Unleashing Americans

By Alan Caruba

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.

The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.

Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.

While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.

A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.

It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.

Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.

In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.

In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.

The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.

Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.

The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.

Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.

The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.

We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.

I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.

The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.

If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama is Determined to Destroy America

By Alan Caruba

It is astonishing that Barack Obama seemingly learned nothing from the 2010 national elections in which the Republicans regained control of the House with a net total of 63 seats. For the Democrats it represented the greatest loss in the House midterm election since 1938, which occurred nearly ten years into the Great Depression.

It is the House that determines the spending and borrowing to maintain the nation, though the President traditionally sends a budget. Obama did not. Indeed, as Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has said, Obama has never put anything on paper. Negotiating Obama's demands have changed week to week and now day to day.

What has happened to “No drama Obama”? The present impasse, topped by an angry press conference late Friday afternoon is entirely of his making. Neither the White House, nor the Democrats in Congress have put forth any plans, let alone any numbers, other than to propose tax increases, now euphemistically called “revenue” increases.

The 2010 Democrat losses in the House are largely attributed to the passage of Obamacare, a piece of legislation that was not only widely protested, but that led to the Tea Party movement and new members of the House representing its common sense agenda. The House subsequently voted to repeal Obamacare and it is being contested in the courts by 26 States.

What Americans have witnessed over the first two years of his term is Obama’s continual blaming of all problems on either his predecessor or the Republicans in Congress. What they are witnessing is the duplicity of a man who appears incapable of telling the truth from day to day.

The nation is in for a week of “high drama”, all of which could have been avoided had Obama agreed to any of the proposals put foreword by Republicans from Paul Ryan to members of the so-called “gang of six.” In the Democrat controlled Senate there has been nothing but obstruction.

One senses that this is exactly what Obama wants. While saying he does not want the U.S. to default on its obligations, what better way to destroy the nation than to destroy its “full faith and credit” regarding its debts?

The emphasis the Founding Fathers put on the necessity to meet the nation’s debts can be found in Article VI of the Constitution. “All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.”

Article I, section 7, states “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.”

There is no mystery as to how the U.S. can recover from the present recession. Government spending must be reduced. Tax rates must be reduced for corporations and the middle class to encourage investment, growth and more employment. Entitlement programs will have to be revised to ensure they can meet their obligations. They represent sixty percent of all government expenditures.

A government that must borrow forty cents of every dollar to pay its debts and whose current debt of $14 trillion equals the entire annual gross domestic product of the nation is endangering the present and future economy for present and future generations of Americans.

At this writing, it looks as if Obama intends to deliberately implode the nation’s ability to meet its obligations and he has used the most raw fear tactics to achieve his goal, falsely claiming that Social Security checks would not be sent, that the military would not be paid.

If ever a President was begging for impeachment the time for such action has arrived. The evidence that he was ineligible to run for office and to hold it is beyond question, if only because he was not a “natural born” American whose both parents were citizens. His father was a citizen of Kenya.

Raise the debt ceiling. Impeach Obama. America must be set free. What he is attempting to bring about is the worst “change” imaginable in the nation’s history.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Boy President

By Alan Caruba

Any parent or teacher who has tried to hold a conversation with a self-centered, petulant child or teenager knows how frustrating it is to try to get beyond the “I want it and you won’t give it to me” stage. This is the point at which we, the Republican leadership, and others in Congress have arrived with a little boy named Barack Obama.

I know he’s going to turn fifty soon. I know he is married and the father of two girls. I know that outwardly he is an adult, but the “inner child” of Obama has always been on display because it is also the outer child. No need to tick off the evidence of self-indulgence in a job that provides limousines, helicopters, and jet planes, along with all the other perks for the man in the Oval Office bubble.

This may explain why Obama appears to be so detached from the reality of the current financial crisis. All presidents inherit problems from the previous administration and in 2009 no one is suggesting the financial stability of the nation was not challenged.

Here, though, is the problem. After a failed “stimulus” program, after an obscene increase in the nation’s debt, and after the imposition of Obamacare, this president has been in full retreat from virtually every policy he enunciated when taking office. The lone exception has been a relentless attack on the provision of energy to fuel an economy in freefall. The Environmental Protection Agency has become his engine of destruction.

Reality is closing in on President Obama and he still thinks that staged events like his “Twitter” conference will let him escape. Intended to appeal to younger voters, it was impossible to not notice how inarticulate Obama is and how he falls back constantly on trite phrases about “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the disparity between the rich, the middle class, and the poor.

His abiding theme has been “fairness”, but life is not fair. You don’t get to choose to be born into wealth or poverty. You don’t get to choose your race. Your family’s genetic history may include being prone to cancer or heart attacks. What we can influence, however, is how hard we study in school, whether we choose a vocation or profession, work hard toward acquiring it, and most of all, our attitude about ourselves and others.

The contempt the Boy President feels toward taxpayers is evident in the boldfaced lies he tells about the current tax system, the fact that reducing tax rates actually increases government revenues, and the obvious fact that the federal government is spending too much money.

The nation that delivered itself into his hands was one devoted to profligate spending. In June, the Institute for Truth in Accounting (IFTA) announced the completion of a comprehensive study of all fifty state’s assets and liabilities, including pension and retirement obligations.

