AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Brutal Racist Hate Crime Beating At McDonald’s (Victim May Be Transgender Or Beating Probably Okay)

The official Obama administration policy: “Never bring a lawsuit against a black.”  Because white people should be second-class citizens to pay for what they did, you know.

A white girl – who may or may not have been transgender – was beaten for an incredibly long time until she was lying near a trash can convulsing in seizure while numerous black McDonald’s employees and patrons did virtually nothing to stop the savage attack that just went on and on.

The attackers were two black girls who repeatedly kicked the victim in the head and at one point smashed her head against a wall.

The video appears here.  At least for the moment.  I hope you don’t watch it.

I actually did, because the McDonald’s employee who posted it lyingly claimed that the victim was a transvestite wearing a wig.  And I didn’t want to post this if it ended up being something other than what it very clearly is: a hate crime race beating against a white girl.  One of the ways I know that scumbag (and anyone who didn’t punch those two vicious criminal girls in the face to stop their attack is a scumbag) is lying because one of the attackers actually dragged the girl across the floor by her hair.  Some wig.  [Updated 4/24: I leave my exact words but strike them in order to provide clarification.  I was not trying to claim here the victim was NOT a transgender.  I had already stated that as possibly being the case twice prior to this sentence (and then did so again after this sentence).  And the reason I used the term “girl” was that I also could not be certain at the time I wrote this that “she” wasn’t a girl.  The details emerged the day after I published what was known at the time.  I am stating here that the employee who videotaped this savage incident while laughing about it (and who has been fired by McDonald’s) clearly lied about certain points, such as the “wig” which very clearly wasn’t a wig.

The other point I would make in this clarification is that if you’re a black person who doesn’t like my immediately jumping to the conclusion that the beating was a racially motivated “hate crime,” then please stop assuming that WHITE people are racists whenever there’s the slightest reason to come to that conclusion.  I say more about the stupidity behind “hate crimes” in my subsequent comment on this article here].

Here’s the story at the site which contains the video.

PIX11 NEWSROOM
8:35 p.m. EDT, April 22, 2011
BALTIMORE (PIX11)—

Two women are charged after a video showing a brutal attack on a teenage girl at a Baltimore-area McDonald’s restaurant surfaced on the internet Friday.

According to the Baltimore Sun, police have charged a 14-year-old girl as a juvenile, and charges are pending for her 18-year-old accomplice.  The attack reportedly occurred April 18 at the 6300 Kenwood McDonald’s location.

The Sun is also reporting that State’s Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger says that the assault may be classified as a hate crime because the attackers were both black, and the victim white.

The video, which was uploaded to LiveLeak.com, shows two black females kicking, punching and slapping a white female who at one point starts to have a seizure. Restaurant employees could be seen watching the fight and adding their own splash of commentary to the shocking scene, but only once half-heartedly trying to help the victim. One employee is even heard laughing.

A man who appears to be the manager at the fast food eatery, interjects between the victim and attackers about two times but ultimately gives up on separating the young women.

At first, the attackers appear to walk away from the battered victim with one of them uttering “she’s bleeding, yo.” The pair, however, emerge for a brutal second round where they drag the victim by her hair across the restaurant.

Finally a customer, an elderly white woman, attempts to rescue the victim but is pushed aside by the aggressive girls.

The video ends as the suspects flee the restaurant after having been told by restaurant employees that the police were on their way.

“Ya gotta go before the police come yo!” the worker is heard telling one of the girls.

The helpless victim is left on the floor where she is seen rolling around in convulsions as a result of what appears to be a seizure.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the incident took place or if the suspects were apprehended and charged. The condition of the victim is also unknown.

The identities of the women are also unknown.

Late Friday, the McDonald’s corporation issued a statement on the incident, expressing shock and outrage.

“We are shocked by the video from a Baltimore franchised restaurant showing an assault. This incident is unacceptable, disturbing and troubling. McDonald’s strives to be a safe, welcoming environment for everyone who visits.”

“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of customers and employees in our restaurants. We are working with the franchisee and the local authorities to investigate this matter.” 

If McDonald’s thinks it is “welcoming,” they seriously need to rethink their slogan.  Unless maybe it’s “Welcome to hell, I’ll be your beater, can I smash your skull open please.”

The first thing McDonald’s needs to do if it wants my business ever again is to fire every employee from the manager on down who allowed a woman to be beaten nearly to death in their restaurant.

But I’m not just pissed off at McDonald’s – as loathsomely as they acted (and I hope the chain loses a gazillion dollar lawsuit for not protecting that girl whether “she’s” a real girl or not) – as much as I’m pissed off at the fact that we now live in a society where our highest law enforcement officials say “Never bring a lawsuit against a black.”

The thing that strikes me is how this story ends.  The media doesn’t know anything about this.  Nobody’s done anything about it.  If it had been white attackers going after a black victim, dang, the mainstream media fecal matter would have hit that rotary oscillator with a vengeance, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been all over the media feeding frenzy even if it was entirely made up.

