Obama Will Finish What Osama Started
Feb 15, 2009 Political
Osama bin Laden is not a stupid man and his plan to attack America was brilliant from a tactical standpoint. He could never hope to beat this country in a head to head fight so he used airliners to kill nearly 3000 of our countrymen. He became emboldened when Bill Clinton withdrew from Somalia after the Blackhawk Down incident. Osama believed that America was a paper tiger. He never expected the response that we gave him.
He attacked us on 9/11 but that was the opening salvo in a protracted war. Bin Laden’s real goal is to bankrupt America. His belief is that he engaged the Soviets in Afghanistan for 10 years and they went broke fighting. He believes that he can do the same thing to America. The big difference is that the major part of his plan will not play out on the battlefield. No, bin Laden banked on us spending a fortune to keep our country safe and he was right. We have not been attacked since 9/11 but we have spent a fortune keeping safe. Many times when we needed to spend money 9/11 played into the thinking and the amount of debt we incurred was great.
Bin Laden was banking on us spending and spending while he sat back and watched us go bankrupt. Despite tax cuts and increased revenues we continued to spend more than we took in. The deficit rose and, as Pastor Wright would say, our financial chickens came home to roost. Years of policies like the Community Reinvestment Act came back to bite us in our hind parts.
As a result we have been in a recession, not the worst of all time and not the worst since the Great Depression despite what the Sainted One has said. He and his minions have their talking points and part of their job is to scare people into submission. Terence P. Jeffrey at the Washington Times has a great piece describing this rhetoric. He lays out the numbers which refute the claims made by those hell bent on our economic collapse.
Claims Mr. Obama, “We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression.”
But the historical figures for the gross domestic product (GDP), calculated by the U.S. Bureau Economic Analysis, say something else. After growing by 0.9 percent and 2.8 percent in the first two quarters of 2008, GDP declined by 0.5 percent and 3.5 percent in the third and fourth quarters of the year. Is that “an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression”?
Well, 1949 was far worse. GDP declined by 5.8 percent in the first quarter of that year and 1.2 percent in the second. It rebounded by 4.6 percent in the third, but then dropped 4 percent in the fourth. America did not start an irreversible decline that year. In 1950, the economy grew by an amazing 17.4 percent in the first quarter, 12.5 percent in the second, 16.6 percent in the third and 7.5 percent in the fourth.
In 1953-54, there was also a downturn worse than the one Mr. Obama “inherited.” GDP declined by 2.4 percent in the third quarter of 1953, by 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter and by 2 percent in the first quarter of 1954.
The rhetoric about catastrophe is nothing more than the politics of fear that Obama railed against during the campaign. He is ignoring history and sound policy in order to advance an agenda designed to funnel taxpayer money to his special interests. Many have claimed that Obama made a mistake by letting Pelosi and Reid write his plan but I believe his decision was calculated in order to give him plausible deniability. He stayed above the fray while the large number of Democrats in Congress were able to absorb the blow. They are already unpopular so why tarnish the Messiah?
We cannot spend our way out of the problem. Obama and his sock puppets keep saying that the stimulus plan is a spending bill because that is the point. If spending is stimulus then we should not have a problem because George Bush and Congress spent a lot of money. Using Obama’s logic we should have an unemployment rate of 0%. He blames George Bush for doubling the debt and causing the economic collapse (that did not cause it) but then says that the way to solve the problem is to spend more and go deeper into debt. If what Bush did caused it, how is doing more of what Bush did going to fix it?
Obama’s future generation bankruptcy plan will increase inflation and unemployment while doing little to stimulate the economy. During the times discussed by Jeffrey, the country was able to rebound fairly well after each of the past problems and none of them involved spending a TRILLION dollars. Passing a small, targeted stimulus or letting this play out is not in the cards because doing so would deny the Democrats the opportunity to take advantage of this crisis and get what they want. There is no doubt that this is what they did just as Rahm Emanuel said they would.