Founder and CEO of the Institute, Sheila Weinberg, stated that, “If the governors and legislatures had truly balanced each state’s budget, no taxpayer’s financial burden would exist.” This is an issue of truth versus the razzle-dazzle needed to justify the demands from public service unions that have burdened taxpayers.

“A state budget is not balanced if past costs, including those for employee’s retirement benefits, are pushed into the future.” Only four states, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, have assets available to pay their debt and obligations.

The U.S. is, we’re told, $14.2 trillion in debt, but this figure likely involves financial obfuscation and is likely far worse if one looks too closely. Others say that the U.S. collects enough revenue to pay off its debts and suggest that the “ceiling”, constantly increased over the years, is largely a piece of political theatricality.

When it comes to who actually pays taxes in America, there is ample evidence that, as of April 15th of this year, nearly half of all Americans would have paid no federal income tax because they owed none under the present tax code. Obama’s demands for fairness look odd under such circumstances.

According to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, Americans who earn less than $30,000, those who are elderly, and those who are single with children paid no income tax. Not owing federal income tax is not the same as not paying any taxes. Workers are subject to payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare programs. In addition, they pay a wide range of sales taxes as anyone who has checked their telephone bill or filled up their gas tank can testify. A plethora of hidden taxes cut into the income of even the poorest among us.

In 2007, writing in The American, a journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Stephen Moore laid out the facts. Then as now, “a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shouldered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest one percent of the population earns 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab.”

The Bush tax cuts resulted in “more investment, more hiring by businesses, and a stronger stock market,” said Moore.

The Boy President’s demands for more revenues to spend on more federal programs are baseless and his past performance to date has been disastrous.

Fox News analysis and commentator, Brit Hume, recently said, “This President is in as full of a political retreat as this town has seen in many years. He was elected to fix the economy, but people think he and his party have failed and have exploded the nation’s debt in the process.”

The Republican leadership, if it is to have any hope of defeating him in 2012, must now press its advantage and exact, not just short-term compromises, but major reductions in what passes for a Democrat budget…if such a thing even exists.

In the present crisis, Republicans have as much at stake as the Boy President and, indeed, the entire nation.

Obama, increasingly desperate and spasmodically lying to everyone, needs to be driven from office like Frankenstein fleeing from the villagers with their pitchforks and torches.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Destroying the Dollar

By Alan Caruba

Something I never thought I would ever see in my former hometown, a wealthy New Jersey suburb of New York City, was a Dollar Store, but one opened recently in a former supermarket. Dollar Stores are giving Wal-Mart, Target, and similar outlets a run for their money and it’s not hard to see why. The local one has just about everything you could need and all for astonishing low prices.

In countless ways people are looking to save money these days. The looming problem, however, is the question of what happens when Americans wake up to learn that even a dollar can no longer buy anything?

“When Faith in U.S. Dollars and U.S. Debt is Dead the Game is over – And that Day is Closer than You May Think” is the cheery title of an article recently posted on EconomicCollapse.com.

There’s a reason why both the mental condition and the financial condition are called a Depression. It’s hard to be happy about anything when your nation’s currency is not worth the paper on which it is printed. The Federal Reserve’s answer, some fear, is to print more money and to continue to buy U.S. debt with it. It is doubtful, however, this Ponzi scheme will continue.

There isn’t a day that goes by when some U.S. government agency doesn’t send me a news release to announce that it is giving millions for something and, if our elected leaders are negotiating a solution to this insane spending and giving, there is precious little evidence of it.

New unemployment numbers are up. The administration continues to churn out thousands of pages of new regulations. It has stalled the energy sector from oil and gas exploration that could create thousands of jobs. And China is divesting itself of U.S. securities, anticipating a bad outcome for our economy.

Meanwhile, the so-called “entitlement” programs represent sixty percent of all the money the government spends. Without some changes, these programs are unsustainable. The Democrats’ answer is to depict Republicans as wanting to kill grandma.

The Gross Domestic Product

In a Mid-May article posted on American Thinker.com, Randal Hoven spelled out a number of facts that are overlooked in the political battles between liberals and conservatives. “The entire debate is about a difference that is less than 4% of GDP. According to International Monetary Fund figures, government in the U.S. is spending 41% of GDP in 2011. The current debate is about whether government spends 40% or 44% of GDP.”

The government is absorbing far too much of the Gross Domestic Product for its own purposes. We are in a league shared by Greece and other nations with a serious financial crisis.

While the federal and state governments plunders every cent they can extract from those still fortunate to have a job, any investments, or will die at some point, both Republicans and Democrats have participated in expanding government since the last Great Depression.

While President Obama’s constant blaming of George W. Bush for his first two years became a joke, Hoven notes that Bush expanded Medicare with a prescription program and many of the “liberal” programs we conservatives denounce occurred while Bush was president. “No Child Left Behind”? Bush. Outlawing light bulbs? Bush. Ethanol subsidies? Bush.

The absurdity of President Obama’s mantra that millionaires and billionaires be taxed more ignores the fact that such taxes, even if we took all of their money, would barely cover the rate at which government spends and wastes such income.

While negotiations, we’re told, are occurring or will, the greatest impediment is Obama’s open disdain and dislike for Republicans. This cannot be underestimated in terms of finding a solution.