This vicious attack may end up getting filed as a hate crime.  But if it does, it’s only because the victim who was beaten nearly to death in public with about a dozen people doing nothing to stop it was homosexual.

To put it in O.J. trial terms, “If whitey aint gay, black attackers don’t pay.”

The moral of the story is this: if you are white, and you get the crap kicked out of you by black people, you tell the authorities and the media and everybody else that you are as queer as a three-dollar bill.  Because otherwise your “hate crime” case will get round filed.

I suppose I have a better understanding of how black people used to feel: an oppressive illegitimate criminal thug justice system that didn’t do a damn thing to help victims because of the color of their skin.  We’re still a ways off from the point where you’ll start seeing white people lynched on a public tree.  That’s the kind of thing that would be more likely during Obama’s and Holder’s second term.

On the bright side, eventually white people actually might get to use the “white rage” defense when we they go postal and commit a spree of racist hate crimes.

At least us whiteys have the “gay thing” to fall back on.  I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have helped a black victim back in the 50s, you know.  Nowadays, even Obama’s and Eric Holder’s policy of official racism can’t beat the hell out of THAT sacred cow.

Whether that victim is a transgender, or transvestite, or whatever, I’m praying for you to pull through and then hit the legal jackpot against that McDonald’s.  I’m truly sorry there was no one there to help you except a little old white lady.  Racism is an evil thing, even when it’s black people kicking the hell out of a white person while a whole bunch of black people stand around and laugh about it.

I’m going to say this, and a lot of black people aren’t going to like it.  200 years of white racism, and black people don’t get to call themselves “victims” anymore.  Because what we see in this “Never bring a lawsuit against a black,” and the black Attorney General talking about “my people,” and a white woman viciously attacked by black girls while a bunch of black people stand around laughing, is that YOU WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME EXACT CRAP HAD THE ROLES BEEN REVERSED.

Congratulations.  You’re just as bad as “racist whitey.”  And the only difference is that you haven’t got the power to unleash the evil that’s in your souls.  At least not quite yet.

Jesus told us that in the last days, ethnos (race) would rise against ethnos.  And that’s what we’ve got.  Even at McDonald’s.

Home Depot CEO Says Obama An Airheaded Academic Who Demonizes Real-World Job Creators

Flopping Aces got all their video from Townhall.  I got all the quotes from the following interview from Flopping Aces.

Go to either site to watch the videos of the interview.

CNBC’s Greg Hengler said that Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus

“…may have been the best defense of small business, and the most important attack on the Obama administration all year.  Marcus knows a little something about small business, because his business – Home Depot – was once a small business before it became a very BIG business. Home Depot employs 320,000 people, so Mr. Marcus knows a few things about job creation.

Bernie Marcus had the following broadside blast against the administration that he clearly views as ruining America and ruining the US economy:

Now you take some of the people the President surrounded himself with, now think about it a second, they’re all academics…most of them…I mean all of them, they come out of Harvard they come out of Yale. These guys are all on tenure. By the way they’re all on tenure. Tenure means they get paid whether they work or not, tenure means they are on insurance for life, tenure means they don’t ever have to worry about anything just because they were there for a number of years.  America is not that way. America is not that way. And if the President got out of, you know, Washington, in his cloak as I talked about, and started moving around the peasants which is people like everybody else in the world except for Washington. Washington has their own insurance plan, they got their own pensions, they don’t even abide by their own rules they everybody else lives by.

This “tenured” Obama “Washington” crowd sounds profoundly un-American, for what it’s worth.  You get the sense they could have woke up in Moscow, circa 1950, and fit in with the commissars and their never-once-succeeding five year plans just fine.

And Bernie Marcus speaks with unforked tongue when he accuses the whole Obama administration of being a bunch of common-senseless eggheads with no actual private sector experience whatsoever:

You can see why an incredibly successful CEO who’s actually DONE SOMETHING to create real jobs in the real world would be rather pissed off at the two-years’-worth of Obama’s demonizing the job creators of the business world.

Bernie Marcus continues, apologizing to a president who appears to despise actual job creation for his record of actual job creation:

Marcus – And when I talk to people who are creating jobs today…these are not villains. These are not monsters. They’re not like…

Kernan – And you think they are being portrayed that way?

Marcus – Oh, there is no question about it.

Kernan – How many employees does Home Depot have?

Marcus – They got about 320,000

Kernan – So you, Arthur and Ken are directly or indirectly responsible for 300,000 jobs?

Marcus – Yeah, we’re monsters and we’re disgusting human beings and I recognize that and I apologize to America right now, I’m sorry that I made wealth and I’m sorry that I’m creating jobs.

