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
I don’t know: to be lectured that “you don’t leave a man behind” by the president and his party that abandoned four men to miserably die in an attack that went on and on for hours and ordered the men who were begging to be allowed to go to their aid to “stand down,” just leaves me wanting to punch something. The only thing Obama was willing to trade for their lives was an unarmed drone.
Obama not only won’t go to the mat for heroes, it’s almost like good riddance to him. He has done NOTHING to bring justice to the terrorists responsible. To date, the only man held accountable for the debacle and disgrace in Benghazi – when terrorists put their flag over a burned out diplomatic facility of the United States of America and murdered the first ambassador to be killed since the first Carter years – was an American citizen who had exercised his rights to make a movie that had NOTHING to do with the attack (contrary to Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s oft-repeated lies). You want to get a little help from Obama, you’ve got to be a traitor, or a man who wants to become a woman, or some kind of low-life turd who walks out on his brothers.
The release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from captivity in Afghanistan has reignited questions from some about the circumstances of the soldier’s disappearance five years ago.
Bergdahl was the only American soldier being held in the country until he was exchanged in a swap deal on Saturday for five high-ranking Taliban figures from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
His freedom was celebrated by his family and the Obama administration. But others — including some members of his own platoon — have reiterated their long-held concerns over the events surrounding his June 2009 disappearance.
The 28-year-old sergeant vanished from a military base in Eastern Afghanistan with little more than a compass and a bottle of water. Considerable resources were diverted to try to find the missing man, and several of his fellow soldiers were killed trying to find him.
“I was pissed off then and I am even more so now with everything going on,” former Sgt. Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl’s platoon when he went missing, told CNN. “Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him.”
An online petition and several Facebook groups were set up following Bergdahl’s release, calling for him to be brought to justice for what they alleged was a dereliction of duty.
“He is not a hero and is directly responsible for several military members death,” read the petition, which by 4 a.m. ET had more than 1,500 digital signatures.
“Bring punishment to Bowe Bergdahl and let the public know that the military holds all members to the same standard.”
One of the Facebook groups claimed to have been set up by Bergdahl’s former “battle buddies” who had “first hand knowledge of what took place” on the day of the soldier’s disappearance.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to comment on reports that the sergeant had walked away from his unit. Such matters “will be dealt with later,” Hagel said.
The defense secretary pointedly described Bergdahl as a “prisoner of war.”
While some questioned the circumstances Bergdahl’s disappearance, others, including prominent Republicans, were unhappy with the manner of his release, claiming that the swap deal amounted to negotiating with terrorists and effectively put a price tag on the heads of all U.S. servicemen.
The reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar who described the men released from Guantanamo Bay as “important commanders of jihad” and declared the swap a “great victory.”
If you’re on a forward operating base like Bergdahl was and you leave that base, you sign out: you write down where you’re going and how long you believe you’ll be there. And you don’t go without at least one buddy. And the reason for that is if you turn up missing, your brothers will have somewhere to start looking rather than put their lives needlessly at risk stumbling around all over the place.
Bergdahl didn’t give much of a damn about the fate of his brothers in arms when he decided he didn’t like the war anymore and walked away – deserting at the very least, if not essentially defecting.
He is no hero. He is the OPPOSITE of a hero.
And second, Barack Obama sure isn’t a hero for trading five senior Taliban leaders for this turd. If you want to make a similar trade with me, I’ll take the five most valuable pieces of real estate in America in exchange for the little house I live in. If you’re stupid enough to do the one, you ought to be at least consistently stupid enough to do the other.
It is true that during the Cold War, the United States frequently traded one of ours for one of theirs. But two things: 1) we were trading with a legitimate foreign nation that we formally recognized as a legitimate nation; and second, we traded apples for apples, rather than trading the highest-level KGB generals for a disgruntled clerk-typist, fourth class.
The United States has declared that it will NOT negotiate with terrorists.
Until now.
We actually had a damn LAW that would prevent us from releasing Gitmo detainees. Obama – the worthless disgrace who demonized Bush over “signing statements” – issued just such a statement that he was immune from and above the law.
Whereas Barack Obama not DICTATED the Bergdahl-Contra to Reason scandal but BROKE THE LAW. But what else is new with the most lawless president in the history of the republic who feels that he has the right as our god-king to break any law he doesn’t like?
What’s an American soldier worth on the open market that ought to encourage terrorists to abduct as many of them as possible?
Well, the going rate for the most-failed turd in uniform is five senior generals after today. So what’s one of our really GOOD guys worth? I’m guessing one of our Delta Force or SEAL Team Six guys ought to be worth at least the conversion of America to Islam. I can just see Obama signing the executive order and heralding the freedom of our man and declaring what he’s actually already declared: America is a Muslim nation (“we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world”).
We shouldn’t have made this trade. Because it’s a terrible policy to recognize terrorists as legitimate partners with whom we ever WOULD trade, number one, and because it is an incredibly bad trade that makes us look like complete fools, number two. And because this is an incredibly cynical political act from an incredibly cynical politician, number three.
The ONLY silver lining in this scandal is that Obama can’t give world-class medical treatment to those five terrorist generals anymore while he denies any care whatsoever to American veterans.
What we should have done is turned over every stone – and turn Afghanistan into a pile of rubble as necessary to make our turning over every stone – to find Bergdahl because he was an American serviceman. And then put him on trial for desertion in time of war.
Mitt Romney repeatedly said last night that he would not allow tax cuts to add to the deficit. He repeatedly said it because over and over again Obama blathered the liberal talking point that cutting taxes necessarily increased deficits.
Romney’s exact words: “I want to underline that — no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”
The fact of the matter is that we can go back to Calvin Coolidge who said very nearly THE EXACT SAME THING to his treasury secretary: he too would not allow any tax cuts that added to the debt. Andrew Mellon – quite possibly the most brilliant economic mind of his day – did a great deal of research and determined what he believed was the best tax rate. And the Coolidge administration DID cut income taxes and MASSIVELY increased revenues. Coolidge and Mellon cut the income tax rate 67.12 percent (from 73 to 24 percent); and revenues not only did not go down, but they went UP by at least 42.86 percent (from $700 billion to over $1 billion).