At the heart of our current problems is that, having inherited a financial crisis, Obama devoted the last two years to a government takeover of both the health care industry and the financial sector with two bills, each of which exceeded 2,000 pages and vastly expanded government bureaucracy.

More government control of the economy is the last thing this nation needs at this time. Or any time.

Social Security will be insolvent by 2037 and, together with Medicare, they have unfunded liabilities of $107 trillion in today’s dollars. That is seven times the size of the U.S. economy and ten times the size of the national debt.

The real problem for the United States is the falling confidence and faith in the U.S. dollar. It is the default reserve currency of the world. Just about everything trades in U.S. dollars. It’s not only Americans losing faith in our government’s ability to maintain its value, it is everyone else.

In April, Standard & Poor’s downgraded its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative.” It warned that the U.S. could lose its prized AAA rating. Unless Congress and the current occupant of the White House take specific steps to fix Social Security and Medicare, the dollar compared to other major national currencies will continue to fall. It has fallen 17% since 2009. Moody’s rating service has also issued its own warning.

Pretty soon, nobody will want to buy U.S. securities used to currently borrow 41 cents of every dollar the government spends. The U.S. borrows about $168 million every single hour.

In April, CNSnews reported that “the federal government made $125 billion in ‘improper payments’ in fiscal 2010, more than eleven times the total 2010 spending by the U.S. State Department.”

That’s a government that doesn’t know what it’s doing and isn’t in a hurry to fix it.

That’s why a Dollar Store just opened in one of the most affluent suburbs of New Jersey.

I know the economists and others keep saying that the Recession that began in 2007, ended in 2009. I know they can and will cite all manner of good economic indicators, but if faith in the U.S. dollar continues to falter, it won’t matter.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Liberals Attack America's Security

By Alan Caruba

“Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.”

Now, decades after repeated attacks on U.S. embassies, U.S. Marines in Beirut, the USS Cole, and, of course, nearly a decade since 9/11, Rep. Peter King is holding hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, the kind that led to the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood and which The Wall Street Journal identified as “more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil.”

The similarities between the 1947 House Committee on Un-American Activities and Rep. King’s hearings are remarkable and, in both cases, the mainstream media played an extraordinary role in depicting them as a witch hunt. That metaphor was used by playwright Arthur Miller when he wrote “The Crucible” and Miller’s application to join the Communist Party of United States of America was one of the items the Committee made public.

Along with revelations that many Hollywood scriptwriters were CPUSA members, sworn to obey Russia and their Soviet masters and that a number of Hollywood stars had been duped by Communists to lend their names to anti-American activities has long been subsumed by a relentless campaign to depict the Committee as Un-American, not those working to undermine America. At the heart of that campaign, then and now, was the mainstream media and those in academia.

Liberals will always embrace totalitarian governments and movements. From Jane Fonda to former President Jimmy Carter, liberals have always seen America as the enemy and worked to further the aims of our enemies.

The opening quote to this commentary came from “Dupes”, a book by historian Dr. Paul Kengor that reveals not only the names and activities of Communist dupes in America from the years just following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the present day.

That history has been largely re-written by the many liberals in the nation’s media and in its colleges and universities. Among the most famous advocates of the Soviet Union were leading academics and, today, the revolutionaries of the 1960s, including some who bombed U.S. facilities, are found on America’s campuses, indoctrinating new generations.

To give you an idea of how great the threat to America truly is, Rep. King and his family have been protected, according to the Associated Press, by “round-the-clock security” provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y. police.” Capitol police secured the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office.”

And, then, true to the media agenda to undermine and disparage the current and past hearings, the Associated Press report noted that “Critics have likened them to the McCarthy-era hearings investigating communism.” Bingo!

You would have to have read the March 10 Wall Street Journal editorial to learn that, among the efforts by jihadists to attack America being investigated, there were “plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline.”

“Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan’s November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.”

And the White House response in all these cases was, “Do not jump to conclusions.” The Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, led by Janet Napolitano and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, have choked on the words “Muslim terrorist” or even the word “terrorism.”

If you want to see how the purpose of these hearings will be twisted, you need only pay heed to the top ranking Democrat on the committee, Bernie Thompson of Mississippi, who said he believes the hearings could be used to “inspire terrorists.”

Only terrorists don’t need to be inspired by a U.S. Congressional Committee. They are already inspired by the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Watching the Democratic Party Implode

By Alan Caruba

It’s déjà vu for me as I think back to the last two years of Jimmy Carter as his “progressive” program of “sacrifice” and his impotence in the face of the Iranian hostage taking of U.S. diplomats left him looking weak and overwhelmed by events.

George W. Bush did not appear to be anything more than a garden variety Republican President until September 11, 2001. It transformed his presidency from peace to war and Bush had the right instincts for war, but wars in the post-WWII era all seem to stall and stalemate.

No one was in much of a mood to listen to George W. in the final years of his second term. The voters served up a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2006. If this reminds you of the November 2010 elections that transferred power to the Republicans, you’re right

The leviathan of independent voters has moved restlessly back and forth between Democrats and Republicans looking for either party to address the nation’s problems.

