February 05, 2009
Rider On a Pale Horse
In a profoundly dispiriting missive to the Washington Post, Beelzobama, Lord of the Flying Excuse, has issued forth one of the most negative, doom-proclaiming pronouncements ever issued forth from the Oval Office ,The Actions Americans Need.
It is a ledge-walking lament of a false Prophet attempting to extort America into supporting his pursuit of a nakedly partisan ideological agenda.
Barack Obama has put radical orthodoxy over country, and chosen opportunism over leadership. It is, in short, an editorial that deserves to be read and understood so that a trainwreck of a President may be properly mocked and scorned.
The dishonesty begins with the first proverbial stroke of the pen:
By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression. Millions of jobs that Americans relied on just a year ago are gone; millions more of the nest eggs families worked so hard to build have vanished. People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring.
While we are indeed in the midst of a recession, Obama has purposefully and vastly overstated our nation's present economic condition. We find ourselves in what is indeed a financial downturn, one hastened and exacerbated by if not created by politicians, but a downturn nevertheless far less dire than the Crier in Chief suggests.
As Don Surber notes, Beelz inherited from Bush an inflation rate of 3.85% and an unemployment rate of 5.76%, both far lower than rates inherited by Ford (11% and 5.64%), Carter (5.75% and 7.05%), or Reagan, who inherited 13.58% inflation and 7.18% inflation from James Earl Carter—the failed President many critics find Obama to be most like.
Despite the demonstrable lies of the guileless fearmonger in the Oval Office, we are not approaching anything like the dark days of the Great Depression our neophyte President suggests.
If anything, there are some suggestions of improvement in the economy. Many of the best public companies, and some private companies, continue to hire employees and report growth.
From this profoundly depressed state our young President, in his first ever executive position, attempts to convince us that to get out of this recession, we should place our faith and our children's futures in the hands of the incompetents, tax cheats, business failures, and agenda-driven blowhards that helped lead us into this mess, otherwise known as Congress.
What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives -- action that's swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.
That's why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.
This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education. And it's a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.
Obama refuses to listen to even his own rhetoric of the past several years. Fresh off winning an election based in part upon laments that the prior administration was guilty of rushed decision making, he is furiously attempting to railroad through Congress that costs more than the total costs of the Iraq War and Afghan War combined, in less than two weeks, so rapidly that it is said that not so much as a single Congressman or Senator had a chance to read the bill in it's entirety, much less examine it critically.
There is a good reason for Obama's bum rush: the Congressional Budget Office has declared that this bloated trainwreck of a bill is more harmful to the nation's future than the government ignoring the issue entirely:
President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.
Worse. Than. Nothing.
Hell of a job, Barry.
Hell of a job.
It's why experienced professionals never hire rookies like Obama. He wants to believe his life is exceptional, that he's the savior who has all the unique answers to what is so terribly nonunique, common, predictable and uninteresting. He is the college freshman who comes up with radical answers... only because he didn't show up for class for 5 weeks when we explained the common causes.
Notice how he says "inherited an economic crisis" as if he and his Dem buddies weren't a large part of the cause but just innocent bystanders come to fix the previous administration's mistakes.
Posted by: Bill Scrunty at February 6, 2009 07:23 AMI think his description of impending disaster is entirely correct but that it serves only as an excuse for this huge bill to be passed. The solution to a debt crisis is obviously not more debt.
And with respect, hinting at "suggestions of improvement" in the economy is nothing more than a cabin upgrade on the titanic. Trillions of dollars has been lost or defaulted on. The economy cannot turn the corner until that value is wiped off the stock market, houses and other investments that were inflated in this bubble. We have not even reached the half way mark in writing down losses to their full value.
Posted by: Scott at February 6, 2009 10:28 AMFrom the Times...
“Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.Et tu, Brute Times ? Posted by: Neo at February 6, 2009 11:06 AM
“Now, as the Obama administration embarks on a similar path, proposing to spend more than $820 billion to stimulate the sagging American economy, many economists are taking a fresh look at Japan’s troubled experience.
...
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.
our young President, in his first ever executive position
NOT first-ever. He was anointed Chairman of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, by none other than his uber-leftie friend Bill Ayers. Ayers had successfully applied for a grant to 'improve' the education of Chicago kids, and scored an initial 92 million to do it. By the time Obama had disbursed all the funds to his favorite 'community organizing' groups, matching funds had boosted that sum to nearly $160,000,000. That was a bonanza for the grant recipients, but made no improvement whatever to school performance. It no doubt filled his groups political war chests just fine.
Now comes the Obama, using our CRA-induced economic difficulties as an excuse, full of hopes of repeating the Annenberg scam - just sign onto his enormous 'stimulus' bill, and he'll have a stupendous war chest of money to shovel out to ACORN and all his other cronies - with a little skimmed off for some unions, and other window-dressing. This may be the most audacious piece of Alinskyism ever seen. Hang in there, Senators, and vote no.
It is quite clear that you do not understand the scope of the mess that the George W. Bush legacy has gotten us into. It is quite understandable to me, as an average American that if you let everything go to pot, that that is exactly where you're going to wind up in, in the hole. Lest you forget the 10 Trillion Dollar bill that George and his boys left on the desk for the American public to pick up the tab on.
Posted by: Peter Buchta at February 7, 2009 04:24 PMThe last thing in the world we need now is more debt. The one bright spot in the economy is the lack of inflation. Inflation is a disaster for poor people, for the lower middle class, and for people on fixed incomes. Amazingly, given the way we've been printing fiat money for all these year, and the huge deficits and debts all levels of government, private businesses and individual consumers, have run up, not to mention our trade deficits, our money is still actually worth something!
The benefit of this to most people, particularly the more vulnerable persons listed above, is enormous. Today, gas costs less than a third of what it cost only a year or so ago. The value of that reduction to anyone who drives a car, or even rides the bus, is immense. Anybody who works for a living has to commute (except for the very few who walk to work), they are all benefited by low energy costs. And, unlike with tax cuts, the poorer you are, the higher percentage of your money goes to pay for gas, so the poor actually benefit more from the great drop in prices than the rich. It's like a great stimulus that only the oil producing countries have to pay for, and that is "self targetted" to the poorest wage earners! And it doesn't add a penny of debt to our country's balance sheet.
What, exactly, is the big tragedy that "must be addressed?" That the housing bubble burst? Good, I'm glad it burst, now housing is more affordable. That the stock markets went down? OK, that is not good, but its hardly the end of the world, either. For all the BS propaganda about wide-spread stock ownership, the overwhelming majority of it is owned by the rich and the super rich, and the institutions they control. So what if someone who owned a hundred million dollars of stock last year now "only" owns sixty million? How much of that hundred million was the result of a rising stock market? Very little of this alleged "catastrophic loss" of assets is anything more than the trimming of paper profits. To me, and to most people, the price of gas and the price of food is a lot more important, and, the lower the better. Sure, some middle class people dabbled in the market, many of them beyond their means. But, whose fault is that? Everyone knows that stocks are risky investments. These people would have been fine if they just bought municipal bonds or CDs. You can't take all the upside gains as just par for the course, as your due, and then go crying to "the government" when you get bit by the downside risk. Nobody forced anyone to buy stock, TS if that stock is now worth less than it was before.
The only economic indicator I see as troubling is the unemployment rate. A modest, short term stimulus to keep household incomes in the middle class and below from falling off the cliff due to layoffs may well be indicated. But, another trillion dollars? Why?
Let all the bad debt be written off. Let's start shoveling ourselves out of the pit we have dug, not dig down further. Put a few people to work shoring up the infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) which is almost a good investment anyway. But, please, don't drive us deeper and deeper into debt.
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