That appeal is in the form of lower taxes, less regulation, a much smaller, less intrusive federal government. I see zero chance with the Change Guy. In fact, I see just the opposite.
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a strike by America’s thinkers and creators, the successful are heavily taxed to support the poor. Government subsidizes inefficient businesses at the expense of the more efficient. Freedom is steadily eroded. The end result is a collapse of American prosperity. Sound familiar?
The jobs depression in America is well observed by looking at the average duration of unemployment in weeks. My display shows you that the Obama peak is twice that of prior peaks.
The Joint Economic Committee reports that private payrolls in the Obama recovery (such as it has been) have climbed by a little over 4%. Since WWII, the norm for similar periods has been over 8%. How’s that for an Obama haircut?
And what are the hordes of unemployed doing? Well over 45 million are collecting food stamps. Under Barack Obama’s stimulus-led quasi recovery, food stamp rolls are increasing by about 400,000 per month. And under President Obama, 11 million Americans are collecting federal disability checks—double the number he inherited. What’s President Obama’s proposed cure? A tax hike of historical proportions. How long before Americans are going to wish they were hearing on the airways, “This is John Galt speaking.”?
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 I go out of my way to read stuff written by Michael Lewis. I was looking forward to getting some insight from his piece on Barack Obama in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair. It turns out it’s a puff piece that could be summarized as follows
: Michael Lewis thinks President Obama is really cool. But what neither Lewis nor the president may have expected is the light it sheds on how Obama got us into the mess in Libya. The article, much to Vanity Fair’s dismay, might end up putting the president in a tough spot, especially now that foreign policy is going to be front and center in the debates.
Libya is going to be a real problem for the president, especially when you see how he came to his decision to save the people of Benghazi. Before committing to help, he met with “the principals,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House Chief of Staff William Daley, Head of the National Security Council Tom Donilon, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They gave him two options: do nothing or establish a no-fly zone. The president rejected both:
Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. “What was a little unusual,” Obama admits, “is that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made.”…
Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president—people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. They aren’t political people so much as Obama people.
This is yet another example of the president acting like a regular guy and not the president. But when you’re the president of the United States, the “regular guy” is checked at the door. Lives depend on you. You need to make the decisions, and it probably makes sense to listen to your experienced advisors rather than your entourage.
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I would remove Dan Senor from the Romney advisory team. Mr. Senor is a key neocon player in a “stick in the eye” foreign policy approach. Do Americans remember Vietnam? The Woodstock kids were right, weren’t they? And the big fool at the end of the day was of course Lyndon Johnson. Read more about Senor here.
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Six times per year, Cato directors, sponsors and friends receive a special memorandum from the president. I found five insights from Ed in the most recent issue that I want to share with you.
- Do you remember August 15, 1971? Richard Nixon soberly (or perhaps not) informed the nation that henceforth there would be wage and price controls. That was going to control inflation—and the experts actually took him seriously. Please. And the gullibility of the media with regard to what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, the Military-Industrial Complex, is astounding. The boys in the Project for the New American Century (Bolton, Woolsey, Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, et al.) had been clamoring for war with Iraq years before 9/11, which gave them their great opportunity. Now they’re pushing for war with Iran. These are not serious people. They believe in American Empire and have an undue influence on both sides of the aisle.
- The bald, bearded oracle at the Fed actually thinks it’s his role to keep the United States economy humming along, not to mention determining what the right level of interest rates and money expansion should be. The media hang on his every pronouncement. Such silliness. Presidents are constantly setting up “commissions” to look into problems, like unemployment, entitlement reform, and alleged global warming. We are supposed to take seriously the “findings” of these commissions. We hold our breath waiting to see what the answer is. Each and every time, the true answer is simply freedom. But Washington attracts people who find freedom constraining with regard to their ability to control other people’s lives.
- This fellow Obama is a menace. I think his ties to Saul Alinsky are utterly underappreciated. His recent commentary about “You didn’t build that” reveals an underlying and intense disdain, not just for the free-enterprise system, but for success. Indeed, that same riff he was engaged in included mocking references to hard work and intelligence. I once asked my colleague Gene Healy, who was a student at the University of Chicago law school while Obama was a lecturer there, why he never took a course with him. The answer was that Obama had a reputation as a very mediocre legal mind. Other than at Chicago, has he ever earned any money?
Check back for two more on Friday.
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On Wednesday, I posted part I of my favorite bullet items from Cato President Ed Crane’s summer director’s memorandum. Here are my concluding favorites.
- In light of Obama’s Saul Alinsky ideology, it would have been good if the Republicans found somebody who was philosophically committed to individual liberty as opposed to community organizing. Instead they came up with Mitt Romney, who appears to be a decent-type fellow, but one without an ideological bone in his body. I’ll never forget when I asked him at a Club for Growth dinner whether he thought the president had the constitutional authority to arrest an American citizen on American soil without charging him with anything, holding him indefinitely without access to an attorney or the right of habeas corpus. Should have been a simple response, right? Not so with Romney. He said (as he often does on this type of issue) that whenever he’s confronted with a difficult issue he likes to get two smart attorneys on either side to debate it in front of him. How appalling is that?
- I’m a great believer in American exceptionalism, which needs to be distinguished from nationalism. Too many conservatives conflate the two. American exceptionalism is not based on our superior military capability (as the neocons would have us believe) or our material abundance (as too many conservatives focus on). Rather, it is based on the idea that we are a nation created to have a government for the purpose of allowing us to live our lives as we damn well please. Look at world history and tell me that isn’t exceptional. It is incredibly exceptional. Now we are clearly losing all the things that make American exceptionalism exceptional.
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