While the House changed hands in 2010, the margin in the Senate fell sufficiently for the Republican Minority Leader to have some clout there. Harry Reid has begun to bend to the new reality.

Most effected, however, is President Obama. Politics, events in far-off places, and unpopular domestic decisions have gelled into a general public discontent.

Symbolically in recent weeks Robert Gibbs, his original press secretary, left and was replaced by Jay Carney. While Gibbs was facile, Carney is uncertain, hesitant, and weak at the podium. Then came news that the new social secretary at the White House was an openly gay man, a high profile job historically held by a woman. Two surprising and I predict bad choices.

People talk about turning points in history and I would suggest that, so far as the White House is concerned, those new faces will be regarded in retrospect as a turning point.

The timing was especially bad for the White House as the Democratic Party was once again revealed to be the hostage of the union movement and what people saw on their television screens was ugly and thuggish. Cowardly Democrat Wisconsin senators ran away.

In times when millions of Americans are out of work, union members left their jobs to descend on the state house in Madison, Wisconsin and to hold rallies in Trenton, New Jersey demanding they retain their privileged status. It looked bad. It smelt bad.

Beyond our shores events mercilessly erupted as nations in the Middle East and Africa were caught up in a contagion of anger against a rogue’s gallery of despots and monarchs. The White House issued statements that literally conflicted, one with the other, on a day to day basis. If there was a coherent foreign policy it was barely detectable.

Unprepared, incompetent, the façade surrounding the Obama presidency continued to crumble.

It is an implosion. It is the failure of “progressive” ideas that have not changed and have not worked for a century dating back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

It revealed the contempt this President and the Democrats have for the Constitution; ballooning the government with schemes like Obamacare to grow an already too large government larger and more intrusive.

Every new piece of legislation added more people to the government payrolls while ordinary Americans watched the cost of everything rise. So-called stimulus plans did little more than retain government workers or put a bandage on Medicaid behind the façade of short-term construction projects.

We are living in ugly times and Obama’s lies are falling on deaf ears.

The Democrats can no longer convince people that acres of wind farms or solar panels can even begin to provide the electricity the nation needs.

The Democrats cannot make a case for $40,000 electric cars when the nation’s entire transportation structure is based on gasoline and diesel.

The Democrats can no longer justify refusing to let American companies drill for American oil, particularly when it always cheaper than imported oil.

The Democrats forced legislation on voters who showed up, a million strong, in Washington to demonstrate their opposition.

The Democrats ran away from state legislatures rather than debate and vote.

The Democrats favor the unions over the vast majority of non-union workers.

The Democrats will not defend the sanctity of marriage or of life.

Throw the bums out.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Watching the Democratic Party Implode

Sitting Together

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What Jared Loughner is NOT

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Obama, the Great Bloviator

By Alan Caruba

If Ronald Reagan was the "great communicator", then surely Barack Obama is the Great Bloviator.

We have reached the unhappy point in his first term when virtually everything he said to get elected and everything he’s said since being elected is either a lie or of such dubious merit as to be easily dismissed.

Consider his 2008 promise to go through the federal budget “line by line” to eliminate waste. At this point his administration has not produced a budget for the fiscal year. Even so it is unlikely he would find any element of any budget merits a reduction. This man is all about spending.

Watching him grandstand on Friday, Jan 7th, concerning the Bureau of Labor and Statistics announcement that the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate had dropped from 9.8% to 9.4%, I was happy that the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” analysis pointed out that that we are in the twentieth month in which the unemployment rate is over 9%, a post-World War II record.

Let us pause now while everyone at the White House says in unison, “It’s Bush’s fault!”

The Morning Bell noted that “The reality is that the only reason the unemployment rate dropped is because the U.S. labor force decreased by 435,000. More importantly, 260,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force entirely. This means that the Obama economy is now driving Americans out of the labor force faster than it is bringing them in.”

The Democrat Party is bleeding members, particularly white ones. I wonder why? Maybe it’s because from early 2007 through the end of 2010 when they had strong majorities in both houses of Congress, they did not do so well in comparison to when Republicans were in charge from 2003 to 2006.

In an American Thinker article by Yossi Gestetner, he noted that by comparison, under the Democrats 1,583,000 jobs were lost whereas, under Republicans1,672,000 were added.

The average budget deficits were $1.143 trillion for the Democrats and $285 billion for the Republicans.

The Dow Jones Averages went from 11.4% under the Republicans to 0.13% under the Democrats. Bank failures under Republicans totaled seven. Under Democrats, it was 317 and counting!

This isn’t rocket science. The numbers tell you everything you need to know, but listening to Obama’s numbers as he does another “photo op” can be as mentally destabilizing as his economic policies have been on the economy.

He just waved goodbye to his first team of economic advisors and everyone in the business community is praying that their replacements are not aliens from outer space.

You want to know what socialism looks like? Let’s just take tax rates as a measurement.

Bear in mind, we all had to suffer through a down-to-the-wire “compromise” to get Obama to go along with merely extending the Bush tax rates.

When you add income tax rates and value-added taxes that all Europeans must also pay whenever they purchase anything, it looks like this:

United Kingdom: Income tax 50%, VAT 17.5%. Total 67.5%

France: Income tax 40%, VAT 19.6%. Total 59.6%

Greece: Income tax 40%, VAT l6%. Total 65%

Denmark: Income tax 58%, VAT 25%. Total 83%

Suffice to say, I will not be moving to Denmark any time soon!