That’s something called a documented fact. But that wasn’t all that happened: another incredible thing was that the taxes and percentage of taxes paid actually went UP for the rich. Because as they were allowed to keep more of the profits that they earned by investing in successful business, they significantly increased their investments and therefore paid more in taxes than they otherwise would have had they continued sheltering their money to protect themselves from the higher tax rates. Liberals ignore reality, but it is simply true. It is a fact. It happened.
Then FDR came along and raised the tax rates again and the opposite happened: we collected less and less revenue while the burden of taxation fell increasingly on the poor and middle class again. Which is exactly what Obama wants to do.
People don’t realize that John F. Kennedy, one of the greatest Democrat presidents, was a TAX CUTTERwho believed the conservative economic philosophy that cutting tax rates would in fact increase tax revenues. He too cut taxes, and he too increased tax revenues.
So we get to Ronald Reagan, who famously cut taxes. And again, we find that Reagan cut that godawful liberal tax rate during an incredibly godawful liberal-caused economic recession, and he increased tax revenue by 20.71 percent (with revenues increasing from $956 billion to $1.154 trillion). And again, the taxes were paid primarily by the rich:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So we get to George Bush and the Bush tax cuts that liberals and in particular Obama have just demonized up one side and demagogued down the other. And I can simply quote the New York Times AT the time:
WASHINGTON, July 12 – For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.
A Jump in Corporate Payments On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.
Mr. Bush plans to hail the improvement at a cabinet meeting and to cite it as validation of his argument that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and ultimately help pay for themselves.
Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.”
The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.
And of course the New York Times, as reliable liberals, use the adjective whenever something good happens under conservative policies and whenever something bad happens under liberal policies: “unexpected.” But it WASN’T “unexpected.” It was EXACTLY what Republicans had said would happen and in fact it was exactly what HAD IN FACT HAPPENED every single time we’ve EVER cut income tax rates.
The truth is that conservative tax policy has a perfect track record: every single time it has ever been tried, we have INCREASED tax revenues while not only exploding economic activity and creating more jobs, but encouraging the wealthy to pay more in taxes as well. And liberals simply dishonestly refuse to acknowledge documented history.
Now let’s take a look at the utterly fallacious view that tax cuts in general create higher deficits.
Let’s take a trip back in time, starting with the 1920s. From Burton Folsom’s book, New Deal or Raw Deal?:
In 1921, President Harding asked the sixty-five-year-old [Andrew] Mellon to be secretary of the treasury; the national debt [resulting from WWI] had surpassed $20 billion and unemployment had reached 11.7 percent, one of the highest rates in U.S. history. Harding invited Mellon to tinker with tax rates to encourage investment without incurring more debt. Mellon studied the problem carefully; his solution was what is today called “supply side economics,” the idea of cutting taxes to stimulate investment. High income tax rates, Mellon argued, “inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw this capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities. . . . The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up, wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people” (page 128).
Mellon wrote, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower taxes.” And he compared the government setting tax rates on incomes to a businessman setting prices on products: “If a price is fixed too high, sales drop off and with them profits.”
And what happened?
“As secretary of the treasury, Mellon promoted, and Harding and Coolidge backed, a plan that eventually cut taxes on large incomes from 73 to 24 percent and on smaller incomes from 4 to 1/2 of 1 percent. These tax cuts helped produce an outpouring of economic development – from air conditioning to refrigerators to zippers, Scotch tape to radios and talking movies. Investors took more risks when they were allowed to keep more of their gains. President Coolidge, during his six years in office, averaged only 3.3 percent unemployment and 1 percent inflation – the lowest misery index of any president in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, Mellon was also vindicated in his astonishing predictions that cutting taxes across the board would generate more revenue. In the early 1920s, when the highest tax rate was 73 percent, the total income tax revenue to the U.S. government was a little over $700 million. In 1928 and 1929, when the top tax rate was slashed to 25 and 24 percent, the total revenue topped the $1 billion mark. Also remarkable, as Table 3 indicates, is that the burden of paying these taxes fell increasingly upon the wealthy” (page 129-130).
Now, that is incredible upon its face, but it becomes even more incredible when contrasted with FDR’s antibusiness and confiscatory tax policies, which both dramatically shrunk in terms of actual income tax revenues (from $1.096 billion in 1929 to $527 million in 1935), and dramatically shifted the tax burden to the backs of the poor by imposing huge new excise taxes (from $540 million in 1929 to $1.364 billion in 1935). See Table 1 on page 125 of New Deal or Raw Deal for that information.
FDR both collected far less taxes from the rich, while imposing a far more onerous tax burden upon the poor.
It is simply a matter of empirical fact that tax cuts create increased revenue, and that those [Democrats] who have refused to pay attention to that fact have ended up reducing government revenues even as they increased the burdens on the poorest whom they falsely claim to help.
Let’s move on to John F. Kennedy, one of the most popular Democrat presidents ever. Few realize that he was also a supply-side tax cutter.
“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”
– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference
“Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964
“In today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarges the federal deficit – why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“It is no contradiction – the most important single thing we can do to stimulate investment in today’s economy is to raise consumption by major reduction of individual income tax rates.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, message to Congress on tax reduction and reform, House Doc. 43, 88th Congress, 1st Session.
“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Sept. 18, 1963, radio and television address to the nation on tax-reduction bill
Which is to say that modern Democrats are essentially calling one of their greatest presidents a liar when they demonize tax cuts as a means of increasing government revenues.
So let’s move on to Ronald Reagan. Reagan had two major tax cutting policies implemented: the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981, which was retroactive to 1981, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Did Reagan’s tax cuts decrease federal revenues? Hardly:
We find that 8 of the following 10 years there was a surplus of revenue from 1980, prior to the Reagan tax cuts. And, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986, there was a MASSIVE INCREASE of revenue.
So Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenue. But who paid the increased tax revenue? The poor? Opponents of the Reagan tax cuts argued that his policy was a giveaway to the rich (ever heard that one before?) because their tax payments would fall. But that was exactly wrong. In reality:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So Ronald Reagan a) collected more total revenue, b) collected more revenue from the rich, while c) reducing revenue collected by the bottom half of taxpayers, and d) generated an economic powerhouse that lasted – with only minor hiccups – for nearly three decades. Pretty good achievement considering that his predecessor was forced to describe his own economy as a “malaise,” suffering due to a “crisis of confidence.” Pretty good considering that President Jimmy Carter responded to a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering,“It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
Reagan whipped inflation. Just as he whipped that malaise and that crisis of confidence.