The unfortunate thing is that Obama and the Democrats are aiding and abetting the enemy. Osama bin Laden said he wanted to bankrupt us and he certainly got us to spend a lot of money.
Barack Obama is hell bent on finishing the job bin Laden started by saddling future generations with monumental debt.
One
Big
Assed
Mistake
America
If Obama takes control of health care he will probably force everyone to take one of these. He will need to in order to get reelected because this plan will bring nothing but bad memories.
Related:
Wall Street Journal (very good at debunking Obama)
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Why Does Stimulus Vote Surprise People?
Feb 13, 2009 Political
Not the fact that Democrats are voting for a bill that is loaded with special interests and will do little to help the economy. No, why are people surprised they voted FOR something that they have not read and do not know about completely. These people supported Barack Obama. They voted for him even though he was not vetted and his troubles were ignored or covered up by the media. They voted FOR him without knowing much about him.
The whole stimulus plan is a sham. The bill, in its final form, was more than 1000 pages (earlier reports indicated it was nearly 1500) and it was distributed at 2300 last night. There is no way that anyone could have read the entire thing in that little bit of time. I hope that someone slipped in a provision for all Democrats and the three traitorous Republicans to resign and for Obama to have to provide a birth certificate. That would be absolutely hilarious. Obama wants to sign it Monday and you can bet he will not be able to read the entire thing before then. It does not matter because he is only interested in spending, not actually producing results.
Look at what we have in this mess:
- The bill passed with all but 7 Democrats voting for it and all but 2 Republicans voting against it. The 2 Republicans did not vote. This means that all who voted for it voted for something that they have not read and do not know.
- The bill was touted as one that provides tens of thousands of jobs even though no one has read it. No one knows what it includes or what it will do because they have not read it. In fact, one Congressman said they voted with one hand and crossed the fingers on the other. This is not leadership and it shows that even though they claim that something must be done now and that the bill is good, they don’t know.
- The so called administration of transparency has broken a campaign promise to post bills on the web 5 days before they are voted on so that the public can view them. The Democrats promised the bill would be posted on the internet for 48 hours before it was voted on. That did not happen. Does it surprise anyone that they broke their word? Nancy Pelosi needs to get out of town for her taxpayer paid vacation in Rome. She will have a few meetings while she is there.
- A Senator has predicted that none of his colleagues will have had the chance to read the bill before they vote on it. This is irresponsible. The Democrats in the Senate will vote for it and they have not read it. They are just like their House partners in crime.
- Barack Obama said that the lobbyists needed to be taken out of the process. He campaigned on changing DC and the politics as usual. The bill was on K Street in the hands of the lobbyists before staffers got it. The lobbyists had to go over it and make sure none of the payback they demanded had been left out. They had to ensure all the special interests were addressed. They had to ensure they knew what was in the trough they will be feeding from.
I have only read portions of the bill but from the lists I have seen it contains nothing but pet projects and items from the liberal wish list. It will not reduce the unemployment rate (I believe the extension of unemployment benefits is designed to make the numbers go up so the Dems can claim they are doing a good job when the numbers go down next year. It will be an election year) as FDR saw when he did the same things. The unemployment rate varied little under him and his plans and only went down markedly when the US entered WW II.
Barack Obama is unable to see this and his explanation for the failure under FDR is that he did not spend enough. Well one thing is certain. This bill spends enough. If it works and things get better then Obama can say he was right and if things get worse then we will know the real truth. Should that happen, Obama will say he did not spend enough and needs even more money.
The CBO says that the situation will improve by the second half of this year even if Congress does not spend one cent on the problem. That is what happens in recessions. Things get bad and then they get better all on their own. Government intervention makes things worse and prolongs the problem. FDR and Carter proved that. The reason Democrats are rushing this bill through is so that they can get their pet projects passed before the economy improves on its own. Once the economy improves they will not be able to use it and fear to get what they want. Obama is not letting this crisis go to waste…
If the economy begins to recover on its own the Dems will claim credit for the improvement. However, I think that the infusion of borrowed money will prolong the recession and things will not get better for quite some time. History shows us this will happen.
