Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
“Too many folks still don’t have a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. And so, the question in this election is which way do we go?” President Obama asked at a fundraiser in Chicago on Sunday.
“Do we go forward towards a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared?” Obama asked. “Or do we go backward to the same policies that got us in the mess in the first place?”
“I believe we have to go forward,” Obama said. “I believe we have to keep working to create an America where no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your last name is, no matter who you love, you can make it here if you try. That’s what’s at stake in November. That’s what is why I am running for a second term as president of the United States of America.”
“Shared prosperity” is collectivism. Statism. Marxism. It means taking from those who produce goods and services to fund those who don’t, which is certainly outside any legitimate function of government under the United States Constitution.
Just remember, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” That’s why Obama can take your profits that ought to be going to your family and your children and redistribute them to somebody who will vote for him.
Obama has said we need to “spread the wealth around.” If you listen to the man talk, I defy you to explain to me how Barry Hussein could possibly refute the central economic statement of Marxism:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – Karl Marx
Obama ISa Marxist. That is simply a fact of understanding what words mean.
Another thing is that while Obama says, ” I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper,” this very same hypocrite who mouths those words is literally allowing his OWN BROTHERto suffer in squalor. And the demonstrable truth is that Obama DOESN’T care about his brother; all he cares about is accumulating the same sort of raw government power over a people that Marxists have ALWAYS sought to accumulate. This man who cares NOTHING about his very own brother while saying, “I am my brother’s keeper” for mass consumption wants his liberal ideology and his Democrat Party to be able to decide who wins and who loses, to be able to dictate who is rewarded and who is punished. That’s all he cares about. And if he can drag America across that threshold that is all she wrote.
But let’s get beneath even that level: Obama says, “Iam my brother’s keeper.” And that’s fine as long as it is Obama deciding as an individual to do more for his brother (which in fact he has refused to do). But what Obama then does is a bait-and-switch: he says, “I am my brother’s keeper because I am going to force YOU to pay for my keeping of my brother.” Understand that while Obama demands the erection of a Marxist-style State that seizes the wealth of others and redistributes it according to political ideology, Obama himself gave less than 1 percent of his own wealth to charity before he announced he was going to run for president.
“I am my brother’s keeper” is a statement of an individual INDIVIDUALLYaccepting responsibility out of his own or her own wealth and making the CHOICE to give. But Obama cynically and deceitfully uses the phrase to try to justify a big government State that directly attacks the very religious system that he uses to justify his powergrab: Barack Obama is responsible for 54.5 million abortions in America since 1973; Barack Obama is responsible for the attack on biblical marriage; Barack Obama is imposing something the Bible literally calls an “abomination” onto society; Barack Obama is at war with the Catholic Church.
The same cynical, dishonest man who mocks the Bible proceeds to use it to justify his government takeover and his confiscation of the money that people worked hard to EARN:
If we’re not supposed to use the Bible to justify government policy, then why the hell did you do it, Barry Hussein??? But of course what you do is exploit the Bible whenever it is convenient for YOUwhile denouncing anyone who uses the Bible as that Bible actually teaches.
Please, o mighty Lucifer; give us four more years of Obama so we can collapse the Great Satan America even faster than anyone could have ever have possibly dreamed when the hated pro-Zionist Reagan was president and creating 10 percent economic growth!
The state of Michigan gave one company $1.65 million, with which zero jobs were created or retained after the business went bankrupt.
This is one of several instances where projections fell short for a state fund designed to support select businesses.
The money was given through the Michigan Strategic Fund, a state program that administers the 21st Century Investments program “to strengthen and diversify Michigan’s economy by investing in venture capital, private equity, and mezzanine funds as a method to create jobs and provide financial assistance for the creation of new businesses or industries.”
To date, the direct investment category consists of a single direct investment worth $1.65 million made in Microposite Inc., which was supposed to produce “environmentally friendly” siding products. The state received $55,373 from the investment before Microposite terminated its entire staff on June 30, 2009, and went out of business. The company also received other state support.
The 21st Century Jobs Fund progress report states that zero jobs were created or retained from the $1.65 million investment in Microposite.
“This is redistribution of wealth from the average taxpaying citizen to a privileged few,” said Arnold Kling, an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and an economist formerly on the staff of the Board of Governors with the Federal Reserve system.
Kling has written extensively on what he calls “expert failure.”
“The experience from the 50 states is that when government attempts to compete by picking winners and losers, it usually means the state is failing in terms of overall competitiveness,” said Jonathan Williams, director of tax and fiscal policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council. “Additionally, government officials open themselves to charges of cronyism and corruption when they engage in economic micromanagement.”
“The best approach is when states work to create a competitive environment for all.”
These investments were made as part of 21st Century Investments, a program of the 21st Century Jobs Trust Fund. In total, the state committed over $100 million toward investments that have yielded a little more than $1 million in proceeds and created or retained just 267 jobs.
According to the progress report from Sept. 30, 2011, the program had spent $47 million.
The program was created by the 21st Century Fund Act of 2005, which was sponsored by former State Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Zeeland. Huizenga is now in Congress.
The 21st Century Investments program is a joint collaboration between the Michigan Strategic Fund and Credit Suisse. The Credit Suisse Customized Fund Investment Group manages the investment funds.
The 21st Century Investments program is comprised of four categories. The categories are venture capital investments, private equity investments, mezzanine investments, and direct investments.
