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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Caruba's Crystal Ball: 2012 Election Predictions

By Alan Caruba

It is time my friends to take my crystal ball out of its velvet-lined box, dust it off, and prognosticate. I have gazed deeply into its refracted light regarding the November 2012 elections and the Republican candidates. Here is what it tells me.

Texas Governor Rick Perry will be an August entry into the field of candidates and just blow everyone else out of the race. He has a hell of a track record in the Lone Star state where he became the first governor since WWII to reduce spending using a line item veto to scrub $3 billion from the budget. He has done many other things that conservatives just love and independent voters, shell-shot from Obama’s crazed assault on America, will support. He has never lost an election!

Gov. Mitt Romney is Mr. Flippity-Floppity; a political disaster waiting to happen. His poll rankings are due mostly to name recognition. John McCain beat him out for the nomination last time around and these two RINOs should taking up quilting or some hobby other than politics.

Rep. Michelle Bachman is the Tea Party flavor of the month, but will generate little fervor beyond the patriot legions. My crystal ball says America is not ready for a woman president and that includes Sarah Palin who, in case no one has noticed, is not running. If that makes me sexist, then so be it.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is toast after the Iowa primaries which will tilt heavily toward Ms. Bachman because she was born there and because Iowans love mavericks. Pawlenty is just too “nice” at a time when voters want a candidate who exudes a more aggressive persona.

Rep. Rick Santorum or as we say around here, “Rick Who?” has no traction at all. He will be gone by Iowa and New Hampshire.

Herman Cain has personality to spare, but after four years of Obama, many voters are going to be wary of voting another Black American into the Oval Office. (I would vote for Rep. Allen West in a heartbeat.) Meanwhile, Cain will be offered the job of Secretary of Commerce in the Perry administration.

Rep. Ron Paul will be remembered as the Harold Stassen of this generation of voters. The original Stassen ran for the GOP nomination for president eight (8) times between 1946 and 1992! A Libertarian, Paul has a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones. On television he comes across as everyone’s angry grandpa.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was deserted by virtually his entire campaign staff weeks ago. He needs to officially retire from the race and go back to doing commentary for Fox News. Even Mike Huckabee had the good sense to stay put there.

Lastly, there’s some guy called Jon Huntsman who nobody has ever heard of except the immediate members of his family. He was Obama’s ambassador to China. No need to say anything more about Jon.

For those who actually think Obama will be reelected, relax. He’s already political road kill even though he will get the Democrat nomination.

Obama’s lost his mojo. Lots of people have someone like him in their family and, as often as not, they’re a crack addict, a mental case. The aura of the office and all its trappings will do nothing for this moron. He will do worse than George McGovern did in 1972 against Richard Nixon or Walter Mondale in 1984 against a former California Governor named Ronald Reagan.

And, yes, there are a lot of GOP candidates. By contrast the Communist Democratic People’s Party has only one.

© 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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Dump "The Donald"

By Alan Caruba

Listening to and watching Donald Trump talk with Fox News’s Sean Hannity about how rich he is and how smart he is was truly a vomit-inducing moment. The notion that this extremely successful egomaniac would ever be President of the United States is surreal. It’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on steroids.

Now we learn that he is going to announce whether he is going to run on the season finale of “The Apprentice.” The show is scheduled to air on May 15. Reportedly he will hold a press conference to announce the decision about being a candidate in the Trump Tower in New York “a few days after” the finale.

This is such a naked sham for the purpose of getting lots of viewers for his show that it should be embarrassing to everyone who has, even momentarily, taken his phony “campaign” to gain the Republican Party’s nomination seriously. Hannity was snookered or, more likely, he was using Trump to hype his show’s ratings and vice versa. In a similar fashion, Fox’s Greta Van Susteren has of late used Trump appearances for her show.

Just as I and others cautioned voters in 2008 that Barack Obama was a completely unknown quantity with a totally fabricated life story, it behooves me to warn voters to GET SERIOUS about Trump.

Running the nation requires credentials that go well beyond being a successful businessman. America has coast-to-coast successful businessmen and women, but if a company’s CEO makes bad decisions, the Board of Directors can fire them. You can’t say “You’re fired!” to the President of the United States until the next election.