This might explain why a Gallup poll showed that Ronald Reagan is regarded as our greatest president, while fellow tax-cutting great John F. Kennedy is tied for second with Abraham Lincoln. Because, in proving Democrat policies are completely wrongheaded, he helped people. Including poorer people who benefited from the strong economy he built with his tax policies.
Let’s move on to George Bush and the infamous (to Democrats) Bush tax cuts. And let me quote none other than the New York Times:
WASHINGTON, July 12 – For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.
A Jump in Corporate Payments On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.
Mr. Bush plans to hail the improvement at a cabinet meeting and to cite it as validation of his argument that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and ultimately help pay for themselves.
Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.” The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.
[Update, September 20: The above NY Times link was scrubbed; the same article, edited differently, appears here.]
Note the newspaper’s use of liberals favorite adjective: “unexpected.” They never expect Republican and conservative polices to work, but they always do if they’re given the chance. They never expect Democrat and liberal policies to fail, but they always seem to fail every single time they’re tried.
raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.
These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.
Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.
Budget deficits are not merely a matter of tax policy; it is a matter of tax policy AND spending policy. Imagine you have a minimum wage job, but live within your means. Then you get a job that pays a million dollars a year. And you go a little nuts, buy a mansion, a yacht, a fancy car, and other assorted big ticket items such that you go into debt. Are you really so asinine as to argue that you made more money when you earned minimum wage? But that’s literally the Democrats’ argument when they criticize Reagan (who defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War in the aftermath of a recession he inherited from President Carter) and George Bush (who won the Iraq War after suffering the greatest attack on US soil in the midst of a recession he inherited from President Clinton).
[To read that article in its entirety, click here].
Out of 27,281,452 total firms, 21,351,320 are listed as “nonemployer firms.” Which means that 78.23 percent of all small businesses hire ZERO employees. So when Obama says that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by his tax hike, please understand that the whopping majority of those businesses that won’t be affected aren’t hiring anybody. Another 3,617,764 small businesses have no more than four employees. Those small businesses that hire zero workers plus those small businesses that hire no more than four workers constitute 91.5% of ALL small businesses.
Here’s a more relevant way to look at it. When you consider the businesses that employ more than four people, you are looking at businesses that hire 94.97 percent of ALL the workers who work for small businesses. And while not all of the small businesses that hire between 5-9 employees are going to be paying higher taxes as a result of Obama’s class warfare on small businesses, most of them do. And virtually none of the businesses that hire more than ten employees are going to earn less than $250,000 a year.
Romney pointed out in the debate that half of all jobs created by small business and a quarter of ALL THE JOBS CREATED IN AMERICA would have their income taxes skyrocket under Barack Obama.
Romney absolutely crushed Obama in the debate last night. Nobody had EVER won a debate by the margin that Romney won by in the history of CNN. If you have any decency and care about people who need a job and love this country at all, please cast your vote for Mitt Romney.
Household income is down sharply since the recession ended three years ago, according to a report released Thursday, providing another sign of the stubborn weakness of the economic recovery.
From June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent, to $50,964, according to a report by Sentier Research, a firm headed by two former Census Bureau officials.
Incomes have dropped more since the beginning of the recovery than they did during the recession itself, when they declined 2.6 percent, according to the report, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The recession, the most severe since the Great Depression, lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.
Overall, median income is 7.2 percent
ABC News has a survey. As of now, nearly three out of every four answer “No” to the question and say they are NOT better off under Obama.
Answer: HELL No. You want to blame the recession and even the first year of Obama’s utterly failed presidency on Bush? Fine. But the fact remains that the median household income has gone down nearly TWICE as much during Obama’s “recovery” than it did during the entire recession that Obama blames Bush for. Which is to say that even the very “best of times” under Obama’s failed presidency have paled in comparison even to the worst of times under Bush – with the very “worst” of “Bush’s times” happening while Bush was at home watching Obama stick his skinny legs up on the Oval Office desk.
Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, who is considered a possible contender for president in 2016, bucked other Obama surrogates on Sunday, saying that the country was not better off now than it was four years ago.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer asked: “Can you honestly say that people are better off today than they were four years ago?”
Responded O’Malley: “No, but that’s not the question of this election. The question, without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recession, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars — charged for the first time to credit cards, the national credit card.”
Quipped Schieffer: “George Bush is not on the ballots.”
The most senior Obama campaign simply refused to answer the question:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is he right, can the president argue unequivocally that Americans are better off today than they were four years ago?
DAVID PLOUFFE: Listen, George, I think the American people understand that we got into a terrible economic situation, a recession, only that the Great Depression — the only thing the country has ever seen like it. So they know we had a deep hole. It took us a long time to get into that hole, it’s going to take a long time to out of it.
First of all, Governor Romney is offering the same, exactly policies that led to the recession in the first place.
To paraphrase Plouffe’s response to Stephanopoulos’ question:
“Mumble, mumble, mumble. Blame Bush. Blah blah blah. And in conclusion, blame Bush.”
If you want your president to be a demagogue who will NOT accept responsibility for his record and who will blame and lie, then Obama truly is your “hope and change” and this really is your “fundamentally transformed America.” Because that’s all that Obama has done and it is all that he will continue to do.
And of course that “that’s what led to the recession” line might sound good, but let’s point out that RONALD REAGAN USED CONSERVATIVE ECONOMIC POLICIES TO PROPEL AMERICA TO 10 PERCENT GROWTH AND CREATED OVER A MILLION JOBS A MONTH.
David Axelrod took the plunge and said, yeah, we’re better under the man who lowered the level of our oceans and healed our planet before ultimately saying, okay, maybe we AREN’T better off:
“Can you honestly say that Americans better off today than they were four years ago?” Wallace pointedly asked Axelrod.
“I can say that we’re in a better position than we were four years ago in our economy, in the sense that when this president took office, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month,” Axelrod responded. “And the quarter before he took office was the worst since the Great Depression and we are in a different place.”