Damn right they’re monsters.  Tax those rich bastards.  Tax them until they fire all their American workers and ship those jobs overseas in countries so evil that they actually allow people and businesses to keep more of what they earn.  Tax them until the American economy crashes.  Tax them until the USA goes the way of the Dodo bird.

And then vote for Obama to preside over the ruined formerly great nation he “fundamentally transformed.”

China has ten times – TEN TIMES – the growth of the United States, while having lower tax rates.  And what do Democrats do?  Try to raise our tax rates even more.  And Democrats are employing Marxist class warfare and “spread the wealth around” redistributionist demagoguery to try to get their way.  What is amazing is that the Democrat Party in the United States is literally more communist than the Communist Party in China.

Jobs today are global; they can go anywhere on earth.  What American needs to do is respond to the countries’ that are taking our jobs away from us.  Which is why we need to lower the costs of investing in and doing business in America.  Democrats are demanding that we become less and less competitive even as they pursue a strategy of demonizing those who would make America MORE competitive.

Manufacturers Voting With Their Feet As Obama Kills The Economy

Emerson Electric, an American company founded in 1890, ranking number 111 on the Fortune 500, and the nation’s largest manufacturer of electronics and electronic equipment, is saying bye-bye to the country that hired Barack Obama.

You have to wonder how many businesses are saying goodbye to Obamination with their feet – or will soon start as his policies begin to take hold.

Emerson Electric Votes With Its Feet, Saying The Goverment Is Destoying American Manufacturing

By Richard McCormack
richard@manufacturingnews.com

One of the country’s most important industrial companies says the United States is not a good place to manufacture and it will continue moving its assets offshore.

The federal government is “doing everything in [its] manpower [and] capability to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” says David Farr, chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric Co., in a presentation at the Baird 2009 Industrial Conference in Chicago Ill., on Nov. 11. In comments reported by Bloomberg, Farr added that companies will continue adding jobs in China and India because they are “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something. I am not going to hire anybody in the United States. I’m moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs.”

In his Powerpoint presentation available on the Emerson Electric Web site, Farr notes that the federal government is damaging prospects for U.S. economic growth with a $1.41 trillion federal deficit (10 percent of GDP); $12 trillion in government debt that will grow to $20 trillion in 10 years; a policy of printing money; a “non-targeted $800-billion stimulus”; bailouts for Wall Street and the automobile companies; the prospect for cap and trade legislation; a “government takeover” of health care to the tune of more than $1 trillion; increasing taxes and regulations; and a “lack of U.S. $ support” for manufacturing. The global stimulus “soon will fade,” says Farr.

If I wanted to destroy a nation economically from within, I would do precisely as Obama is doing.  I would create a climate of confusion and uncertainty by preventing businesses from knowing what the future will hold for them so that they could not plan.  I would constantly threaten them with policies that will necessarily provide them with disincentives to hire new employees or expand their operations.  I would burden them with higher taxes and more onerous regulations.  And I would make essential resources (such as energy) more expensive.

And then I would simply sit back and watch that economy crawl into a hole.

You might like socialism just fine, but many of the companies that actually employ workers and produce the profits that keep government revenues flowing, don’t like it at all.

Wall St. Journal Bursts The Obama Bubble: ObamaCare Is All About Rationing

Reading through this article, you begin to come to two conclusions: 1) the problem with the costs of health care is NOT that there is too LITTLE government involvement in health care, but rather too MUCH, namely due to stupid government regulations that end up raising costs by undermining individual responsibility; 2) the people who most stand in the way of legitimate health care reform that would really work is Democrats and their special interest allies, such as organized labor.

ObamaCare Is All About Rationing
Overspending is far preferable to artificially limiting the availability of new procedures and technologies.

By MARTIN FELDSTEIN

Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama’s health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration’s goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating “high cost, low-value treatments,” by “implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt,” and by “directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers.”

The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to “health care that works.” To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama’s original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.

In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as “too expensive.”

One reason the Obama administration is prepared to use rationing to limit health care is to rein in the government’s exploding health-care budget. Government now pays for nearly half of all health care in the U.S., primarily through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The White House predicts that the aging of the population and the current trend in health-care spending per beneficiary would cause government outlays for Medicare and Medicaid to rise to 15% of GDP by 2040 from 6% now. Paying those bills without raising taxes would require cutting other existing social spending programs and shelving the administration’s plans for new government transfers and spending programs.

The rising cost of medical treatments would not be such a large burden on future budgets if the government reduced its share in the financing of health services. Raising the existing Medicare and Medicaid deductibles and coinsurance would slow the growth of these programs without resorting to rationing. Physicians and their patients would continue to decide which tests and other services they believe are worth the cost.

There is, of course, no reason why limiting outlays on Medicare and Medicaid requires cutting health services for the rest of the population. The idea that they must be cut in parallel is just an example of misplaced medical egalitarianism.