The state has committed nearly $60 million toward venture capital investments. All investments made in venture capital are required by law to be focused on “competitive edge technologies.” This restriction does not apply to the other categories.
Despite zero reported spending on the private equity program, three jobs were reported to have been created or retained from the private equity program.
In 2010, an analysis of the program by the Detroit Free Press found that the 21st Century Jobs Fund returned only one-third of the projected jobs. At the time, Ned Staebler, a vice president at the Michigan Economic Development Corp., predicted that “the loans and investments will end up making money for the state in the long run.”
Representatives from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and Credit Suisse did not respond to requests for comment about the status of the 21st Century Investments program.
This is the entire Obama economic policy in one failed microcosm. Government takes money from the increasingly few taxpayers who are successful and redistributes it to crony capitalist boondoggles like Solyndra that piss it away and then go bankrupt. And then the obvious answer is to just keep doing the same insane thing over and over until we implode.
Let’s just file that under yet another proof that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” is a complete load of crap.
This is Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” as it matriculates into our tax policy.
You need to go back and understand Obama’s argument. What he was very clearly saying is that government basically built everything that allows businesses to succeed. And therefore businesses – which owe their success to government – should pay more taxes.
Government built the roads that murderers used en route to their murders. Government built the schools that rapists used on their way to becoming rapists. You can’t take these things that EVERYBODYbenefits from and which only exist in the first place because TAXPAYERS built them for everybody to benefit from and then claim that they in any way, shape or form account for the success of businesses who got where they got by their hard work. The argument that Obama offered and which the Democrat Party accepted lock, stock and barrel suffers from vicious infinite regress: Government does things, which justifies more govenment. More government does even more things, which justifies still MORE government. Still MORE government does still more things, which justifies yet more government. And so on ad naseum.
The vicious regress is one of the most glaringly obvious results of poor thinking in logic and philosophy; and yet a vicious infinite regress literally forms the epicenter of the entire liberal worldview.
Anyone but a FOOL ought to immediately understand that the things that Government has provided are NOT the reason that business owners succeed. Because not only criminals but every slacker on welfare ALSO uses schools and roads and government loans and the Internet. The reason that businesses succeed is because successful business owners had dreams, worked hard to fulfill those dreams, had good ideas, demonstrated individual responsibility and took individual initiative, made difficult choices, saved and invested while others spent, etc.
And Barack Obama as an individual and the Democrat Party as a political group are nakedly evil for trying to falsely claim credit for the success of business and saying to them, “You OWE us for your success.” But regardless of the smokescreens and lies they now blather in front of every microphone, the ugly, diseased cat is out of the bag. When Government says, “We should be able to redistribute your wealth because we made all of your success possible, they end up punishing wealth creation and success and undermining the economy of everyone. Except the slackers.
Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax hike.
This is President Obama’s economic plan. This is what he asked Congress to do. And he recently told a fundraising crowd that his economic plan has been working.
But Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said yesterday that “the economy is not growing fast enough,” acknowledging that “unemployment is very high.” “The institutions with authority should be doing everything they can to try to make economic growth stronger,” he said.
The President’s plan, now endorsed by the Democratic majority in the Senate, has little chance of going anywhere in the House of Representatives. But it has put the 51 Senators who want to raise taxes on record.
Perhaps the biggest lie in the tax debate is that this vote affects only “the rich.” That’s simply not true. Many small businesses, known as flow-through businesses, pay their taxes through the individual income tax. Ernst and Young estimates that these types of businesses “employ 54% of the private sector work force.” This tax hike squarely hits 1.2 million of these businesses that hire workers and have incomes above $200,000.
Rather than punishing just “the rich,” as Heritage’s Curtis Dubay notes, “By pinpointing his tax increase on incomes over $200,000, President Obama has maximized the detrimental impact that his tax increase would have on job creation.”
The Ernst and Young study on the impact of this tax hike showed that it could kill more than 700,000 jobs. This isn’t surprising, since the businesses it targets are some of the country’s most robust job creators. But it is surprising that a majority of the Senate would go along with this plan when the country is suffering from 8.2 percent unemployment.
As if that weren’t enough, the Senate’s actions would also raise the death tax from 35 percent to 55 percent. This confiscatory rate would hit small businesses and family farms exceptionally hard. Dubay explains:
The death tax is often portrayed as a tax that only rich heirs pay. In reality, the death tax hits family-owned businesses hardest. These businesses are valuable on paper because they have many assets that they need to make and sell their products. But the businesses’ book values are not representative of the families’ liquid assets. When a family member passes on, these families often have to sell all or part of the business to raise the cash to pay the death tax. This slows the growth of these businesses and in some cases forces them to lay off existing workers.
The Senate’s vote means we are no closer to preventing Taxmageddon, the nearly $500 billion tax increase scheduled to hit Americans on January 1. It is difficult to imagine the economy sustaining such a blow. Families will be hit with an average tax increase of more than $4,100 next year if Congress allows this to go forward. Instead of preventing this calamity, the Senate voted to raise taxes. It simply boggles the mind.
Obama loves to pit himself against Bush and pass himself off as the “anti-Bush.” But in fact in many ways Obama is just LIKE Bush. Bush ended his presidency with the philosophy that, “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” That was how Obama BEGAN his presidency and he has been doggedly determined to continue to abandon more and more free market principles with every single passing day of his regime.