“29 straight months of job growth, 4.5 million private sector jobs,” the adviser cited as statistical evidence, but conceded: “Are we where we need to be? No.”
Then there’s the “monkey math” that Axelrod cites: basically, it first depends on the theory that Barack Obama really didn’t assume the presidency until 2010. It was the devil BOOSH who was president in 2009 and so all of those numbers only apply to the devil Bush. We only take credit for things we can make look good; Bush is responsible for everything else whether it happened during Obama’s watch or not. I say that because Barack Obama has been president NOT for 29 months, ye Democrat dumbasses, but for going on 45 months. And it is a national disgrace that we have such a completely failed leader that he can’t even assume responsibility for over a year of his failed presidency.
Then there’s the 800,000 jobs lost a month when Obama took office. Well, Democrats are such liars they even fabricate when they’re getting close to trying to tell the truth. We never lost “800,000 jobs a month.” The most jobs we ever lost was in January 2009 (during that year that Obama was president but refuses to acknowledge) when we lost 741,000 jobs. If you’re going to round that number honestly, David, you liar, we only lost 700,000 jobs that month, didn’t we? And for Axelrod to oh so conveniently round way, WAY up and then make it sound like it was happening every single month – we got to that 700k number in only ONE month – is a lie from a serial liar.
What’s always been interesting to me is that we had a crisis that was created by Democrat-OWNED Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going bankrupt which triggered the meltdown as private banks held Fannie and Freddie mortgage backed securities that they suddenly discovered were “toxic assets” because the GSEs had loaded up so much bad debt in those securities that nobody could tell good debt from bad debt. And that month, in September 2008, we lost 280,000 jobs under Bush’s watch. In October, things looked a little better and we only lost 240,000 jobs that month.
Then America made the stupidest decision in its history and elected Obama. And businesses immediately responded in November by giving up 333,000 jobs – nearly a hundred thousand more jobs than the month before. The panic of a future-failed Obama presidency continued as we lost 632,000 jobs in the first full month after Obama was elected. What kind of fool can look at this reality and say, “Obama’s election calmed frightened businesses?” Because businesses said, “This turd is going to kill us. Let’s cut our losses now.” And so the month Obama took the oath of his failed office, we lost 741,000 jobs that month as businesses cut and ran on his presidency.
To document that the huge job losses that Obama demagogues actually occurred because of sheer terror of a pathetic failure assuming office, let me go back to an article I wrote in October of 2008: “Actual Job Creators Favor McCain 4-1 Over Obama.” I note an article from CEO Magazine:
People are most concerned about jobs right now; maybe they should stop listening to mainstream media ideologues and start listening to the people who actually create jobs:
Chief ExecutiveMagazine’s most recent polling of 751 CEOs shows that GOP presidential candidate John McCain is the preferred choice for CEOs. According to the poll, which is featured on the cover of Chief Executive’s most recent issue, by a four-to-one margin, CEOs support Senator John McCain over Senator Barack Obama. Moreover, 74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.
“The stakes for this presidential election are higher than they’ve ever been in recent memory,” said Edward M. Kopko, CEO and Publisher of Chief Executive magazine. “We’ve been experiencing consecutive job losses for nine months now. There’s no doubt that reviving the job market will be a top priority for the incoming president. And job creating CEOs repeatedly tell us that McCain’s policies are far more conducive to a more positive employment environment than Obama’s.”
“Disastrous for the country.” That doesn’t sound good. And that’s about as optimistic as the CEO’s get about Barack Obama:
“I’m not terribly excited about McCain being president, but I’m sure that Obama, if elected, will have a negative impact on business and the economy,” said one CEO voicing his lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, but particularly Obama.
In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.
“Bankrupt the country within three years.” There. You want socialism, you can have it. “Spread the wealth around” so that country itself is as broke as the defaulting homeowners and the defaulting mortgage houses we keep hearing about.
You want to see the market tank and employers cut their losses again? Just re-hire Obama. You’ll see things go to sh!t right quick as business reacts to the fiasco.
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008
That’s right. Six trillion dollars in debt from Obama in one four-year term is responsible and patriotic; four trillion dollars over EIGHT YEARS is “irresponsible and unpatriotic.” Again, there’s that thingy about Democrat=hypocrite and hypocrite=Democrat. And if you are a Democrat, it is only because you, personally, are a hypocrite and a bad person.
The 4.5 million private sector jobs that Axelrod credits Obama for first of all utterly refuses to consider that 13 first months of Obama’s presidency (to quote that Servpro commercial jingle, “Like it never even happened!”) and secondof all counts all the job gains but refuses to consider the rather disturbing factoid about all of those new jobless claims that have racked up every single month during Obama’s presidency. But you see, all the job gains are because of Obama but all the nearly 400,000 job losses every single damn month four damn years after Bush left the White House are still because of the devil Bush. Third, given our population growth, ten million Americans have actually entered the work force during Obama’s presidency; which is to say that Obama is nowhere NEAR keeping up with simple population growth even according to his own asinine horn-tooting. And fourth, this “4.5 million jobs” is a full-of-crap talking point parroted by rabid ideologues.
This turd needs to go. He needs to go now. And if he doesn’t go soon this country is simply doomed.
80,000 jobs. Do you know how pathetic that is? We need an absolute minimum of 125,000 jobs a month (in light of our 313 million citizens it’s more like 200,000) just to begin to keep up with population growth. And when you consider Obama’s godawful labor participation rate and the number of working-age Americans who have just been cast out during the cancer of this presidency, it is an abject disgrace.
But here’s the thing: you listen to Obama campaign and you’d think the last four years didn’t happen. He’s mouthing the same garbage that he was blathering when he was running for president in 2008. Nothing bad has happened (“the private sector’s doing fine”) or it’s anybody and anything else’s fault but the man who sits behind “the buck stops here” desk in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama is the most narcissistic, the most ignorant, the most naive and the most demagogic president America has ever seen. Bar none.