But budget considerations aside, health-economics experts agree that private health spending is too high because our tax rules lead to the wrong kind of insurance. Under existing law, employer payments for health insurance are deductible by the employer but are not included in the taxable income of the employee. While an extra $100 paid to someone who earns $45,000 a year will provide only about $60 of after-tax spendable cash, the employer could instead use that $100 to pay $100 of health-insurance premiums for that same individual. It is therefore not surprising that employers and employees have opted for very generous health insurance with very low copayment rates.

Since a typical 20% copayment rate means that an extra dollar of health services costs the patient only 20 cents at the time of care, patients and their doctors opt for excessive tests and other inappropriately expensive forms of care. The evidence on health-care demand implies that the current tax rules raise private health-care spending by as much as 35%.

The best solution to this problem of private overconsumption of health services would be to eliminate the tax rule that is causing the excessive insurance and the resulting rise in health spending. Alternatively, Congress could strengthen the incentives in the existing law for health savings accounts with high insurance copayments. Either way, the result would be more cost-conscious behavior that would lower health-care spending.

But unlike reductions in care achieved by government rationing, individuals with different preferences about health and about risk could buy the care that best suits their preferences. While we all want better health, the different choices that people make about such things as smoking, weight and exercise show that there are substantial differences in the priority that different people attach to health.

Although there has been some talk in Congress about limiting the current health-insurance exclusion, the administration has not supported the idea. The unions are particularly vehement in their opposition to any reduction in the tax subsidy for health insurance, since they regard their ability to negotiate comprehensive health insurance for their members as a major part of their raison d’être.

If changing the tax rule that leads to excessive health insurance is not going to happen, the relevant political choice is between government rationing and continued high levels of health-care spending. Rationing is bad policy. It forces individuals with different preferences to accept the same care. It also imposes an arbitrary cap on the future growth of spending instead of letting it evolve in response to changes in technology, tastes and income. In my judgment, rationing would be much worse than excessive care.

Those who worry about too much health care cite the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that health-care spending could rise to 30% of GDP in 2035 from 16% now. But during that 25-year period, GDP will rise to about $24 trillion from $14 trillion, implying that the GDP not spent on health will rise to $17 billion in 2035 from $12 billion now. So even if nothing else comes along to slow the growth of health spending during the next 25 years, there would still be a nearly 50% rise in income to spend on other things.

Like virtually every economist I know, I believe the right approach to limiting health spending is by reforming the tax rules. But if that is not going to happen, let’s not destroy the high quality of the best of American health care by government rationing and misplaced egalitarianism.

Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of The Wall Street Journal’s board of contributors.

So it’s not private insurance companies’ “excessive profits” that are to be demonized, but the government’s tax rules.  As is usually the case, the reason we’ve got high costs is because government is too involved, and is making things worse.  And again, who is the biggest obstacle to finally fixing the tax rules in a way that will lower costs?  Big labor, a key Democrat ally.

Having Democrats “fix” the system is like having foxes “guard” the chicken coop.

A further culprit in our skyrocketing medical costs are still another powerful Democrat special interest: the trial lawyers.  In exchange for the millions of dollars the trial lawyers give to Democrats, Democrat politicians continue to protect the system that allows lawyers to file frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit.  A simple “loser pays” system – such as the U.K. offers – would cut billions out of the costs of health care.  Instead, not only are doctors’ malpractice insurance costs exorbitant (which doctors must then pass on to patients), but fear of lawsuits leads to a practice known as “defensive medicine.” When 93% of physicians admit to ordering tests, prescribing drugs, or performing procedures to protect themselves from potential lawsuits rather than help their patients, something is just incredibly wrong.

Doctors are literally leaving medicine over the insane costs of medical malpractice.  In certain specialized fields, such as Ob/Gyn, whole regions are losing their doctors.  Insurance premiums for Ob/Gyn doctors are running $250,000 a year – and between higher insurance costs, lower government deductibles, and always high medical school costs, vitally important family care doctors are finding themselves netting less than fast food restaurant managers.

Alan Miller explains another reason why private insurance is absolutely vital to our health care system – and why a government “public option” would be disastrous:

Medicare reimbursements to hospitals fail to cover the actual cost of providing services. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent congressional advisory agency, says hospitals received only 94.1 cents for every dollar they spent treating Medicare patients in 2007. MedPAC projects that number to decline to 93.1 cents per dollar spent in 2009, for an operating shortfall of 7%. Medicare works because hospitals subsidize the care they provide with revenue received from patients who have commercial insurance. Without that revenue, hospitals could not afford to care for those covered by Medicare. In effect, everyone with insurance is subsidizing the Medicare shortfall, which is growing larger every year.

If hospitals had to rely solely on Medicare reimbursements for operating revenue, as would occur under a single-payer system, many hospitals would be forced to eliminate services, cut investments in advanced medical technology, reduce the number of nurses and other employees, and provide less care for the patients they serve. And with the government in control, Americans eventually will see rationing, the denial of high-priced drugs and sophisticated procedures, and long waits for care.