Obama isn’t the “anti-Bush”; he’s the anti-REAGAN.
Fill THAT one in the blank of Obama’s dishonest statement: “Just like we tried REAGAN’S plan, we tried our plan – and our plan worked.”
Obama has taken every good thing that worked for Republicans and Democrats alike and ended it. He has taken every bad thing that has failed and expanded it.
We’re going backward while Obama demagogues and exploits the small business owners who built this country far more than bigger “Government” – which itself was an anathema to the founding fathers who wrote our Constitution – ever did.
Pull your heads out of your rear ends, Democrats. And vote this turd out of office. Obama has now documented with his demagogic policies that he will NEVERunderstand how the US economy works.
According to Census figures, some 200,000 small businesses disappeared from the rolls between 2008 and 2010. Those businesses were responsible for some three million jobs. The Obama administration claims that they’re moving in the right direction – but the direction of the economy is now reversing itself.
Not surprisingly, Gallup finds that business owners are turning on President Obama. The national poll showed a 59-35 disapproval/approval split. Workers are split in favor of Obama, thanks in large part to Obama’s heavy emphasis on class warfare.
It is no coincidence that government spending has expanded dramatically during the same period that private sector businesses were going under. And it is no coincidence that, even as the economy falls back into a slump, from the mildest recovery in our lifetime, Obama believes that only more government spending can solve the problem.
59% of business owners understand that Obama is a nasty turd who is out to crap on them.
Obama’s desperate protests that his anti-business rant was taken out of context are betrayed both by that very context and because they are a part of a piece — just one more component of his war against the American entrepreneurial spirit.
He would have us believe that his words “you didn’t build that” referred to roads and bridges and not businesses.
Given his accompanying statements — “you didn’t get there on your own,” etc. — that is an absurd construction. But even if that’s what he meant, why would he have felt compelled to point out that businesses don’t succeed without access to roads and bridges? Do roads and bridges not connect the population to failed businesses?
Obama is to failure what Rome was to roads: because all failed businesses lead to Obama.
In Obama’s demagogic universe, if you’re successful and you say Obama and his Government aren’t responsible for your success, well you’re just a racist. But if you say that Obama is responsible for anybody’s failure or any kind of failure at all, well you’re just a racist. Basically, if you have a brain of your own and you believe that there is anything called “personal responsibility,” well that makes you a racist.
His latest foot-in-mouth disease moment should put the kibosh on this Marxist ever coming close to a second term – with the now famous words:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
We’re now being told that Obama was referring not to businesses, silly, but to roads and bridges.
But a basic understanding of the English language pretty much rules that out:
The [Obama] Team then explains: “The President’s full remarks show that the ‘that’ in ‘you didn’t build that’ clearly refers to roads and bridges–public infrastructure we count on the government to build and maintain.”
That’s bunk, and not only because “business” is more proximate to the pronoun “that” and therefore its more likely antecedent. The Truth Team’s interpretation is ungrammatical. “Roads and bridges” is plural; “that” is singular. If the Team is right about Obama’s meaning, he should have said, “You didn’t build those.”
Barack Obama is supposed to be the World’s Greatest Orator, the smartest man in the world. Yet his campaign asks us to believe he is not even competent to construct a sentence.
So let’s examine this thing we call our language and see how it actually works:
“If you’ve got a business (singular), you didn’t build THAT (singular).”
Which of course is what Obama very clearly said. Because yes, you turd, yes he WAS referring to business and in particular to the immediate antecedent noun “a business”.
Whereas if Obama had actually intended to refer to roads and bridges and ignore the general antecedent rule with pronouns he would have said:
“Somebody invested in roads and bridges (plural, and in fact actually two plurals). If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build THOSE. Somebody else made THOSE happen.”
Which he didn’t say. Because he’s a communist among other reasons. Just as conservatives have been trying to tell the nation for the last four years as it has circled the drain due to Obama’s failed socialist policies.
Or another way to express it in Obama speak: “All the Obamas and all of the liberals in the world is stupid.” Because they are literally trying to “fundamentally transform” the English language along with America in order to explain away Obama’s Marxist Freudian slip.
The Washington Post points out that Obama’s words are right in line with what he’s been saying all along:
Here’s the entire quote:
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
His words this time were a little stronger (or perhaps impolitic), but he’s said basically the same thing before.
●From June: “Yes, there have been fierce arguments throughout our history between both parties about the exact size and role of government — some honest disagreements. But in the decades after World War II, there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own.”
●From his January State of the Union Address: “… Even my Republican friends who complain the most about government spending have supported federally financed roads and clean energy projects and federal offices for the folks back home. The point is, we should all want a smarter, more effective government.”
●From 2009, before his stimulus package passed: “Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy, where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending.”
So, whether you want to talk about English grammar or whether you want to talk about Obama’s own history and his own policies, he said what he said and he meant what he said.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
I have also pointed out that all the things Obama referred to minimize the role that business owners play in their own success while maximizing the role that Government plays in their success – public schools and public school teachers, public roads, government loans and the Internet – were ALL used by mass murderer James Holmes. And yet I don’t hear Obama claiming the credit for Holmes’ success as a murderous psycho for using public schools, public roads, government grants and the Internet the way he’s claiming credit for small business owners’ success.