Obama told us that the answer to the bad economy was a government takeover of the private economy via his stimulus. He took office when unemployment was 7.6 percent. If his stimulus passed, he promised, unemployment would never get to 8 percent – and in fact by this time (July 2012) unemployment would be 5.5 percent. History proves that Obama was completely wrong and has absolutely no idea whatsoever how to get an economy moving. All he can do is count on people to believe the same lies he’s been making for years and idiotic things.
If you apply this same mindset to Bush and the economy, we had a terrible economic hit (actually caused by liberals who recklessly ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the ground, but that’s another story) and as Bush left office we were lost 700,000 jobs in just one month. And the religious doctrine that all Democrats must believe as an article of their faith in messiah Obama is that if Bush were still president today, we would have continued to lose 700,000 jobs every single month and unemployment would be 30 percent today. And of course Obama’s otherwise godawful performance now looks GREAT if you consider the 30 percent unemployment that we would of course had had under George Bush. Never mind facts like no recession has ever lasted forever; and never mind that there have only been TWO times when America didn’t come roaring back from a bad recession and both occurred under socialist presidents (Obama and FDR). The average recession lasts 11 months. And historically we get very strong recoveries out of recessions. But if Bush were still president it would have lasted forever and ever and ever. And only messiah Obama can possibly deliver us. Because Mitt Romney is the devil. And do you want a rich, evil, vulture capitalist vampire monster to be your president when you could have more Obama instead??? Hint: if you say “yes” you’re clearly a racist.
So we listen to Democrats demonize “the failed Republican policies” that got us into this terrible mess and we believe their narrative that of course Obama must never be blamed for anything negative but must be given total credit for anything positive. We are taught to not remember that George W. Bush – who himself inherited a terrible recession with the DotCom bubble burst that happened on Clinton’s watch and which wiped out $7.1 trillion in American wealth – ended his presidency with a 5.26 percent overall unemployment rate.
If we extrapolate pure liberal demagoguery and simply utterly refuse to consider history, then Obama is the answer. Otherwise this pathetic president truly and profoundly sucks.
So let’s let the messiah who has an average unemployment rate of 9.16 percent through June 2012 assure us that the president who had a 5.26% unemployment rate was terrible for jobs. And we’ll believe him because this is God damn America and God damn America is under a spirit of delusion.
Yesterday (July 5) I had CNBC’s Larry Kudlow program on, and Kudlow had two economists representing a liberal (Dean Baker) and conservative (David Goldman) perspective. Baker had an optimistic view, believing that the Labor Department release today would show that we created a lousy but-comparatively great 165,000 jobs in June; Goldman believed the report would be even worse than the economists’ consensus view of 125,000 jobs and we’d get only 100,000 jobs. To make it even more interesting and show just how LOUSY liberals and liberalism are, Baker demagogued Goldman and accused him of merely ticking off “talking points” as compared to Baker who was of course examining the NUMBERS.
And Dean Baker documented just who was the ideologue living in a world of talking points: 80,000 jobs. Not even HALFof his shockingly idiotic estimate. And it was the conservative and his “talking points” who was right, right, RIGHT.
If it was a street fight, Goldman would be standing over Baker’s corpse and liberalism would be lying on the street DEAD. But you just can’t kill this failed ideology of liberalism off in a “civilized” world. They just get to keep screeching to fools and counting on the fact that there will always be ignorant, stupid, depraved people who believe that somebody else ought to be forced to support their failed lifestyles.
Stop and think about the difference of this “cancer presidency” and the Reagan recovery. As voters considered re-electing Ronald Reagan, GDP was surging to 8.5 percent. Under Obama, it’s 1.2 percent and we’re facing a double-dip recession.
Newsbusters has a great documentation of how incredibly propagandist the mainstream media was. In May, 1984, when the jobs report for Ronald Reagan reported 269,000 jobs, the New York Slimes actually arbitrarily revised it DOWN by 19,000 jobs to 250,000 ostensibly to keep the numbers in increments of 50,000. So if the New York Times were fairly “reporting” on Obama today, we’d have only 50,000 jobs created, wouldn’t we? And whereas Obama’s numbers keep getting revised DOWN, Reagan’s for some mysterious reason were being revised UP: the revised jobs report for May, 1984 actually showed growth of 363,000 jobs. Compare that to Obama’s jobs number above – recognizing that Reagan’s number was when we had a population of 235 million people versus 313 million today – and tell me that Obama isn’t wildly failing the American people.
The worst lies, according to the “lies, damned lies and statistics” proverb, are statistics. And when liberals control the statistics, you get great news being depicted as lousy news and you get lousy news being depicted as great news.
Your biggest problem in being able to know the truth is that most of our “journalists” are Marxist propagandists who could have easily fit in at TASS during the Soviet days.
Ultimately communist “journalists” blamed seventy years of bad weather for why they couldn’t keep up with Ronald Reagan and an America that was being ran under conservative Republican policies.
Obama keeps demonizing Romney as standing for the “same failed Republican policies of the past.” JUST LIKE RONALD REAGAN’S.
If you want to see “the failed policies of the past” you just take a look at Barack Obama’s utterly failed liberal policies of the last four years. And as much as Obama has demonized George W. Bush, Barack Obama has never once even in his very best month been anywhere CLOSE to George Bush’s very worst month of unemployment.
Bill O’Reilly interviewed Bill Clinton and asked a question: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama – who collected the largest revenue?
O’REILLY: I didn’t mind paying you that but do you know between… among you, Obama and Bush who had the highest tax receipts of all three of you? Do you know? Bush. So under prosperity the tax cuts under Bush more money flowed into the federal government.
The “failed Republican policies of the past” don’t just refer to George Bush in late 2008 ( Democrats want you to believe that Bush was only president for the last few months of 2008 because the rest of his presidency looked pretty darn good); they refer to Ronald Reagan.
Let me tell you liberal pukes something: Ronald Reagan didn’t fail at NOTHIN’.
Unlike Jimmy Carter – and at this point it is very obvious to say, unlike Barack Obama – Ronald Reagan had a solution. Under Reagan’s leadership, the US economy soared into the stratosphere. Bill Clinton became part of that Reaganomics solution when he acknowledged that “the era of big government is over” and cooperated with the Republicans who had swept both the House and the Senate in a landslide when he too had failed to accept that conservative policies WORK.