When we consider that – all protestations aside – some 88 million Americans will be shifted out of their employer-paid private insurance into a “public option” under the Democrats’ plan, we should be very, very worried.

Democrats aren’t doing ANYTHING to reduce the costs of healthcare.  All they are offering is total government control as fiscally-responsible panacea; and that is simply a lie.  Government bureaucracy is not more efficient; it is unimaginably LESS efficient.  The government has never been more efficient at delivering services (remember the $435 hammers? the $640 toilet seats? the $7,600 coffee makers?).  You want efficiency and economies of scale?  How about the government overpaying 618%.  Big government is inherently bureaucratic, inefficient, and corrupt.  And as their costs go up and up and up, the only way they will be able to bring their costs down will be to ration care.

Don’t just listen to me: listen to the man Obama chose to be his health policy adviser, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who said this year:

“Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide…. Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide” and “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.”

And:

“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”

Please don’t be so stupid not to think that rationing care – particularly to senior citizens who have already “lived their complete lives” – that rationing won’t be essential to government care.  And we will GET government care unless we rise up now to stop it.

Obama Wreckovery Act And Stimulus ‘Employment’: The Pathetic Reality

I downloaded the Obama administration’s “Recovery Report: 100 Days, 100 Projects.” It was an utterly laughable experience.

I copied the “100 projects” into a Word file and then conducted a search with the word “employees.” Here were the results of EVERY single occurrence:

9) A company in Maine “that had been struggling to pay its 19 employees” now being “back to work” thanks to a $2 million stimulus handout.

14) A New York construction company was able to rehire laid-off seasonal employees. Slate Hill had previously laid off 40 seasonal employees, possibly at the END OF THE SEASON. There is no mention of how many seasonal employees (meaning these are not full time jobs) were rehired, but the cost was over $7 million of your dollars in stimulus contract money.

15) The president of New Hampshire paving company Continental Paving ESTIMATES he would have had to lay off 75 employees if it weren’t for the Recovery Act (I “estimate” he may be a liberal). In any event, however many of those 75 jobs were actually “saved” come at the cost of $10 million in stimulus money.

29) EnergX, a Department of Energy contractor, has 87 new employees on the job. We’re told that that these jobs “are supported by Recovery Act funding” – whatever that means. No mention of how much government money they are getting.

51) An auto-repair business owner received $463,500 in stimulus funds which we’re told are “strengthening his short-term cash flow and putting him and his 10 employees in position to increase sales as the economy turns around.” Note that no mention is made of any new employees hired.

58) A start-up tire-recycling plant owner had borrowing fees of $45,750 for a $1.715 million equipment loan paid by stimulus funds. The owner “hopes to have 34 employees onboard by New Year’s Day next year.” Clearly, IF the owner is able to hire 34 employees, it will NOT be due to the pissant borrowing fees for the near $2 million in private bank loans.

75) Four hundred employees hired using Recovery Act funding reported for work at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. Now we’re getting somewhere! 400 plus a few employees from the other 74 programs, at a cost of ONLY $3.27 TRILLION!!! We’re not told how much these employees cost taxpayers, but we ARE told that most of the employees will be UNION.

83) A company selling and installing energy-saving window films for commercial buildings, saved $6,970 in fees on its SBA 504 loan when it bought a new space five times larger than its previous home. We’re told “the savings will help owners John and Kimberly Henderson add three employees to their staff of 12.” If you know any business owner who has ever hired full-time employees, ask him or her how much $7 grand in saved fee-money would go toward such a hiring decision. And THINK ABOUT IT: $3.27 TRILLION DOLLARS, AND OBAMA IS POINTING AT “HELPING” HIRE 3 EMPLOYEES IN ITS LIST OF HIS TOP 100 ACHIEVEMENTS!!!

And that’s IT. That’s ALL THE JOBS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR. And most of the list of EIGHT businesses really aren’t able to hire employees based on anything Obama did with his – did I mention? – $3.27 TRILLION in porkulus.

Think about it: this is Obama’s own “Look what we’ve accomplished!” list. This is all the man has to show for the largest spending bill in the history of human civilization! How would Mister Rogers put it: “Can you say, “pathetic”? I think you can!”

I wrote an article earlier this month titled, “Obama And Unemployment: Just So You Know How Pathetically Incompetent Dear Leader Is.” You might say it’s a harshly-worded title – until you see just what a ZERO Obama (who interestingly enough is often ALSO called “Zero“) has produced with more money than any government has ever spent in the entire history of the planet. That article mentions facts such as how Republicans were shut out of the bill; how no one in Congress was even allowed to read it before it was rushed through; how Republicans PREDICTED it would be a gigantic boondoggle; how Obama time after time boasted that he’d “saved” jobs only to see those very jobs go down the drain; how Obama created a marketing term called “saved jobs” to “create” 150,000 phantom jobs out of thin air that he could take credit for; how the stimulus money isn’t even going to the poorest counties that need help most; and how the Obama administration promised that unemployment – which is now at 9.4% – would NOT go above 8% if his stimulus bill was passed. And on, and on. Hence the disparaging title describing a failed president and a failed economic policy.