I’ve written a couple of articles that have featured Obama’s idiotic worldview summed up by “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” remark. And I’ve received quite a few comments from liberals pointing out that Obama is right. Why? Because Jack Gilchrist went to public school and even got a government education loan.
Well, okay. Government is responsible for our success.
Mind you, Government is equally responsible for damn near every single murder, every single rape, every single gang banging criminal, heck, every single criminal of every stripe, every single scumbag and every single slimeball in America.
CASTROVILLE — Adam Martinez and Chris Elkins, Castroville Elementary School classmates of accused Colorado shooter James Holmes, were in shock over the weekend, unable to reconcile their childhood memories of a young man they both agreed was “an exemplary person — he never gave any trouble, and never got in trouble himself.”
James Holmes, the suspect in the Dark Knight Rises shooting rampage at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 58 others, received a prestigious taxpayer-funded stipend from the National Institutes of Health that covered his graduate school tuition.
The federal government education grant that James Holmes received totaled $26,000 and “paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver,” reports CBS News.
Ready to strike, on Thursday evening Holmes drove the five miles from his home next to the faculty complex to the multi-screen Century 16 cinema in a sprawling shopping mall.
There he bought a ticket for the midnight screening of Dark Knight Rises, the new Batman film, went into the auditorium with other excited cinema-goers, but slipped straight out the back into the car park though the emergency exit, leaving the door lodged slightly ajar.
Holmes changed into his body-armour and moved back into the cinema to launch his real-life rampage just as a cacophonous shooting scene erupted on the screen.
Oh, my gosh, I just thought of something that completes the picture: I’ll bet you anything you want to bet me that James Holmes used the internet.
Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes bought his 6,000-round arsenal legally and easily over the Internet, police said as Holmes was to appear in court Monday.
Holmes, 24, accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others inside an Aurora, Colo., movie theater Friday, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun almost as easily as a person orders a book from Amazon.com, police told The New York Times.
He spent an estimated $3,000 at the online sites in the four months before the shooting, police told the newspaper.
My God. Obama killed those people. Just as surely as Obama took credit for successful business owners like Jack Gilchrist!!!!
What did Obama say in claiming that Government was responsible for the success of business owners who therefore ought to render unto Obama more in taxes?
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together. (Applause.)
It’s all there. Public schools, check. Roads, check. Government education programs, check. The Internet, check.
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
Let me rewrite this to describe James Holmes:
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is anti-human warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got to be a mass murdering psycho on his own. Nobody.
Notice that my modified version of Elizabeth Warren’s – as idiotic as it sounds – is every bit as true as the original idiot Warren version???
Barack Obama and the Democrat Party – the same people who are trying to take credit for the success of business owners – are every bit as responsible for James Holmes and every single murdering psycho and every single rapist and every single criminal, etc., etc., etc. as they are for those business owners. Because all these slimbags and many others benefitted from those public schools, those public roads, those government loans, the internet and the police and fire departments just as much as business owners like Jack Gilchrist ever did. That is simply a fact.
If you’re saying, “That’s crazy!” Please understand that if the left is right about business owners, then precisely what I’m saying follows. Because please find me the murder, rapist, gangbanger, child molester, etc. etc. etc. etc., who never went to a public school, or who never used a public road or bridge, or who never got any kind of government loan or grant, or who never used the internet and I could show you ten thousand who DID.
What the left is trying to claim to justify their messiah Obama is not merely wrong; it is flat-out demonic.
The left is bombarding the airwaves and the blogosphere with claims that business people owe their success to the government. Why? Because after all the government gave them education or assistance and built roads and the internet for them. But by their very “logic” that liberals are claiming credit for every success, they are EVERY BIT AS RESPONSIBLE for every evil thing under the sun. Because the same stuff that Obama is claiming credit for that gave us successful business owners such as Jack Gilchrist IS THE SAME DAMN STUFFthat James Holmes used.
After-all, it is government , we the people, that built the roads, airports, water plants, Internet, and other infrastructure businesses are dependent on. Taxpayers, we the people via teachers and other professions provided the knowledge that allowed the entrepreneur to innovate. […]
After-all, it is government , we the people, that built the roads, airports, water plants, Internet, and other infrastructure businesses are dependent on. Taxpayers, we the people via teachers and other professions provided the knowledge that allowed the entrepreneur to innovate.
The video is a highly edited version of Jack Gilchrist admitting what every single homo sapiens on the planet would acknowledge. And yet the left cites it as if it’s some kind of giant admission. Yes, dumbass, I know that. I also know that James Holmes got the same things. Please claim him, too.
If you see the unedited remarks the president made and not the edited version Faux news showed you will see what the president was talking about and it was not building your buisiness it was the infrastructure to get your buisiness going like the roads which someone else built, the internet, schools etc.
Yes, stupid, we understand. The same roads, the same internet, the same schools that James Holmes got. [Feel free to notice that this idiot is claiming credit for the success of businesses while not even being capable of spelling the word “business” correctly].
After a couple of liberals who decided simple personal attacks was the way to go, the next lefty offered this:
Not only did Obama say that businesses had help from many along the way, and that they didn’t build the roads and bridges, etc. that businesses need in order to function, but Romney agreed with him. Yet Romney still chose to edit Obama’s remarks to make it look as though a business owner didn’t build his own business. And as it turns out, Jack Gilchrist most definitely benefited from government help, receiving millions in government loans and contracts.