Let me get the formalities out of the way. I am not jealous of Donald Trump because he’s rich. Much of the population is richer than me and I could not care less. I understand that Trump has exhibited considerable business acumen, but that is not the same as political acumen, nor does it suggest that it prepares him to deal with heads of state and the nasty events that occur; frequently unexpectedly.

Nor has everything Trump has put his name to been a great success. He gambled on gambling in Atlantic City and that was a bad bet. Fortunately he owed the banks so much money he could write his own ticket. In fairness, all the casinos took a bath. Instead of gambling, the few people visiting Atlantic City these days are there to buy its famous salt water taffy.

Trump is a strident self-promoter. He is a bombast. He lacks subtlety which, for his line of work may be a good thing, but for someone to whom we would have to trust the future of the nation, what he lacks most is the experience that a professional politician acquires over time. I hate to admit this, but it is true. The lack of this experience and judgment is blindingly apparent in the current White House resident.

Trump wants to win—all the time. Politicians want to survive with their principles reasonably intact and a fat government pension. It is a whole different mindset. The ones the voters reject tend to become lobbyists.

We have a history of presidents who just stunk up the job because they came to it as engineers like Hoover and Carter or ivory tower scholars like Wilson. For a long time, Americans elected a succession of generals because the president’s job was mostly about expanding the size of the nation, generally by shooting our way to the West Coast, or fending off Barbary Pirates, yet another of Thomas Jefferson’s many achievements.

Presidents become celebrities AFTER they’ve been in the office. Few are celebrities going in unless, like Obama, their celebrity is totally manufactured by skilled public relations professionals. After two years in the job, the only things we know for sure about Obama is that he’s a moron, probably a Muslim, and definitely a Marxist.

If you want business acumen, Mitt Romney has it to spare. True, he’s a bit of a RINO, but it’s hard to find a Republican these days who isn’t. Gov. Pawlenty is a politician and that is not a bad thing. Gov. Huckabee was a politician, but is now a successful anchor of his own show on Fox News. He is going to stay put. Rep. Bachman is the political equivalent of your ex-wife, smart and, like Trump, impossible to shut up. There's a reason we haven't heard from Sarah Palin lately and that's because she's smart enough to not want the job.

I guarantee you that, within one month of his inaugural, you would be kicking yourself for voting for Trump. His incessant need to demonstrate he knows best and is the greatest president ever would be the mirror image of Barack Obama’s crazed ideology.

Right now Trump is a novelty, a distraction, a false hope. There’s plenty of time for the campaign process to sort out who will be the Republican choice. My bet is that Trump will announce he’s not running. If I am wrong, the happiest man in America will be Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Time to (Officially) Start Worrying About the Next Election

By Alan Caruba

It seems nuts even to a political junky like me, but I am already worrying about the November 2012 election now that Obama has made it official that he is running.

I think Obama can be easily defeated for all manner of reasons that include the way he has begun to lose his liberal Democrat base thanks to the Libyan non-war and the more general electorate thanks to Obamacare, the bailouts, a soaring national debt, unemployment, and gas prices.

What does bother me is what appears to be a fairly lackluster group of expected GOP candidates for the presidency currently gearing up to announce their candidacies. They are not generating a lot of enthusiasm at this point, but there is a lot of time for one of them to catch fire if they make a real case for themselves and against Obama.

Many people are understandably focused on present economic fears and November 2012 seems a long way off. There’s an unrealistic disappointment in the performance of the new batch of Republicans in Congress. Members supported by the Tea Party have barely been in office, but some are beginning to assert themselves.

Within the Republican leadership, there seems to be the view that they need only let Obama and the Democrats hang themselves as the national debt and deficit continues to skyrocket, along with inflation, rising gas prices, and a lingering high unemployment rate.

Republicans are understandably reluctant to be blamed for shutting down the government if they cannot get the White House and Democrats to agree to more realistic budget cuts. The Democrat strategy is to brand them as “extremists” in a shutdown. The mainstream media will reflect this. Some 25-30% of liberals will accept this, but that still leaves a majority of Americans who will not.

The fact remains, even with a Republican majority in the House, the majority Democratic Senate is a major roadblock to solving the financial problems of the nation and the White House can still wield a veto. However, keeping the government going with continuing resolutions based on cutting a few billion from a $14 trillion dollar debt is beginning to look lame.

It is, however, the presumptive Republican candidates that are my concern at this point and, it will surprise those who have read my criticisms of him, but I think Mitt Romney may emerge is the leader of the pack.