Obama is now claiming that his administration will “create or save” 600,000 MORE phantom jobs. Just realize that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is already on record claiming it has no way to verify Obama’s job numbers. Because they are a fantasy (Michelle Malkin calls it “The biggest most magical makework program ever“). The mainstream media – which adores their new “Dear Leader” – would never haved allowed President Bush to make claims about “saved” jobs. The whole thing is like building a house of cards in the wind.

All that as an introduction to this:

Stimulus program fraught with waste, report says

A Republican senator’s office says stimulus funds are going toward dubious projects, such as a $3.4-million tunnel for turtles. Obama aides say the report is flawed.

By Peter Nicholas, June 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington — A report due to be released today by a Republican senator contends the Obama administration’s stimulus program is fraught with waste and incompetence — evidenced by a turtle crossing in northern Florida that will cost more than $3 million and a snafu in which thousands of Social Security checks went out to people who had died.

Modeled after a release from the White House describing 100 stimulus projects that were in the works, the report put out by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma looks at the same number of projects but reaches starkly different conclusions. The title is “A Second Opinion on the Stimulus.”

“Will these projects make real improvements in the lives of taxpayers and communities or are they simply pet projects of politicians and lobbyists that never got off the ground because they are a low priority?” the report says.

Coburn’s staff spent about a month interviewing federal officials, reviewing data and compiling news clippings in a continuing examination of the $787-billion stimulus package.

Millions of dollars are going toward bicycle lockers, bike paths, walking trails and a skate park, Coburn said. One town in North Carolina is using stimulus funds to hire an administrator whose job will be to procure more stimulus funds, according to the report. […]

A theme of Coburn’s work is that money is going toward dubious projects that will leave little imprint. One project mentioned is the $3.4-million construction of a 13-foot tunnel near Tallahassee, Fla., that will allow turtles and other wildlife to safely cross U.S. Highway 27.

The report said the area “has the highest road-kill mortality rate for turtles in the world.” But it also suggests other uses for the money, and mentions Florida State University’s plans to lay off 200 faculty and staff members in hopes of saving millions of dollars.

Officials at the Florida Department of Transportation defended the project as one that not only would save turtles but also protect motorists. “A lot of these turtles are quite large. They get hit by a car, and they turn into flying objects,” said Josh Boan, the department’s natural resources manager.

Construction on the tunnel is to begin in September. State officials could not estimate how many jobs would be created.

Raising questions about the government’s ability to manage the stimulus money, Coburn’s report also focuses on more than 8,000 Social Security checks that have been mailed to people who are dead.

A spokesman for the Social Security system said the checks were mailed based on erroneous records. In most cases, the Postal Service returns the checks directly to the government.

One $250 check went to the home of Antonietta Santopadre, a 74-year-old retired hairdresser living in New York. The check was made out to her father, who died 35 years ago. In an interview Monday, Santopadre said: “I was infuriated. Where’s our money going? Our country is in such trouble right now.”

The Coburn report entitled “A Second Opinion on the Stimulus” is now available. Some of the section titles:

– “Free” Stimulus Money Results in Higher Utility Costs for Residents of Perkins, Oklahoma.

– FutureGen: The Stimulus Earmark that Wasn’t, Becomes the Costliest Pork Project in History.

– Little-Used “Shovel-Ready” Bridges in Rural Wisconsin Given Priority Over Widely Used Structurally Deficient Bridges.

– $800,000 for little-used Johnstown, Pennsylvania airport to repave a back-up runway; the “Airport for Nobody” Has Already Received Tens of Millions in Taxpayer dollars [note: that’s in pork-king and king-scumbag Jack Murtha’s district].

– $3.4 Million for Wildlife “Eco-Passage” in Florida; Project Still May Take Years to Finish [note: that’s the one about the turtles while 200 nearby employees are being laid off].

– Nevada Non-Profit Gets Weatherization Contract After Being Fired For Same Work.

– Non-Existent Oklahoma Lake in Line for Over $1 Million To Construct a New Guardrail.

– Taxpayers Taken for a Ride: Nearly $10 Million to be Spent to Renovate a Century Old Train Station that Hasn’t Been Used in 30 Years.

– Ten Thousand Dead People Get Stimulus Checks, Social Security Administration Blames a Tough Deadline.

-Town of Union, New York, Encouraged to Spend Money It Did Not Request For a Homelessness Problem It Does Not Have.

Mind you, this is just the porkulus bill. There was also the 9,287 pork-project-laden $410 billion Omnibus spending bill and the soon-to-come $1.5 trillion socialized health care bill (which will easily be triple that, given the longstanding tradition of massive underestimation of the actual cost of government programs).