Yes, yes, dumbass, Romney knows that the government has built some stuff. And he probably also knows that James Holmes used it all along the way to being a mass murdering zombie. Please credit the government for the killings.
And again the liberals who had nothing more than personal attacks, we have this:
1. YOUR parents sent you to public school. If you have a problem with that blame YOUR PARENTS.
2. The fact remains that unless you are independentely weathly like say,.. Mitt Romney you will at some point need help opening your business. Loans from the bank are guaranteed by…(shocker I know) THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
Jack Gilchrists dad may have put taken out a second mortagage on his house, but that doesn’t change the fact that he may have ALSO gotten a loan from the government.
Michael, so what do you have to say now that it’s been shown he DIDN’T do it on his own but with some government loans? Hypocrite is as hypocrite does.
And, okay. As I documented, liberals should proudly embrace James Holmes and say, “What a wonderful product of all the stuff we’re claiming credit for.” Public school, check. Public road, check. Internet, check. GIANT GRANT FROM GOVERNMENT, CHECK. Go down that list again. We have the Democrat Party to thank for every mass murderer, every rapist, every pedophile, every gang banger, every criminal, every slimebag. Every vile insect that preys upon American society got to where they are because of big government. And that is according to the very same argument that liberals are using to argue that business owners got to where they are because of big government.
Let me go back to James Holmes. I heard Greg Gutfeld make a funny but true comment about the insanity defense and how contrived it is. Gutfeld said that it’s funny, but the murderers who claim they’re insane after their crimes somehow never claimed insanity for anything GOOD they did. And that’s exactly how liberalism is: they have a religious view of the Government that makes it only responsible for everything GOOD. And they will NEVER own up to anything bad unless they can say, “Bush did it.” When you’re talking to liberals, you are talking to insane, pathological people who simply cannot think outside of their disturbed, warped, diseased little brains.
So, here’s the deal. If a liberal says, “The government gave us schools,” YOU say, “James Holmes went to a public school. Obama’s a murderer.”
If a liberal says, “The government gave us roads,” YOU say, “James Holmes used public roads to kill people. Obama is a murderer.”
If a liberal says, “The government gives us loans and grants,” YOU say, “James Holmes got government grants and used the money to buy his arsenal. Obama is a murderer.”
If a liberal says, “The government gave us the internet,” YOU say, “James Holmes used the internet to buy his arsenal. Obama is a murderer.”
It’s that simple. It’s a matter of using “idiot judo” to use the sheer stupidity of Democrats against them.
What the hell happened to this country? How did business owners become successful? I’ll tell you: they were successful because they studied harder, and worked harder, and took risks to make their dreams come true, and displayed personal responsibility for themselves, and took personal initiative for their own lives, and made good decisions, and practiced fiscal responsibility, and basically did everything that the Democrat Party is trying to destroy today. Democrats want to tax the success of successful business owners and redistribute the fruits of that success so they can dole it out to failures to reward failure and ultimately so they can buy the votes of failures.
The Democrat Party has just taken stupid to an entirely new level. The Democrat machine has become like a giant reciprocating engine of moral idiocy that just keeps getting dumber and dumber and dumber with every downward stroke and particularly with every single speech from Obama.
President Obama just threw a grenade at small business. He implied that everything is done in a community setting with the government or outside help. He is implying that individualism and individual achievements should not be highlighted, as everyone and everything needs help. In his speech yesterday, President Obama referenced the involvement of the government in the development of the internet and in building roads and bridges. He is correct to say the government did involve themselves in those endeavors. That was the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
If we get into a discussion whether business owners want the government as their partners, the President is on the wrong side of the tracks. What is being debated is the matter of degree. How much government? How big should government be? Small businesses give back through taxes, jobs and charity but not by enlarging government. This is all about an attack on individualism and individual achievement. The implications is clearly is that we need the government and we need big government. Not a great position for capitalism, small business or entrepreneurs.
There’s your short summary of Obama’s rhetoric. If you’d like to hear a little more, then please keep reading.
When both the Chamber of Commerce and the NFIB repeatedly say a president sucks for creating business growth, and when survey after survey of small business owners validate what these two small business organizations are saying, then that president SUCKS. If you want Marxism, then don’t listen to the Chamber of Commerce or the NFIB. If you want a job and the opportunity to advance your fortunes in a nation that has historically been better than any other at allowing the opportunity to do do, then get this joker out of the White House.
Obama – the failed president who a short time ago said “the private sector’s doing fine” – has demonstrated that he has no business talking about businesses. He is simply an ignorant fool who does not understand how a free market functions. And that is why he has spent the last four years unsuccessfully attempting to “fundamentally transform” America into a centrally planned economic system that has failed wherever it has taken root.
This is what Obama said in context (an expanded section of Obama’s words and a link to Obama’s entire speech is available at that link):
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
These two doctrinaire liberals couldn’t be more clear – which makes it frankly amazing that the left would now try so hard to twist their words now that their policies are being exposed for what they clearly and truly are: they are saying that businesses do not deserve to take pride and responsibility in their own success because the Government (with a big “G” because that is how they view government) contributed to that success by building roads and bridges and providing schools and other infrastructure. And they are using that as their justification that business owners therefore owe far more in taxes than they have been paying. Because the Government is more responsible for their success than they are.