The surprise for many who hear him is that Mitt Romney is a dynamic throwback to Ronald Reagan, espousing the same values. When he addresses Republican audiences these days, he makes a lot of sense, particularly when he dissects Barack Obama and when he discusses the role of business in American life. He does so without Tele Prompters and with real passion. If America can elect a black President, they can elect a Mormon. I can remember when fears were expressed about JFK’s Catholicism.

Forget about Newt Gingrich. Too much baggage from his personal life and an opposition research file on him a foot thick means he is not a viable candidate against the likes of Obama.

Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty strikes me as a nice fellow who says the right things, but few know who he is and those that do can’t figure out why he wants to be President or should be. Too much of what he says comes out sounding bland. The same can be said of Gov. Mitch Daniels. Both are good men, but neither offers a compelling reason to pay them much attention.

Haley Barbour has a ton of political expertise and a good record as Mississippi Governor, but the problem is that he is from Mississippi. He’s “too southern” and, in a presidential campaign, his opposition would show up at every rally waving the Confederate flag and so would some of his supporters!

Then there are what I call the weird candidates, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Donald Trump, none of whom have come out and said they are running for the nomination. Palin excites the far right because the woman is never boring. That, however, is not a criterion for running the country. Former Gov. Huckabee is making a ton of money with his popular Fox Channel and likely knows he’s better off there.

Donald Trump has been playing the media and getting tons of exposure by hinting he might run. He is a combination of real estate mogul, television star, and a celebrity who agreed to be roasted on the Comedy Channel. He’s smart enough to know that being president would be a demotion and cut in pay. He wouldn’t be able to tell Congress “You’re fired!”

Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favorite, is a smarter version of Palin. Both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, serious minded Congressmen, are too young and too smart to get into the race at this time. Forget about Herman Cain, a pizza magnate; a good man for sure, but not now, probably not ever.

These candidates, individually and in aggregate, probably account for the reason why the name of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie keeps coming up despite his denial that he will run at this time. If the GOP convention were a Hollywood movie, one could see it turn to Christie after a deadlock and draft him to run, but it isn’t and that is not going to happen.

Ronald Reagan had been Governor of California for two terms. He gained political credits when he ran against then President Jerry Ford for the nomination and, after four years of Jimmy Carter, he looked very good. Even the Bush’s, father and son, had the political credentials to run and win, though we need to recall what a squeaker that first George W. election was when we came within a hair’s breath of having loony Al Gore in the Oval Office.

Whoever is chosen to carry the party’s banner had better be willing to tear into Obama and the Democrats because, if he bores us to death, Obama will destroy the nation in a second term.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Sitting Together

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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

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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

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Barack the Barbarian

By Alan Caruba

In the film, Conan the Barbarian, his father asks him what is best in life and Conan answers “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.”

Fortunately, Barack Obama has not been able to crush his “enemies” which, in the run-up to the midterm elections, he identified as “Republicans.” Nor have the independents and the Tea Party movement been driven from the political battlefield. They’re gaining ground.

The Obama administration has been able to inflict a great deal of damage to the nation and, if it was an invading army, Americans would have taken up arms long ago against it.

They may have to form militias to protect themselves along the nation’s southern border while the administration sues Arizona and does little to stem the flow of illegal aliens and an invasion of narco-warriors. Meanwhile, half the States are suing the federal government supporting Arizona and, of course, in opposition to Obamacare.

Americans, accustomed to obeying the law, are beginning to look like the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 40s who were told they were being “relocated” and voluntarily boarded cattle cars to the Nazi death camps. Aggressive airport scans and searches are generating anger against an increasingly intrusive and coercive government. Are ID cards far behind?

The response is predictable. According to the most recent Zogby polls, “President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has dropped to the lowest point of his presidency at 39%. The percentage of likely voters who say the nation is on the wrong track “is now the highest since Obama took office at 69%.” Nearly as high, are the 61% oppose the airport security measures.

Americans have witnessed a take-no-prisoners approach to politics from a president so partisan that even meeting with Republicans was limited to a handful of charades intended to pass for a discussion of the issues, most prominently his meeting to “discuss” healthcare reform.

Obama's condescension regarding his political opposition is beginning to be matched by his growing disenchantment with the press and the feeling is mutual.