And as we speak, Obama is showing how much he wants to save taxpayer money by illegally firing an Inspector General (in flagrant violation of a law he personally co-sponsored as a Senator) in order to protect one of his friends who abused Americorps funds.

One quote in particular that set me off:

In the course of his investigation, Walpin found [Sacramento Mayor and personal friend of Barack Obama Kevin] Johnson and St. HOPE had failed to use the federal money they received for the purposes specified in the grant and had also used federally-funded AmeriCorps staff for, among other things, “driving [Johnson] to personal appointments, washing his car, and running personal errands.”

I don’t know ’bout you, but I’m hoping to get me a job shinin’ Massah Bureaucrat’s shoes some day.

There are a whole lot of questions about whether Obama is creating any jobs with his massive government spending, but there is no question at all that the trillions of dollars being spent are all-too-real. And there is no question that the anvil will fall on the US economy due to the near doubling of the national debt as Obama adds a projected $9.3 trillion to the $11.7 trillion hole we’re already in. Obama is borrowing 50 cents on the dollar as he explodes the federal deficit by spending four times more than Bush spent in 2008 and in the process “adding more to the debt than all presidents — from George Washington to George Bush — combined.” And most terrifying of all, Obama’s spending will cause debt to double from 41% of GDP in 2008 to a crushing 82% of GDP in 2019.

What will be the result of all this insane spending, and not very far off? A quote from a CNS News story should awaken anyone who thinks the future will be rosy:

By 2019, the CBO said, a whopping 82 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will go to pay down the national debt. This means that in future years, the government could owe its creditors more than the goods and services that the entire economy can produce.

All that staggering hyperinflation-creating debt, and about the only jobs that are being created by it are washing cars and running errands for politically-connected Democrats.

Obama’s Tax and Health Plans WILL Hurt Businesses – And Ultimately American Workers

There’s quite a bit of confusion about Obama’s tax plan and its effect on small business and American workers.

John McCain stated during Tuesday night’s debate that most small businesses would see their taxes increase due to Barack Obama’s tax plan.  Barack Obama corrected him and said that only a small percentage of small businesses would see their taxes go up.  Both men are wrong.  And both are right.

Obama may or may not be right when he says that only a small percentage of small business would see their taxes go up under his economic plan – as it is written now (in at least its fourth version).  He hasn’t specified whether he will tax on the basis of net or gross, whether inventory counts as total part of total income, and so on (because the media will NOT do its job and press a liberal on economic details).  But regardless of how the specifics pan out, don’t forget that Bill Clinton similarly campaigned on a tax relief for the middle class economic plan – and he immediately taxes on the middle class early in his first term.  Given the high likelihood of a Democrat-controlled Congress that is eager to have massive government social projects, another such “undeclared” tax hike on the middle class is actually quite likely.

John McCain may have been incorrect in how he phrased his objection during the debate, but he is still right enough to win the argument if the facts actually come out.  He was probably wrong in saying that most small businesses would see their taxes increase in terms of the total number of businesses.  If you earn a living mowing lawns, and have no employees, or you have a business out of your home, you probably won’t be paying any higher taxes.  But keep in mind that a small business can have as many as 500 employees (up to a 1,000 in some industries) and be classified as “small.”  And such businesses are the real engine of our economy.  If a small business even employs a handful of employees, it is likely its revenues easily exceed Obama’s $250,000 figure.  It is these businesses which hire the most workers, and it is these businesses that Obama will start taxing.  It is also these businesses which will suffer the most even from a modest increase in their operating costs.  Many are skating on pretty thin ice as it is.  They can’t just sell more stock.

If Barack Obama raises the taxes for these small business owners, there will be layoffs.  And as his plan is right now, he is promising to raise their taxes.  Realize that we are in a tough economy.  It is harder to obtain loans.  Fewer people will be buying.  Small businesses will be struggling to survive, and if Obama does what he promises to do – particularly when he is going to force businesses to start paying health care as well – you WILL see layoffs.

Meanwhile, Obama is decrying John McCain for wanting to give tax breaks to big oil.  John McCain does NOT want just to give tax breaks to big oil (actually it was OBAMA who voted with Bush for the last big energy bill giveaway to big oil); he wants to lower taxes for ALL corporations.  Most nations realize that lowering taxes for corporations has resulted in corporations creating more jobs and more tax revenues, and that more corporations will be attracted to their country.  But not the United States: we have the second highest corporate tax rate as it is.  Obama wants to be “#1.”

Is that good for our struggling economy?  Your vote on November 4 will be your answer that question.

Another thing Obama wants to do is impose requirements for businesses to provide comprehensive health care for their employees or pay into a government fund.  Small businesses would be ostensibly exempted from the requirement, and would get a 50 percent health-care tax credit to help ease their cost of employee coverage.  People with pre-existing conditions – which often impose the largest cost on the health care system – cannot be denied coverage.  Businesses who hire such people will be forced to grin and bare it.