That is PRECISELY what Obama was saying.
And that is why Jack Gilchrist as a successful small business employer is so pissed off at Obama:
In another comment I explained this to a liberal who never has and never will comprehend how the American economy functions:
There is absolutely no question and any honest person knows there is no question that what Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren are saying is that all people who build businesses are really just pirating off government infrastructure, such that they have no right to take any meaningful credit for the success of their businesses. And therefore business owners ought to be willing to pay their real god the Government what it is due with their sacrificial offering of high taxes. But that is simply bullcrap because: 1) Given that both successful people and unsuccessful people alike have all benefited equally from schools and roads, how can the schools and roads then possibly be the cause of the successful people’s success? It was those business owners’ hard work, risk, more hard work and good decisions that made them successful, not the public schools and roads that welfare slackers get just as much of as small business owners get. And 2) Given that these business owners were already forced to pay for this stuff by their already too-high taxes, it is frankly despicable for Obama to suck out business owners’ tax money for services, and then turn around and argue that because the government provided those services that Obama forced the business owners to pay for therefore meant that the business owners who were forced to pay for those services aren’t truly responsible for all the hard work and risks that they took that had nothing to do with the government.
As an example, I went to a public school when I was a kid. Do you know why I went to a public school? Because liberals forced my parents to pay property taxes that went into public schools and ONLY into public schools. My parents wanted us to go to Christian schools, but at that time they couldn’t pay the taxes that funded the government schools AND at the same time pay in addition to those taxes to send us to a Christian school. If my parents had been allowed to use their property tax money to instead send us to Christian schools, then THAT’S where we would have gone. If liberals had any decency they would be for VOUCHERS that allow parents to choose which schools to send their kids to. Instead, they condemn millions of children to failing government schools. And then take credit for it.
So what liberals are in fact doing is 1) forcing Americans to contribute to a government system and then 2) saying that since we benefited from the system that we were forced to contribute to, we are therefore not allowed to take any credit for our success that was based on our risks, our initiative, our investments and our time and our work. Instead Government should get all the credit and liberals can then justify their forcing people to pay even higher taxes on the basis of the taxes that they have already been forced to pay.
You can sum Obama’s policies up with three words “Government as God.”
When Karl Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” the point he was driving home was that God is an illusion that was keeping the people satisfied in their economic misery. Marx believed that economic reality was the ONLY reality. And he believed that if his economic and political Marxism replaced God with “the State” (i.e., “the Government”), that the people would find the true happiness they had wrongly been seeking in God.
And of course all they found was misery and death. Every SINGLE timeany form of Marxism was tried.
When Obama says – as a false, heretic “Christian” – that salvation is “collective salvation,” (see also here) you can understand that in light of Marxist liberation theology (and see also here) that he is referring to “collectivist salvation.” For Barack Obama, salvation is not related to sin, but rather to poverty, and the solution to poverty is not individuals improving their lot with hard work, but a Utopian redistributive state.
Karl Marx was wrong. History has proven that his ideas were wrong for the world. And Barack Obama is wrong and history has proven that his ideas are wrong for America.
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together. (Applause.)
So all these issues go back to that first campaign that I talked about, because everything has to do with how do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers — how do we help them succeed? How do we make sure that their hard work pays off? That’s what I’ve been thinking about the entire time I’ve been President.
Now, over the next four months, the other side is going to spend more money than we’ve even seen in history. And they don’t really have a good argument for how they would do better, but they’re thinking they can win the election if they just remind people that a lot of people are still out of work, and the economy is not growing as fast as it needs to, and it’s all Obama’s fault. That’s basically their pitch.
The spirit of Obama’s words boils down to EXACTLY what I said about this demon-possessed man in a piece I wrote nearly two years ago titled “Obama’s Government As God Believes It Owns Everything The People Earn.” To wit: we owe the government EVERYTHING. We are NOTHING without the government; we are ENTIRELY produced and shaped by government and we could do absolutely nothing to better ourselves apart from politicians and bureaucrats. The only difference between rich, successful people and poor, unsuccessful people is that the former are better at taking advantage of the benefits of government. And therefore the Government frankly ought to basically own us and it own absolutely everything we produce – such that whatever the Government DOESN’T take in taxes from us is literally considered a COST to Government. But Government in its deity is gracious and mercifully allows us otherwise pathologically helpless descendents of monkeys to keep some of what we earned entirely because of all the many Government blessings.
Obama’s remark produces this question: is America a people who have a government or is America a government that has a people? Obama very firmly believes the latter.
Let me first explain why Obama’s words are just incoherent pabulum. Obama starts yapping about roads and bridges that were built by government. But there’s an obvious question: where did the government get the funds to build those roads and bridges? And is it seriously Obama’s assertion that “the Government” climbed aboard the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and was the very first entity to stride onto the beach of the New World???
What came first, the chicken or the egg? I don’t know what YOUR answer is, but Obama’s answer is “The Government came first, and that’s all that really matters.”
Obama’s rant depends entirely upon the assumption that government didn’t even exist at all until Karl Marx invented it. It depends upon the straw man demagoguery that Republicans are nihilistic anarchists who have actually been trying to dissolve all government. It depends on the narrative that only Democrats and only Obama want to have ANY government at all. And that is why quite literally every single success of government in history actually becomes the result of Obama’s policies that Republicans want to stop.