The one aspect of life in the Oval Office thus far that hasn’t attracted a lot of attention is the fact that Obama adopted all of George W. Bush’s military agenda. He recently announced that U.S. troops will stay on in Afghanistan through 2014.

His aggressive use of drones to kill Taliban and al Qaeda lurking along the Pakistan border has now been extended to Yemen, so in point of fact Obama has also adopted the Israeli policy of killing terrorist leaders before that make more trouble. There’s a lot of irony in all of this.

If Obama has been hearing the lamentations from Americans who have lost their jobs and homes, it has been mostly rhetorical. Other than seeking to extend unemployment payments to the far horizon, he has been spectacularly incapable or indifferent to job creation. If anything, the moratorium on Gulf oil drilling cast even more thousands out of work and the EPA is hell bent on shutting down coal mines and the utilities, fifty percent of which, use coal to generate electricity.

Why would anyone expect a man wedded to the unions and socialist ideology to have any idea about how to create a job? Or care about workers who are not government employees?

Barack the Barbarian is giving every evidence of being an enemy of the people as the U.S. Constitution is shoved aside to destroy the economy and deprive Americans of their rights.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Cartoon Round Up

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Impatient Americans

By Alan Caruba

Americans are an impatient people. There’s a reason why every manner of labor-saving device was invented here and why we are in love with every kind of device that lets us instantly communicate with one another.

In an earlier era, it might have taken longer for a majority of Americans to realize just how awful President Obama’s legislative and other policy initiatives were for the nation, but a plethora of punditry on countless Internet websites and blogs alerted them even while the mainstream media was trying to deceive them as they had with their support for candidate Obama.

As an aside, media prognosticators are predicting that daily newspapers are essentially all dinosaurs and many, if not most, will be gone in a decade or so. The general rule is that new technology, the Internet, drives out old technology, dead-tree newspapers.

The other factor is that most daily newspapers with their liberal outlook have simply been abandoned by subscribers who have tired of seeking real news amidst the propaganda. Prediction: none of the news weeklies will be around in five years or less.
When even the National Enquirer and Star Magazine are filling for bankruptcy protection, you know the times they are changing. Survivors, however, may be the nation’s many weekly newspapers because, like politics, all news is local.

Impatience with a Congress that was so clearly out of touch with most constituents has resulted in a historic turnover of power to the Republican Party and it is a far more humble party than its heyday during George W. Bush’s two terms, the latter of which saw Americans return Democrats to power.

Americans had already grown weary of the war in Iraq that had begun in 2003 and had little enthusiasm for the nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. Throughout history, great empires have fallen because they got over-extended in such conflicts.

Making matters worse for any administration is the growing perception that the Middle East is psychotic; a place where reason takes a backseat to a seventh century religion that dominates its politics and social life. Watching Muslims blow up mosques filled with other Muslims is sufficient to convince many Americans that no amount of military power or billions in foreign aid will change anything.

Only one nation in the Middle East poses any kind of military threat and that is Iran. The minute it actually acquires nuclear weapons will be the hour in which Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and various Gulf States sit down at the table with Israel to discuss and plan ridding itself of this threat. The Iranian leadership—not its people—are certifiably crazy.

Americans will be looking to a Republican controlled House to rid the nation of Obamacare and begin to address over-spending, joblessness, and other issues, but the next two years will be spent in triage, trying to stop the bleeding until the patient can make it to the operating room and that will require the election of a new president and a Republican Senate.

So Americans are going to have to strive to be patient while the many Republican governors redistrict their states to aid a victory in 2012. They will have to content themselves with legislative maneuvers to defund Obamacare or remove many of its more noxious mandates. Also on the To-Do list will be to put the Environmental Protection Agency in manacles before it utterly destroys the economy with crazed greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

There is little that can be done to turn around the decades-old disastrous energy policies that have stalled the construction of the many new coal-fired and nuclear plants needed to provide the electricity that is the very breath of life to the nation. The Obama administration will also continue to thwart any oil exploration and drilling, and how much of a priority this will be in the new Congress is unknown.

Meanwhile the White House has announced that, upon his return from India, President Obama will sit down with the Republican leadership of the House along with their Democrat counterparts including the noxious Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It is likely to be little more than a photo-op because this president is deaf to partisanship or the reversal of his plans to destroy the nation.

This means that that a less frightening two years is ahead with the hope of real change in 2012. The economy is barely improving and is likely to remain stagnant, even with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. A Mount Everest of federal regulations will have to be eliminated to get the economy moving again.