If I had Barack Obama’s performance, I would resign. I would have held a press conference and declared, “I’m sorry. I thought I had a plan to turn this economy around. Clearly I was wrong. It’s time for me to step aside and allow someone with better ideas and better leadership to help the American people.”
Barack Obama has declared war on the United States of America. But instead of bullets and bombs, he has waged his war with massive and unsustainable government spending and joblessness.
Democrats easily win the cover-up game, 20 to 10. In sports parlance, that’s a blowout. When it comes to lying and cover-ups, Democrats are the Harlem Globetrotters to the Republican Party’s Washington Generals. Only in this game, the Harlem Globetrotters cheat like absolute fiends while angrily and self-righteously denouncing the Washington Generals for cheating.
So it again proves my constant statement of fact that to be a Democrat is to be a massive abject hypocrite. Here’s Harry Reid saying that when Bush used executive privilege it was like saying, “I’m KING”:
And then there’s “King” Obama – who was mysteriously once a “harsh critic” of executive privilege:
This was back when Democrats ran Congress and therefore, in Obama’s words, it was “very appropriate” to investigate the president. Back then, in the soon-to-be “King” Obama’s demagoguery, if Bush cited privilege he was “trying to hide behind executive privilege every time something shaky is taking place.”
Well, now the shoe is on the other foot, and the Hypocrite-in-Chief is revealed for what he truly is (hint: four letter words work best).
And, for the record, you aint seen nothin’ yet on “King Obama” and executive privilege. Obama will be using that sucker many more times, I assure you. Because coming up is the fact that the Obama White House repeatedly leaked incredibly damaging secrets to favorable press such as the New York Times in order to bolster his image as a “strong leader” no matter how much it damaged American national security. He’ll have to protect his lies on that one in order to avoid impeachment, too.
The only possible way to keep Obama from breaking Bill Clinton’s previously believed un-breakable record of fourteen will be if “King Obama” is a one-term president. Because it’s usually in that second term that – in Obama’s “reverend’s” and “spiritual mentor’s” words – “the chickens come home to roost.”
Just imagine “King” Obama actually demonizing George Bush for something that Bill Clinton had just done more than twice as many times (that’s 133.33% more often for you sports fans who appreciate your statistics) as Bush did. When I say “Democrats are cockroaches,” I know it’s wrong, and I sincerely apologize to all members belonging to the class periplaneta americana for such a harsh comparison.
Think of that: Bill Clinton invoked executive privilege 14 times. That’s like Wilt Chamberlain’s rebounding record, only for cheating lying dirtbag slimeball weasel presidents. But while Chamberlain’s records will likely never be broken, simply because nobody will ever physically dominate the way Wilt did, Barry Hussein is up to the challenge when it comes to pathological dishonesty. “Hope and change” means believing Obama can dive deeper into that giant manure pile than Bill Clinton believed was even humanly possible. I never dreamed that anyone could lie like Bill Clinton … until this turd squirted out onto the national scene.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley was barely able to contain his laughter Wednesday night after playing a clip of President Obama invoking Ronald Reagan on behalf of his “Buffett Rule” tax hike quest. Nearly breaking into a laugh, a baffled Pelley wondered to CBS News political analyst John Dickerson: “So a vote for President Obama is a vote for Ronald Reagan?!”Dickerson snickered too. (Watch the video to see Pelley’s puzzled reaction.)
Today’s Republicans might view Ronald Reagan as a “wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior,” and the late conservative icon’s views on taxes might have disqualified him from the party’s nomination in 2012, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.
Obama, defending his “Buffett Rule” call for higher taxes on the very rich, said in a speech that he was “not the first president to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share.” He went on to say:
Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was “crazy”—that’s a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary. That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.
He thought that, in America, the wealthiest should pay their fair share, and he said so. I know that position might disqualify him from the Republican primaries these days, but what Ronald Reagan was calling for then is the same thing that we’re calling for now: a return to basic fairness and responsibility; everybody doing their part. And if it will help convince folks in Congress to make the right choice, we could call it the Reagan Rule instead of the Buffett Rule.
Yet Reagan also championed the very same “trickle-down” economics that Obama has roundly denounced—the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy lead to investment that generates growth and thereby jobs. Obama on Tuesday described this economic policy in harsh terms, saying its supporters “don’t seem to understand how it is that America got built.”
“In this country, prosperity has never trickled down from the wealthy few,” he said. “Prosperity has always come from the bottom up, from a strong and growing middle class.”
Obama lumped trickle-down economics among “old broken-down theories” that he blamed for the 2008 global economic meltdown.
The Blazefurther points out that Obama’s demagogic claiming of the Reagan mantle gets even more warped, pointing out:
The comparison is equally confounding when you consider President Reagan’s historic tax reform:
The video comes from Ronald Reagan speaking at the signing ceremony for his 1986 Tax Reform Act. What exactly did Reagan say that Obama can cling to?
Thank you all, please be seated. Well, thank you, and welcome to the White House. In a moment I’ll be sitting at that desk, taking up a pen, and signing the most sweeping overhaul of our tax code in our nation’s history. To all of you here today who’ve worked so long and hard to see this day come, my thanks and the thanks of a nation go out to you.
The journey’s been long, and many said we’d never make it to the end. But as usual the pessimists left one thing out of their calculations: the American people. They haven’t made this the freest country and the mightiest economic force on this planet by shrinking from challenges. They never gave up. And after almost 3 years of commitment and hard work, one headline in the Washington Post told the whole story: “The Impossible Became the Inevitable,” and the dream of America’s fair-share tax plan became a reality.
When I sign this bill into law, America will have the lowest marginal tax rates and the most modern tax code among major industrialized nations, one that encourages risk-taking, innovation, and that old American spirit of enterprise. We’ll be refueling the American growth economy with the kind of incentives that helped create record new businesses and nearly 11.7 million jobs in just 46 months. Fair and simpler for most Americans, this is a tax code designed to take us into a future of technological invention and economic achievement, one that will keep America competitive and growing into the 21st century.