It’s an incredibly weak and idiotic point, and so it isn’t that surprising that Obama would reach to some profoundly contradictory examples to try to substantiate it.
Government gave us the internet. So of course therefore rich people should be taxed at whatever the hell rate Obama says they should.
“The President signed and supported cuts in the defense budget of close to a trillion dollars that his own Secretary of Defense has said—we’re talking about Leon Panetta, here—are devastating to the military and equivalent to shooting ourselves in the head. This was done with no strategic analysis of the needs of national security and no plan for how to implement the cuts. Even now we don’t know the details of how the cuts are going to be implemented. We do know that they’re planning to cut 200,000 troops. Given the state of the economy, it’s equivalent to laying them off and the military is sending them to the unemployment lines.”
Fact: the military didn’t build the damn internet “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet,” you damn disgrace to the presidency; the military built the internet to network computers so that the United States could further protect itself against attack and regain a technological edge that had been lost to the Russians.
You need to understand, Obama’s never-before-seen expansion of government into Government isn’t going to create the next internet and it won’t put the first man on Mars. Rather, it will put a man on his couch on permanent welfare for life as long as he votes Democrat and as long as we don’t run out of somebody else’s money. Obama’s Government is only intended to massively, MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY expand government dependency of a class of redistribution-loving welfare-sucking pigmy people. Obama’s policy is not the means to the next great thing; it is the END of greatness.
Let me just round file that “storytelling” into a “How the hell can you be that stupid?” alert.
Obama wants to take credit for public schools, does he? The public education system has utterly and comprehensively failed American children who are left “waiting for Superman” because government and unions have seized childrens’ futures. The only reason that public schools continue to exist is because liberals turned the public school system into a monopoly that benefits liberals. An organization I serve provides monthly support to a Christian private school. That school is located in a state (California) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in the nation for SAT scores. That school is located in a county (Riverside) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in California for SAT scores. And that Christian school is in the ninetieth percentile in the entire nation for SAT scores. And politicians and bureaucrats like Barack Obama WILL NOT allow parents to use their tax money to attend such a school; rather they will force most American children to rot in these government schools that are frankly more like prisons today than centers of learning.
Let me simply assure you that Barack Obama is dead frigging WRONG about “without Government there would be no schools!” and present the fact that kids who have escaped Obama’s wildly failed government schools are running circles around the mindless drones that are increasingly being pumped out by union-owned indoctrination factories a.k.a. public schools.
Let’s go over the punchline of the sick, twisted, perverted joke Obama is playing on the American people again:
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
I’ve known quite a few people who started their own businesses. And what I’ve encountered proves that Barack Obama is a liar without shame. Because the small business owners I have known were people who risked virtually everything they had built in their lives to borrow enough money to start their businesses. Because the small business owners I have known were people who worked upwards of a hundred hours a week – basically seven days a week – to get their businesses off the ground. Because the small business owners I have known were self-made men and women who scratched and then carved out a niche for themselves with the government being FAR more of a burden and hindrance than it ever was a blessing to them.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mr. Obama continued. “Somebody else made that happen.” This claim would come as a surprise to the small-business owners who have invested their lives and life savings in making a go of it. It would be a shock to inventors and innovators who have been the drivers of America’s technological edge. It does make sense, however, coming from someone who has never had a job that didn’t depend on patronage and has spent his entire career getting ahead on identity and charisma instead of creativity and achievement.
“We succeed because we do things together,” the president chimed. He neglected to mention that lately, too much togetherness has been a source of failure. The type of relationships that help lead to success in life, the personal and professional bonds of trust and fellowship, aren’t what Mr. Obama is selling. He’s trying to pitch the idea that everyone in business should be required to take on government as a partner, with himself as a member of the board. He’s discarding the capitalist notion of free association and replacing it with the socialist idea of forced oversight by the state. The anemic economy, high unemployment and skyrocketing debt that are the products of his policies don’t deter Mr. Obama. He envisions a golden age in the future by repeating the failed policies of the past.
The government Mr. Obama worships isn’t a source of economic growth. It retards innovation, prevents jobs from being created and halts business expansion. Government under current management has become the greatest threat to initiative, creativity and wealth generation in American history. Mr. Obama thinks there is no finer force for good than his administration, but it’s a wrecking ball to prosperity. His Cabinet has the least collective private-sector experience of any Cabinet ever. This is the group that thinks unemployment checks and food stamps create jobs, that the public sector creates prosperity and that raising taxes on the productive to transfer it to the unproductive will create growth. The wonder is not that the economy is doing so poorly, but that it hasn’t collapsed altogether.
Mr. Obama has no business talking about business. He has never created anything substantive and doesn’t understand those who have made it their life’s work. This president only invented the stories and people he made up for his purported autobiography, assuming somebody else didn’t make that happen.
Update, 7/18/12: I’ve already had liberals say that “Obama didn’t say what he very clearly actually said.” So let’s show an even clearer version of Obama’s gobblygook to see that what Obama is saying has already been spread through every single liberal roach in the nest:
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
That is the SAME argument that Obama was making – and it couldn’t be clearer. The assertion is that “nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Those are the exact words. And why would Democrats say that? Because Government built the roads, that’s why. And therefore the Government is responsible for ALL the wealth that was created. And therefore those who ONLY succeeded because of Government owe the Government EVERYTHING. EVERYBODY owes the Government EVERYTHING. Which is a statement of pure Marxism and which if taken to its logical conclusion justifes the Government in taking over EVERYTHING.