Under socialism, Europeans pretty much work for their government, giving up the majority of their earnings to taxation.

As Obama begins the final two years of his first—and hopefully last term—a December Bloomberg National Poll survey indicated that “more than 50 percent of Americans say they are worse off now than they were two years ago when President Obama took office, and two-thirds believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.” It was noteworthy that “The pessimism cuts across political parties and age groups, and is common to both sexes.”

Here’s a prediction, Democrats in Congress will fight any and all Republican efforts to get the budget under control before the nation goes belly-up. Why? Because they're socialists!

Oh-oh, I think I hear Obama about to give another TelePrompter-perfect speech on how great things are. Excuse me while I reach for the remote and hit the mute button.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Obama, the Great Bloviator

National Debt is now $14 Trillion, the Highest Ever!

By Alan Caruba

On Monday, January 3, 2011 the national debt, as calculated by the U.S. Treasury, topped $14 trillion for the first time. Ever!

In 2010, the Financial Forecast Center, an independent entity, predicted that the Gross Domestic Product, the value of goods and services, would reach $14.834.1 trillion by October of last year and predicted the GDP would reach $14.952 trillion by January 2011.

I’m no mathematical whiz, but it would appear that the U.S. is just barely managing to produce enough income to cover the amount of its National Debt.

A percentage point more or less means nothing as the 112th Congress convenes to tackle the problem of the nation’s debt. It is being discussed in terms of how high to raise the “debt ceiling” so the current administration can borrow and presumably spend more.

In 2008 when Obama was elected, the national debt was about $9 trillion. When the Obama administration began in 2009, it had rocketed passed $10 trillion, then $11 trillion, and, by the time 2010 began, it stood at $12 trillion! A year later, it stands at $14 trillion.

Based on official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury, on December 27, Terence P. Jeffrey reported on CNSnews.com that “The federal government has accumulated more new debt--$3.22 trillion—during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined...”

That is terrifying.

It also accounts for the midterm election’s massive transfer of power to Republicans in the House of Representatives as the 112th Congress begins on January 5. Since all spending bills must be initiated in the House, the presumption is that the new Congress is going to get a grip on this nation-killing situation.

That’s not, however, what a January 4 Rasmussen Reports survey suggests. “The new Congress, with Republicans in control of the House, isn’t even seated yet, and voters are already expressing more likely disappointment than they did around Election Day.”

A Rasmussen telephone survey found that “67% of likely U.S. voters—two out of three—think it is at least somewhat likely that most voters will be disappointed with Republicans in Congress before the 2012 elections. This includes 32% who say it is Very Likely.”

That is terrifying.

Bear in mind that there is still no National Budget. The government is operating under what are called continuing resolutions. Not only did the Obama administration run up the national debt to historic heights, but it just could not find time last year to structure a budget to guide the nation through its remaining two years in office.

In the same fashion former Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to oversee and implement that crazed spending while she held power, incoming Speaker John Boehner is going to be expected to somehow reverse that madness at the same time Obama administration policies keep pushing the nation over the edge of financial disaster.

What policies you ask? Having failed to get the Cap-and-Trade bill enacted, a huge tax on all energy use, the administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on ignoring the will of Congress with an end-run of regulatory insanity. It has announced it will regulate carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas” emission to avoid a “global warming” that is not happening.

China is not doing this. India is not doing this. Japan withdrew last year from the UN Kyoto Protocols setting emissions limits. Europe is likely to follow. But! The EPA insists that the USA, virtually alone in the world, must save it from “global warming.”

On virtually the same day it is asserting this totally unauthorized power, The New York Times announced that the Chicago Climate Exchange, “the nation’s first experiment in carbon emissions cap and trade has come to an end…” Created to buy and sell “Carbon Financial Instruments”, the collapse reflected “the legitimacy of the system itself.”

It’s about as legitimate as the “clean coal” scam in which companies sequester carbon dioxide, burying it, to save the world from “global warming” which, I repeat myself, is not happening.

At the same time oil and gas prices are inching upward, the Obama administration has virtually shut down any further exploration or extraction of the USA’s own vast reserves of oil. Since oil is a global commodity whose price is set by the marketplace, the rule of supply and demand will drive up the price still further as China continues to buy more for its fast-growing economy.

In the interest of length, I will not enumerate other nation-killing Obama policies.

Pay no attention to Obama’s claims that he will focus on creating jobs. We are deep in historic debt from the first two year’s of such alleged efforts. If the new Congress can find a way to get out of the way, we might survive.

Will the Republicans find a backbone? A lot of likely voters have their doubts. Stay tuned.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → National Debt is now $14 Trillion, the Highest Ever!

Government as a Criminal Enterprise

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration is “one of the most corrupt administrations in modern times” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) Sunday, January 2st. As the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we can expect some explosive revelations.

The larger question is how long can a nation survive when its east and west coasts are occupied by liberals who are so out of touch with reality they cannot understand why the rest of the nation would disagree with them about anything? Two States alone, California and New York, are so broke and so laden with red tape they exist by mercy alone.