But for all tax reform’s economic benefits, I believe that history will record this moment as something more: as the return to the first principles. This country was founded on faith in the individual, not groups or classes, but faith in the resources and bounty of each and every separate human soul. Our Founding Fathers designed a democratic form of government to enlist the individual’s energies and fashioned a Bill of Rights to protect its freedoms. And in so doing, they tapped a wellspring of hope and creativity that was to completely transform history.
The history of these United States of America is indeed a history of individual achievement. It was their hard work that built our cities and farmed our prairies; their genius that continually pushed us beyond the boundaries of existing knowledge, reshaping our world with the steam engine, polio vaccine, and the silicon chip. It was their faith in freedom and love of country that sustained us through trials and hardships and through wars, and it was their courage and selflessness that enabled us to always prevail.
But when our Founding Fathers designed this government-of, by, and for the people-they never imagined what we’ve come to know as the progressive income tax. When the income tax was first levied in 1913, the top rate was only 7 percent on people with incomes over $500,000. Now, that’s the equivalent of multi-millionaires today. But in our lifetime we’ve seen marginal tax rates skyrocket as high as 90 percent, and not even the poor have been spared. As tax rates escalated, the tax code grew ever more tangled and complex, a haven for special interests and tax manipulators, but an impossible frustration for everybody else. Blatantly unfair, our tax code became a source of bitterness and discouragement for the average taxpayer. It wasn’t too much to call it un-American.
Meanwhile, the steeply progressive nature of the tax struck at the heart of the economic life of the individual, punishing that special effort and extra hard work that has always been the driving force of our economy. As government’s hunger for ever more revenues expanded, families saw tax cuts-or taxes, I should say, cut deeper and deeper into their paychecks; and taxation fell most cruelly on the poor, making a difficult climb up from poverty even harder. Throughout history, the oppressive hand of government has fallen most heavily on the economic life of the individuals. And more often than not, it is inflation and taxes that have undermined livelihoods and constrained their freedoms. We should not forget that this nation of ours began in a revolt against oppressive taxation. Our Founding Fathers fought not only for our political rights but also to secure the economic freedoms without which these political freedoms are no more than a shadow.
In the last 20 years we’ve witnessed an expansion and strengthening of many of our civil liberties, but our economic liberties have too often been neglected and even abused. We protect the freedom of expression of the author, as we should, but what of the freedom of expression of the entrepreneur, whose pen and paper are capital and profits, whose book may be a new invention or small business? What of the creators of our economic life, whose contributions may not only delight the mind but improve the condition of man by feeding the poor with new grains, bringing hope to the sick with new cures, vanishing ignorance with wondrous new information technologies?
And what about fairness for families? It’s in our families that America’s most important work gets done: raising our next generation. But over the last 40 years, as inflation has shrunk the personal exemption, families with children have had to shoulder more and more of the tax burden. With inflation and bracket-creep also eroding incomes, many spouses who would rather stay home with their children have been forced to go looking for jobs. And what of America’s promise of hope and opportunity, that with hard work even the poorest among us can gain the security and happiness that is the due of all Americans? You can’t put a price tag on the American dream. That dream is the heart and soul of America; it’s the promise that keeps our nation forever good and generous, a model and hope to the world.
For all these reasons, this tax bill is less a freedom-or a reform, I should say, than a revolution. Millions of working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates and an almost doubled personal exemption. We’re going to make it economical to raise children again. Flatter rates will mean more reward for that extra effort, and vanishing loopholes and a minimum tax will mean that everybody and every corporation pay their fair share. And that’s why I’m certain that the bill I’m signing today is not only an historic overhaul of our tax code and a sweeping victory for fairness, it’s also the best antipoverty bill, the best profamily measure, and the best job-creation program ever to come out of the Congress of the United States.
And now that we’ve come this far, we cannot, and we will not, allow tax reform to be undone with tax rate hikes. We must restore certainty to our tax code and our economy. And I’ll oppose with all my might any attempt to raise tax rates on the American people and I hope that all here will join with me to make permanent the historic progress of tax reform. I think all of us here today know what a Herculean effort it took to get this landmark bill to my desk. That effort didn’t start here in Washington, but began with the many thinkers who have struggled to return economics to its classical roots-to an understanding that ultimately the economy is not made up of aggregates like government spending and consumer demand, but of individual men and women, each striving to provide for his family and better his or her lot in life.
But we must also salute those courageous leaders in the Congress who’ve made this day possible. To Bob Packwood, Dan Rostenkowski, Russell Long, John Duncan, and Majority Leader Bob Dole; to Jack Kemp, Bob Kasten, Bill Bradley, and Dick Gephardt, who pioneered with their own versions of tax reform-I salute all of you and all the other Members of the Senate and House whose efforts paid off and whose votes finally won the day. And last but not least, the many members of the administration who must often have felt that they were fighting a lonely battle against overwhelming odds-particularly my two incomparable Secretaries of the Treasury, Don Regan and Jim Baker-and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. I feel like we just played the World Series of tax reform- [laughter] -and the American people won.
Barack Obama is the most conniving and dishonest weasel to ever occupy (or should I capitalize that word to denote the Occupy Movement that are serving as Obama’s brown shirts today?) the White House.
If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would walk up to Obama after his incredibly slanderous and dishonest words, slap him right in the face, and say, “How DARE you?” But genuine and profound coward that he is, Obama goes after the legacy of a dead man rather than all the men Reagan named who are still alive to defend the record.
The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.
And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”
When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.
Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.
And the only thing that could truly destroy the fruit of Reagan’s policies was the coming of another Jimmy Carter.
That’s exactly what we’ve got in Barack Obama: a dishonest and Marxist version of Jimmy Carter. And everything that Reagan accomplished refutes Barack Obama, Barack Obama’s economic plan and pretty much everything about Barack Obama.
Jimmy Carter’s policies gave us shocking inflation and a catastrophic misery index; Ronald Reagan’s policies saved America from a monster that Jimmy Carter could not understand and acknowledged he had no solution for.
In the God damn America of Barack Obama, the poor people that Obama promised his policies would save are (of course) unable to buy a house while watching their rents skyrocket.
The thing is, Michelle Obama would never say, “Let them eat cake” and is frankly offended that cake is being wasted on the proletariat who clearly don’t deserve cake until November when it’s time to vote again.