Let me give you a couple of quick examples of where evil ideas like this lead:
1) Liberals say that health care is a universal right that everyone should have and nobody (but rich people) should have to pay for. Okay. What about housing? How is it that health care is a universal right but housing isn’t? Don’t I have the right to live in a house that somebody else should have to pay for? What about food? Why the hell am I forced to pay for my own food when Obama should be giving it to me? Wht about clothing? What about transportation? What about fuel for my transportation? If health care is a universal right, then ALL of the others and many more things become universal rights. Becaue there is no way in hell that you can say that everyone has the universal right to health care but nobody ought to have the universal right to housing, to food, to clothing, to transportation, etc. etc. etc. And the logically necessary conclusion to the first “universal right” is a totalitarian Marxist state in which the State owns you and owns everything around you.
2) A particular example comes from Rahm Emanuel who is taking Obama’s abrogation of illegal immigration to the next logical level. Obama’s former chief of staff and now Chicago Mayor Emanuel is saying that Obama didn’t go far enough in refusing to enforce federal laws that were passed by Congress and signed into law by a president of the United States. Emanuel has an out-of-control murder rate that proves that liberalism equals lawlessness. So he’s in a tight spot and has to get Hispanic voters on his side. And so now he’s saying he’s more liberal than Obama; Emanuel is a better liberal who can out-liberal the liberal-in-chief. So Emanuel will go even further in abrogating the law to win his base than Obama went to win his. And there is simply no end to that. Until you get to a pure Marxist State for which the Constitution and the constitutional framework of separation of powers is utterly meaningless.
To further attack Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s idiotic Marxist rhetoric, both the rich and the poor get to take equal advantage of all the government services. If you call the cops, does the 911 operator ask you if you are rich and hang up on you if you’re not? If you pull out of the driveway, does a cop demand your IRS information so that you can show that you are wealthy enough to use the damn road? It is a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. And in point of fact the rich paid a much, MUCH bigger share for those roads and those police than the poor ever did. You are simply a liar if you suggest otherwise.
But some people playing on that level playing field took independent initiative which Marxists around the world hate. They wanted to better themselves. And Democrats like Obama and Warren can’t have any of that. If you take risks, buy a business, work like hell to grow that business, spend all of your energy and time investing yourself and your creativity into that business, well, to quote Obama: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.” The welfare-sucking Democrat parasite deserves as much of the wealth produced by your business as you do. Why? Because the government built the roads and hired the police and so that business owner built nothing and therefore deserves nothing.
And you will necessarily get Marxism unless and until people start saying, “That is a lie from the devil. We can’t go there. We WON’T go there. We will vote out Obama and Warren and absolutely everybody who believes the hell that they believe.”
You need to understand something: liberalism is half-ass Marxism that will be taken to full-fledge Marxism the moment the left truly is able to take power.
There’s a problem with Marxism that few liberals bother to think about in their Utopian visions of a world in which everyone has a universal right to everything that Government can provide. Allow me to quote the question and the Marxist answer that was developed out of necessity because their original premises were so wildly wrong and evil:
Why work?
In a challenging paper, Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) argued that – despite imperfect monitoring – work incentives are preserved in Western economies because those caught shirking face the threat of unemployment and loss of income. The ‘No Shirking Condition’ they derive for wages constitutes the effective labour supply curve for the economy – with labour demand given by its marginal productivity. We apply the same broad logic to the Soviet system in CEPR DP 6621 – but with two significant alterations. First, in deriving the No Shirking Condition for labour supply, custodial sentences replace spells of unemployment-on-benefit as the ‘worker-discipline device’, so the supply price of labour falls not with the numbers of unemployed but with the population of the Gulag. Second, wages are set below the marginal productivity of labour as the dictator exercises monopsony power in the labour market to maximise investible funds.
… The state commands a goodly share of national resources, but wages are pushed down to ‘efficiency’ levels – just high enough to prevent shirking. No-one is unemployed, but many are in labour camps.
Ironically, the outcome for labour is as if it faced a greedy capitalist who wanted to maximise profits and had the market power to do so. More than that, the state employer can also manipulate the living and working conditions for those not in civilian employment to further its own ends. To increase investment, for example, prison conditions can be made harsher – so as to lower the supply price of civilian labour and reduce consumption. Where this may lead is what Solzhenitsyn (1963) describes – from first-hand experience – in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
You need to understand that everything Obama stands for is a system in which the rich are discouraged from working harder because they are not allowed – and do not deserve – to keep the fruits of what they risked more and worked harder to earn.
So why work harder at all? Why even work? After all, if business owners didn’t build their businesses, who can truly be said to build anything? Why bother to work to build anything at all?
The penultimate result of that kind of thinking is the Marxist solution. You will work harder not because we will reward you for working harder – that contradicts our liberal philosophy that some deserve more than others. No, you will work harder because the State requires that you work harder and you will work harder because otherwise we will put you in a gulag and MAKE you work harder.
That is the logical outcome of where Obama is heading. History has already proven that time and again.
Let’s see what small business owner Jack Gilchrist says about Obama’s telling him he and his family didn’t build their business:
Start Thinking Right 