Spending money we do not have is a problem and up until this year Democrats were screaming about the deficit under Bush. They said it was irresponsible to run up a huge deficit (though they had done so in all the years past) and that we needed to get it under control. Obama entered office and all that went out the window even though he was one of the folks who leveled criticism at Bush.
Pelosi is off to Europe and the bill is heading to the Senate. Not one of the people elected to run the country has read it and yet they voted for it.
This is not leadership. It is a dereliction of duty.
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Tags: bill, chimps, huge spending, irresponsible, massive bill, Obama, Pelosi, pet projects, pork, Rome, spending, trip
The Bailout Pork Bill And Responsibility
Oct 4, 2008 Political
The bailout bill just passed by the Congress and signed into law contained billions of dollars in Christmas Tree ornaments that had nothing to do with bailing anyone out. These items, including provisions for tax cuts, were added to entice politicians to vote for it. We have no business bailing out Wall Street and we have effectively taken 700 billion steps in the direction of Communism*.
I heard Jesse Jackson on Neil Cavuto’s show and Jackson said the bill did not go far enough (surprise) and that if we can give low interest loans to auto makers (we should not be doing that) we should be able to do the same for homeowners. Jackson contended that people should get low interest rate loans from the government in order to restructure their debt and continue to pay for their homes. He insisted that the predatory lending practices led to their problems. Cavuto told him that while some predatory lending took place people were the ones who signed the dotted line. He said they needed to take responsibility for their actions and if they wanted to renegotiate it was up to them to do it with the people from whom they obtained their loans.
This is absolutely correct. Homeowners need to renegotiate with their lenders to get a better deal. It is not up to taxpayers to lend money to them regardless of whether they will pay it back or not. If they default then taxpayers will be left holding the bag (much as we are with Freddie and Fannie loans). Jackson wants to take personal responsibility away from people and have big government come in and take care of them. We no more belong doing that than we belong taking care of bankers or auto makers.
The market should be allowed to react in whatever direction the crisis leads it. People and businesses with money can come in and buy up failing businesses or they can go away. Allow the market to handle the crisis and leave the politicians who caused the problems out of it.
If Jackson thinks people have no responsibility in the contracts that they make and that government should bail them out then we should have some provisions which include a loss of voting rights if you become a ward of the government. If you are not able to understand a contract to buy a home and can be easily swayed then you are unable to understand the voting system and can be just as easily manipulated.
The bottom 50% of wage earners pay only about 4% of the taxes in this country so they will not be affected by the bailout as much as those who will see tax increases in order to pay for this mess. The voting system needs to be changed so that people are afforded more votes if they pay more in taxes. Perhaps each person gets one vote and then people get an additional vote for every $5000 in taxes that they pay. The people who pay for this country should have a greater say in how it is governed much like stockholders in a company who have more votes if they have more stock.
Whether Wall Street executives or distressed homeowners, the philosophy is the same; live with your decisions. If they cause you problems then you can work your way out and be all that much stronger for it.
If government steps in and fixes your bad decisions you will continue to make them. We get more of what we subsidize.
*I heard this phrase on TV but do not know who said it.
Tags: bailout, communism, jesse jackson, pork, taxes
The Democrats Will Be Transparent, Sure They Will
Oct 4, 2007 Uncategorized
Transparent, that was the claim they made when they pandered for the votes of Americans. They would be open and honest and yet, they continue to make back room deals with people like Abscam Murtha leading the charge to spend your hard earned money. Here is an interesting video that discusses the “earmarks” that this transparent Congress has requested. I just want to know if it is so transparent, how come no one is aware? I also want to know if the Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison, is allowed to participate in the pork fest.
They are corrupt and they need to go. Having said that, Republicans were not very good at fiscal responsibility either. We need people in office who will do what is right. Let’s replace them all and start over.
Tags: corruption, Democrats, earmarks, Murtha, Pelosi, Political Opinion, pork