Liberals are people who still think bigger government, more regulations and more spending is the answer to every problem and need.

These are people who still talk about “global warming”, often in the midst of a raging blizzard.

These are people who refuse to consider the daily headlines of Muslim bombings of Christians, often in their churches, poses a threat to Western civilization.

In the middle, in “fly over country”, the bulk of the population simply stares in disbelief at the White House and Congress and keeps asking, “What are those people thinking?”

Having sent a small army of new people, conservatives, to the House of Representatives and narrowed the Senate’s ability to do further damage, these are independents who now expect change of a different kind than Obama’s.

It’s not so much change as a “return” to smaller government, less borrowing and spending, and such, but those days essentially ended in the last century as progressives got an income tax written into the Constitution, took away the right of State legislatures to name Senators who would represent their State’s interests, and then went on a binge of “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

A century of liberal government has bankrupted the government.

Indeed, just about anything one wants to do, go to college, start a small business, begin raising alpacas, whatever, the government will provide a loan or a grant or a tax exemption. The federal government determines how much each State receives for road and bridge repair, for its school systems, for just about everything for which States were formerly responsible.

The so-called Stimulus Act was nothing more than Representatives and Senators throwing every state and local project into a huge spending bill and then claiming it would create jobs. As has been the case for decades, the only jobs that get created from such largess are government jobs, while businesses large and small are required to waste thousands of hours and thousands of dollars filling out government forms.

There’s a word for that. It’s called communism. To avoid the ugliness of that, it is also called socialism, but it is still communism when the government makes the most important decisions about virtually everything affecting one’s life.

The financial collapse of 2008 was the result of the utter failure of two “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that so distorted the housing mortgage marketplace that it finally collapsed from an excess of incoherence. No one knew who owned the mortgage. Not Fannie or Freddie, not the banks, investment firms or AIG that used them as “bundled” assets.

The current bank failure rate is testimony to the need to shut down Fanny and Freddy.

Those mortgages were loans made to people that often didn’t have a job, bought homes so large they were beyond their ability to make the monthly payments, or just got fired and couldn’t pay. Whose fault was that? The lenders who knew they could turn around and sell the mortgage to Fannie and Freddie, and stick the American taxpayer with the cost to the tune of billions.

Beyond the mortgage fiasco, there is the government’s steady erosion of American’s vast energy industries. They cannot drill for oil anywhere. They cannot mine coal. If, however, you want to build a wind or solar farm, the government will give you millions to produce minimal amounts of electricity and require utilities to purchase it.

Or perhaps you want to be an ethanol producer? The government requires that all gasoline be mixed with ethanol, thus raising the cost per gallon for a chemical that actually reduces the mileage you’d get without it. In addition, since it’s mostly made from corn it forces up the cost of feed to livestock which in turns forces up the cost of meat at the supermarket and the countless other food products that utilize corn in some fashion.

In a free market ethanol would not exist. Even Al Gore has disowned it!

What kind of government would insist on regulating carbon dioxide, claiming it is causing “global warming” when it is obvious to everyone there is no “global warming” and CO2 is not causing anything except the growth of every form of vegetation on planet Earth.

When a government lies that much to everyone in an effort to control all energy use, it has become a criminal enterprise.

While all this is going on, that same government is borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, mostly from China, to keep the monstrosity it has created going. Our government is flat broke.

When you add in a President who thinks America is too arrogant and represents people who eat too much, drive too much, and need to expect less if they get sick, it is little wonder people are beginning to lose faith in him.

We need a lot of change in a big hurry or one day we will all wake up and there will be no United States of America because it had to default on nearly $14 trillion in present debt. That's equal to our current Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. dollar continues to lose its value and we have two more years of a President who cannot sign more spending bills fast enough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Government as a Criminal Enterprise

Merry Christmas from Harry Reid

More about → Merry Christmas from Harry Reid

The Kindergarten Congress

By Alan Caruba

The Founders in their genius created a Constitution that was intended to slow down the process of legislation precisely because they wanted the new nation to avoid being destroyed by the passions and trends of the day.

So what do we have today, a month away from the largest transfer of power in Congress since 1946?

We have a Senate being asked to vote on whether, not when, to extend the tax rates that have been in existence for the past nine years.

We have no indication of a resolution to continue funding the operation of government.

We have extraneous issues such as whether Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be imposed on a military, a large portion of which do not want to have openly gay members in their midst.

We have seen a vote allegedly on food safety that will destroy yet another segment of the economy, the small, usually family-owned farm.

The majority leader of the Senate wants a “Dream Act” amnesty program that would fund the college education of the children of illegal immigrants. And while this is being contemplated, since January 2000 census data shows that 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, have arrived in the nation. In 2008 and 2009, 2.4 million new immigrants settled in the United States at the same time that 8.2 million jobs were lost.

Across our southern border Mexico is in a state of anarchy that threatens States from Texas to California, but the present administration is suing Arizona for taking action to respond to the threat.

We have seen the White House push for approval of a critical nuclear weapons treaty that clearly needs to be subjected to further thought before we allow the Russians to decide how many such weapons we can have.

We have an Environmental Protection Agency threatening to ignore Congress and initiate an authority it does not have, the imposition of regulatory control over carbon dioxide emissions. This would give it control over all energy use and thus control over our lives and the future of our economy.