And then there are the unknown and unpredictable “events” that will occur. 9/11 was one such event in 2001.

On September 18, 2008, there was a little reported electronic run on U.S. banks that withdrew $550 billion before the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop it. It blew away the charade of the nation’s housing market that involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Privatizing both should be a GOP priority. Americans have yet to have been told who withdrew those billions.

Other events over which there is no control such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes could play a role. We’ve seen how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico undermined confidence in the Obama administration.

Two years isn’t really that long a time, but a lot can happen and it will call for patience and perseverance.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Spinning the Democrat Loss

By Alan Caruba

It is now generally agreed that the Democratic Party will sustain large losses in the midterm elections. It will be interesting to see how their candidates and leadership explain why they lost.

My guess is that we shall hear a lot of talk about racism. This is the chief charge leveled against the Tea Party movement and it is utterly without substance. Democrats, however, are very likely to spin the loss as bigotry in general and, in particular, directed against America’s first black president. Obama has been rejected for reasons obvious to anyone who is unemployed, has had their home foreclosed, and an electorate aware of multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

The next fallback position will be, of course, to blame the economy, but the Democrats literally own the economy and have owned it going back decades to the 1930s when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected and reelected while prolonging the Great Depression for ten years until the economy was rescued by a full-employment program called World War Two.

Those were the years when Social Security, a huge Ponzi scheme, was introduced, followed by Medicare. Both are now insolvent and, like all socialist schemes, have “run out of other people’s money.”

The effort to take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy with Obamacare is a major reason for the Democrat failure at the polls. Forced through a Democrat controlled Congress through bribery and arm-twisting in the face of enormous public rejection and protest, the Democratic Party experienced a paroxysm of hubris that ignored the will of the People.

There is, too, a widespread sense that Congress, including some RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, has failed the People. The critical role of the “independents”, voters who do not identify with either party, will be manifested and it can no longer be ignored by either party. Last week, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that an astonishing 65% say that Congress has failed to perform its critical duty to maintain the welfare of the nation.

The statistics of government failure whether it is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all give voice for a return to the founding principles of the nation; a smaller, limited central government.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, John Fund noted that “It took Democrats in the House of Representatives 40 years to become out-of-touch enough to get thrown out of office in 1994. It took 12 years for the Republicans who replaced them to abandon their principles and be repudiated in 2006. Now it appears that the current Democratic majority has lost voter confidence in only four years.”

What those inside the D.C. Beltway have failed to comprehend is that, in an era of the Internet and instant access to encyclopedic amounts of information about the legislative actions of Congress, they no longer can fool all of the people all of the time, nor even some of the people all of the time. A core of about 25% believes in liberalism. The rest of the population does not.

The voters, too, will have rejected a vicious Democrat campaign of personal destruction directed against Republican candidates, accusing them of sexual misbehavior, witchcraft, and other misdeeds that were not only lies, but totally irrelevant at a time when the nation’s economy is in serious trouble.

Along with the Democratic Party, the nation’s mainstream media will suffer a continuing loss of the credibility necessary to their existence. In media critic, Bernie Goldberg’s words, it was “a slobbering love affair” with Barack Obama that got him elected.

I think, too, that many saw the rally staged by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel as an insult to the seriousness of the nation’s problems. Having people like Muslim convert, Cat Steven, participate, or Sheryl Crow who advocates bizarre environmental ideas, simply degraded the event further. There were few laughs to be had from the small crowd that attended.

There will be payback as daily newspapers grow thinner, as news magazines like Newsweek get sold for $1 and the assumption of its debt. The network news programs will continue to lose viewers, while Fox News channel continues to thrive, along with a bevy of conservative radio hosts and commentators.

Ultimately, though, this is a loss to be laid at the feet of the first openly socialist president of the United States, Barack Obama, and it is testimony to the rejection of his political philosophy and his determination to “transform” the nation.

Washington, D.C., with its legions of lobbyists and the need to raise huge amounts of money to get reelected does strange things to the judgment of those in Congress. No matter how the numbers turn out following the election, Republicans must keep in mind that they did not so much “win”, as the Democrats lost.

The same forces are at work and will be on a faster schedule if Republicans do not prove responsive and fail to make the changes necessary to save the nation from economic ruin.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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