I wonder how many older workers will be fired in order to hire new – and less expensive – younger workers?  Under Obama’s plan, I’d sure be looking at my older employees as “potential health care time bombs” just waiting to explode.

Do you think that businesses and corporations will begin to pay very close attention to the health of the employees they hire, or do you think they won’t care about how much a new workers’ mandatory health care will cost?

Between raising taxes, and mandating expensive new requirements, many businesses and corporations will experience a genuine double whammy.  Do you think American businesses are made of money, or do you think they are vulnerable?  You will be answering that question in your vote on November 4.

One thing is extremely important to understand: Obama’s health care plan is modeled on the Massachusetts plan.  How are things going there?  Well, in the three years of the program’s existence, the tiny state is now already facing cost overruns of over $400 million.  Does that sound like a rousing success?  Massachusetts is facing a projected 85% increase in its costs by 2009 – which should set up a serious red flag that such programs are MASSIVELY underfunded.

You need to understand something else that emerged from Tuesday night’s debate: is health care a basic right?  Obama answered “yes.”  What does that mean?  It means that you have a duty to provide me with health care.  You have a constitutional, government-imposed duty to give me health care – no matter what – even if it costs you and your family to do so.  Am I an alcoholic who needs a liver transplant?  You owe me a new liver.   Did I sustain a brain injury riding my motorcycle without a helmet because I like to feel the wind in my hair?  Doesn’t matter.  I have a fundamental constitutional right to that liver, or to that brain surgery and all the long months of incredibly expensive therapy.  If I have a right to health care in the sense that Barack Obama believes, nothing else matters.

Do you understand how expensive this can all get?

Do you understand that Barack Obama is essentially talking about socializing a quarter of our economy?  Do you trust your government’s track record?

Your vote will be your answer to that question.

Barack Obama’s health care plan is estimated to cost $1.6 trillion in 10 years.  But that doesn’t take into account the very sort of cost overruns and cost increases that are even now plaguing the very state that Obama is basing his own plan upon.  What is going to happen to our economy given the extremely real likelihood that Obama’s massive national plan runs into similar issues?  Do you believe our economy is strong enough to bear the brunt of these massive cost increases?

Your vote will be your answer to that question.

Let me also point out something else: if businesses and corporations are forced to absorb shocking new costs, do you believe they will just swallow their profitability, or do you think they will pass their new costs onto you through higher prices?  Barack Obama keeps talking about his “95% of Americans will get a tax break” (which means that 30-40% of Americans who don’t actually pay income taxes will get an IRS-subsidized welfare check).  Will that check compensate for the higher prices you are likely to pay across the board for virtually everything you buy?

Again, your vote on November 4 will answer that question.

Don’t be too suprised if you vote yourself right out of a job.

Obama DELIBERATELY Distorts Sarah Palin’s Experience

This rather devastating analysis comes by way of Big Mouth Frog:

Politics up to the Minute
by Mark Halperin

“For Barack Obama to argue that he’s experienced enough to be president because he’s running for president is desperate circular logic and it’s laughable. It is a testament to Barack Obama’s inexperience and failing qualifications that he would stoop to passing off his candidacy as comparable to Governor Sarah Palin’s executive experience managing a budget of over 10 billion dollar dollars, and more than 24,000 employees.” —Tucker Bounds, spokesman John McCain 2008

Anderson Cooper Obama Experience vs Sarah Palin

Barack Obama Said That He Had More Executive Experience Because Of The Size Of His Campaign.

CNN’s ANDERSON COOPER: “And Senator Obama, my final question, some of your Republican critics have said you don’t have the experience to handle a situation like this. They’ve in fact said that Governor Palin has more executive experience as mayor of a small town and as governor of a big state of Alaska. What’s your response?”

OBAMA: “Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has I think 50 employees. We’ve got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years.”

(CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees,” 9/1/08)

Notice how Barack Obama first misrepresents Sarah Palin’s actual record – to the extent that he ignores her governorship altogether – to focus on her time as Mayor of Wasilla.  And he hypes the fact that he’s got a campaign staff of 2,500.

Well, Barack, you’re not running against the Mayor of Wasilla; you’re running against the Governor of Alaska.  And the resources she has, yes – GOVERNED – dwarf anything you have to compare it to.  That’s why all you can do is pretend she was never really governor after all.  In point of fact, Sarah Palin has a budget in the billions, and manages at least TEN TIMES more employees than you ever have.

Nothing is worse than a politician who engages in the most trivial lies in order to distort the record for cheap personal political gain.  Grow up, Obama.

Expect an avalanche of lies.  When the candidate himself is desperate enough to stoop to flat-out distortions of fact, you can know that his army of cockroaches will do a hundred times worse.