The present Congress, until December 31, is filled with defeated Representatives and Senators, or those about to retire. It should be enacting only such legislation as will maintain the government until a newly-elected Congress takes office in 2011.

And we have a President who sat down this week with the present and future leaders of Congress for two hours in the White House and resolved absolutely NOTHING.

If we replaced the Democrats in Congress with randomly selected kindergarten children, we could do no worse than the ones who forced so-called Medicare reform, Obamacare, on a majority of Americans who expressed their opposition in “town hall” meetings and mass marches.

We have a government-owned automobile company producing obscenely priced electric cars that can barely travel beyond forty miles despite a massive infrastructure that will ensure that gasoline powered automobiles can transport Americans anywhere they want to go.

We have a Congress and administration that, in two years, inflated the nation’s debt beyond that of every previous combined Congress in the nation’s history.

Beyond our borders there are U.S. carrier groups in the Yellow Sea of China and the Gulf of Persia because we have never resolved to take action against a criminal cartel called North Korea and we lack the will to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities even though the entire Middle East would support the action.

Meanwhile, millions of homes in America are over-valued, forcing foreclosures when a rational reevaluation is called for. We have an official 9.6 unemployment rate that is in reality close to twenty million unemployed. Two million of them will lose unemployment compensation that has been provided for two years with which to find employment.

There cannot, however, be renewed employment until the income tax issue is resolved by the simple action of extending present rates.

We have a government that told us that the last Recession ended in 2009! By any rational definition, the U.S. is in a Depression.

Billions squandered. Trillions borrowed. It is a national death spiral that must be set right, but which is imperiled by a succession of potential presidential vetoes.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → The Kindergarten Congress

Video: Democrat Demogoguery in the House

More about → Video: Democrat Demogoguery in the House

Dems Pick Nancy as Minority Leader

Democrats Pick Nancy Pelosi as Minority Leaders in the House.

Republicans rejoice.

More about → Dems Pick Nancy as Minority Leader

Cartoon Round Up

More about → Cartoon Round Up

Election Fatigue

By Alan Caruba

It’s a lot like the marathon experience of “hitting the wall” when you have to push on to get to the finish line. It’s election fatigue.

Elections give media news people hundreds of hours to speculate, to evaluate, to discuss what is occurring in every district of every State, to report which candidate is ahead or behind, to trot out a new poll every day, until those who have probably made up their mind long before refuse to listen to another word.

There are, of course, thousands of words that follow an election and it must be said that the 2010 midterms were quite literally historic. As Karl Rove noted, “Tuesday’s election was epic. Republicans gained over 60 seats in the House and six in the Senate. They’ll now occupy eight additional governor’s mansions and at least 500 more seats in state legislatures.”

“The Republicans picked up more House seats than in any election since 1938, leaving the Democrats with the smallest number in the House since 1946,” and, predicted Rove, “Democratic losses could get worse in the next election. In 2012, three times as many Senate Democrats as Republicans face the voters—and many are from red states. Two more years of voting for the Obama agenda could do them in.”

The question in the minds of most Americans is how does all this translate into solving the awesome problems facing the nation and, more particularly, what does it mean to my future?

Everyone is going to have a different answer to the latter question because everyone has their own specific circumstances. I would not, for example, want to be a new college graduate right about now. The likelihood is they will be moving back in with mom and dad while others will be struggling to hold onto their homes.

While it is likely that the Bush tax cuts will remain, the temptation of States like California and other big spenders to raise taxes exists. The great challenge of our times is to shrink government at every level to an affordable size. Something is very wrong when the largest union in the nation is for government workers. It is inherently wrong that this union can give money to candidates when that money comes from members being paid with public funding.

The answer to the former question, the personal impact the post-midterm nation will have, involves the potential for a huge inflation, a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, a stagnant employment prospect as few jobs are created, and for some the prospect of being laid off from work or running out of the funds put aside or invested for retirement.

Real reduction of government is needed, but few believe it will occur. We have a bloated federal government workforce, many of whom are earning twice what a comparable private sector job would pay. There are entire federal departments and agencies that could be pared without being missed.

There are some important policy changes that could significantly improve the job sector and the mythical “energy independence” politicians love to talk about. You don’t just poke a hole in the ground and get oil. It takes time. Involves a lot of risk, and it takes lots of money.

Big Oil is in the business of risk and would spend the money if it was permitted to drill in and offshore of Alaska where vast amounts of oil are known to exist. There’s oil in the Dakotas and there’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico where the Obama administration is deliberately rendering thousands unemployed by slowing the permitting process. When you think oil, also think natural gas. The oil companies are as interested in it as crude.

Let’s stop handing out billions in tax credits and other funding for “Green energy”, wind and solar power. Few projects are more stupid than a proposal to build the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant in the Southern California desert. It just got the green light (no pun intended) from the Obama administration to the tune of $6 billion.

While the Greens are always screaming bloody murder about endangered species and the destruction of “pristine” land, this one project will take up 7,025 acres of federally owned land near Blythe, California. The cost of the transmission lines that will be needed is ridiculous when a single coal-fired or nuclear plant could produce many times more dependable, 24/7 megawatts of electricity than this blanket of solar panels ever will.

Barack Obama is still talking about a fictitious and fraudulent “climate change”, i.e., global warming at a time when most of the world has concluded that there is no global warming and when the largest carbon credit exchange in the U.S. just closed its doors.

Therein lies the real problem. Granted that the election has been a blow against the Obama agenda, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton who moved to the center after his midterm losses.

Obama is a very different animal. He is still capable of doing a lot of harm from the Oval Office and, as we have seen, he is not shy about doing it. This is an administration that added $2.7 trillion to the national debt, including a record $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009 and a $1.3 trillion deficit for FY 2010.

That’s why we must shake off election fatigue and be as relentless in the two years ahead as those through which we have passed. Obama is punishing America because he doesn’t like America.

He must be politically neutralized. It won’t be pretty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Election Fatigue

Are Liberals Just Nuts?

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has tried to discuss, debate, or argue political issues with a liberal eventually concludes they are dealing with someone too deranged to be influenced by facts. The midterm election defeat of Democrats in the House and the narrowed margin of control of the Senate mean nothing to liberals whose explanations ignore reality.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, explained the defeat in almost classic liberal terms. “Well, anger certainly continues to be all the rage in the corridors of American politics,” he pouted in an commentary titled “Man Up, America!” ignoring the fact that Nancy Pelosi--a woman--wielded the power in the House that produced the largest turnover of seats since 1938.

Ignoring the possibility that two years of legislative insanity that forced Obamacare on an unwilling majority of Americans, of stimulus bills that were nothing more than pork, of financial reforms that ignored the source of the mortgage meltdown, Carter concluded that “The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable, adding that the “hatred for Obama” had “more to do with race than anything else.”

This “white, conservative and independent Americans are all bigots” mantra ignores the fact that Obama made history as the first black man to be elected president and that it could not have happened if a lot of white people had not voted for him, starting with the Iowa primaries in a very white State.

“What makes today’s fury more worrying,” Carter continued, “is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts.” Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, it was Obama talking about people “who cling to their guns and religion” instead of turning their lives over to an all-powerful central government.

Nearly a million “angry right-wing extremists” turned up in Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest passage of Obamacare without a single arrest or incident. They were summarily dismissed by a very arrogant White House that was too busy forcing “healthcare reform” on the majority of Americans to pay attention to how many of them were unemployed.

There is an aspect of psychology called “projection” when one accuses someone of the very characteristics found in themselves. “What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums”, asked Carter. We call them liberals.

Compounding the failure, refusal or inability to accept the reality that liberal, Democrat actions, led by President Obama and enacted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, we have learned that the Speaker has made it clear that she wants to retain her power as the new House Minority Leader.

Historically, House Speakers who have presided over a loss of power resign, but not Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, her letter to the Democratic caucus cited “the most productive Congress in a half century” without apparently taking any notice that its legislative program led to a loss of 61 seats in the House. “We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back,” she said, citing the programs that were responsible for a crippled party in Congress.

Under normal conditions, the current Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, would be expected to be elected by the Democratic caucus to replace Madame Pelosi, but there does not appear to be anything “normal” about those who lost or those who survived.

Pelosi wants the Democrat Seal of Approval for two of the worst years Americans have been through and, of course, Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2006, halfway through former President Bush’s second term. Stimulus hasn’t worked. Unemployment is higher now than when Obama was elected. Obamacare, passed by Democrats who hadn’t even been allowed to read the bill, and a multitude of other ills resulted in a massive rejection of Democrats in Congress.

What have liberals learned from this? Nothing! The swift decline of confidence in Obama is attributed to his skin color. The economic stagnation is the fault of Wall Street. The rise in healthcare premiums will be blamed on insurance companies, not Obamacare. The anger of the electorate is blamed on angry, white-wing conservatives even though Tea Party candidates did not all get automatically elected to office.

On the Saturday following the elections, Rasmussen Reports summed up the situation for Obama as follows:

“Still somewhat in shellshock following Tuesday’s elections, President Obama so far seems content to blame the messenger, not the message.”

“In other words, the American people would really like his agenda if he had just explained it better. We’ll see.”

“Voters have mixed feelings about the tone the president set at his first post-election press conference on Wednesday. Most, in fact, are not confident that the president can work with the new Republican majority in the House to do what’s best for the American people.”

“Just before Election Day, the majority of voters said the election was a referendum on the president’s agenda and that he should change course if Republicans win control of the House. But most also don’t expect him to make that change.”

Obama got elected on a message of hope and change, but voters did not like the change and are running out of any hope that he understands what happened on Election Day.

That’s what happens when liberals are given power and that is why the next two years will be continued resistance to the changes voters want. Expecting them to rationally interpret the elections is a waste of time.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Are Liberals Just Nuts?

Nancy is Ready for her Close-Up

I, for one, am hoping the Democrats elect Nancy Pelosi to be the Minority Leader in the House. She will be a constant reminder of the pathetic depths to which the party has fallen and an inspiration to rid the Senate of Harry Reid, increase the GOP margin in the House, and elect a Republican President in 2012.

More about → Nancy is Ready for her Close-Up

Making Obama an Offer He Can't Refuse

More about → Making Obama an Offer He Can't Refuse