As is often the case, there is a big difference between what the government statistics are reporting and what’s going on in the real world. According to the most recent inflation reading published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), consumer prices grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in August.
The government has an incentive to distort CPI numbers, for reasons such as keeping the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments low. While there’s no question that you may be able to get a good deal on a new car or a flat-screen TV today, how often are you really buying these things? When you look at the real costs of everyday life, prices have risen sharply over the last year. For simplicity’s sake, consider the cash market prices on some basic commodities.
On average, our basic food costs have increased by an incredible 48% over the last year (measured by wheat, corn, oats, and canola prices). From the price at the pump to heating your stove, energy costs are up 23% on average (heating oil, gasoline, natural gas). A little protein at dinner is now 39% higher (beef and pork), and your morning cup of coffee with a little sugar has risen by 36% since last October.
Yes, it’s true that on June 28, 1985, Reagan gave a speech to Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Illinois about problems with the tax code in which he told an anecdote about an executive who was paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. But if you read the whole speech, it’s clear that Reagan was telling the story as part of his pitch for tax reform.
In that same Reagan speech that Obama is demagoguing, Reagan explained precisely what he meant when he brought up the issue of tax rates and “fairness”:
It stands to reason that the more complex our tax code is, the more open it is to abuse. So, we’re making it simple to make it fair. America’s tax plan will do away with special breaks for a few so we can lower the tax rates for all. Our simpler, three-bracket design will assure that no American pays one penny more than his fair share.
Phillip Klein continues, pointing out:
So there are several key differences with Obama. To start, Reagan was talking about simplifying the tax code, whereas Obama’s Buffett Rule would add another layer of complexity. Reagan was arguing for allowing people to keep more of their own money and reduce the burden of government. By contrast, Obama is arguing for instituting the Buffett Rule so that more money is available to pay for government programs.
And, yes, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s talked about simplifying the tax code, lowering rates across the board and eliminating myriad and byzantine deductions.
How DARE Barack Obama so thoroughly disrespect the legacy of Ronald Reagan and try to slanderously steal the credibility that Reagan EARNED by standing for everything that Obama has stood against???
The following article does a great job in ramming home just how miserable Obama has been for the economy versus how wonderful Reagan was for the country.
Economy: The latest economic data make it clear that President Obama’s policies aren’t helping the country get stronger. Rather, they’re smothering what should have been a solid recovery.
Real GDP climbed a less-than-expected 2.8% in final quarter of 2011, and just 1.7% for the entire year, down from 3% in 2010. The trend of subpar growth under Obama continues.
To get a better sense of how bad Obama’s recovery is, consider this: Under Obama, real GDP has climbed a total of just 6% in the two-and-a-half years since the recession ended in June 2009.
By comparison, real GDP had grown 16% by this point in the Reagan recovery, after the very deep and painful 1981-82 recession.
Had Obama’s recovery been as powerful as Reagan’s, the economic pie would be $1.2 trillion bigger today.
And had job growth under Obama kept pace with job growth during the Reagan recovery, there would be 10 million — yes 10 million — more people with jobs today.
So what explains the difference between these two recoveries? Obama and his legion of liberal defenders claim the last recession was so deep that we’re just now getting back on our feet.
Plus, they claim that a financial crisis invariably causes a slow recovery.
Neither excuse holds water. First, the 1981-82 recession was almost as long (16 months vs. 18 months), and as deep (unemployment was actually higher, peaking at 10.8% in that earlier recession).
But even that didn’t stop a rip-roaring comeback.
Second, a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta report found: “U.S. history provides no support for linking low employment and high unemployment in the current recovery with the financial crisis of 2007-2008.”
Plus, nobody at the time expected the Reagan recovery to be as fast and as powerful as it was.
So what’s different? The presidents’ policies.
Reagan enacted sweeping and permanent tax cuts, aggressively eliminated or reduced regulations, reined in domestic spending, and championed the private sector.
Obama’s approach has been the opposite — a huge increase in regulations; meager, targeted and temporary tax cuts; a massive increase in size and scope of the federal government; and a barrage of invective against businessmen and the wealthy. Obama has bashed Reagan’s approach, saying that cutting taxes and regulations “has never worked” to spur growth.
Obama might think the U.S. is “getting stronger,” as he put it in his State of the Union speech, and maybe it is, a little. But if he keeps choking it with his misguided policies, it will never be as strong as it could be, or should be.
The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.
And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”
When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.
Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.
And the only thing that could truly destroy the fruit of Reagan’s policies was the coming of another Jimmy Carter.
And of course that’s exactly what we got in this turd:
Obama obviously has no solution to anything but trying to get himself re-elected so he can continue his “fundamental transformation” of America into a failed socialist banana republic.
Well, the final tally was counted last night, and Mitt Romney edged out Rick Santorum by eight votes.
That’s got to drive you nuts; they say this stretch between Iowa and Super Tuesday is the hardest and most stressful and arduous period in all of politics; and Rick Santorum enters this stretch realizing if he’d just shaken as few as five more hands…
Romney kind of won (a meager technical victory) and Santorum kind of won (by winning the surge of the last few days of the race). Both candidates will legitimately be able to claim victory. The question is who will most effectively be able to take advantage of the victory they won in Iowa in the coming days.
At this point in the GOP contest, the race boils down to one of “the establishment candidate deemed most likely to win” versus the candidate we’d vote for if we were going to actually vote our values. I don’t say it that way to say we should all necessarily be voting for Rick Santorum; I myself would rather have a President Mitt Romney than a defeated GOP contestant Rick Santorum. We all have to do that calculus: which Republican candidate has the best chance of actually winning?
I believe along with Charles Krauthammer that we should elect the most conservative candidate who can win. And I don’t profess to know which candidate that is.
It could be Mitt Romney; it could be that Rick Santorum simply won’t be able to get those millions that will be able to compete with Obama’s billion (and isn’t it interesting that the same president who has so self-righteously eschewed “the system” would be the one who has amassed more money from that system than any other candidate in the history of the entire human race?).
If we’re talking big money, the guy is probably Romney; he has been the only money-raiser who has demonstrated an ability to compete with the Money-Raiser-in-Chief who sits on the White House throne.
But there’s a rub:
We need a candidate who can unite the party, yes, but we also need a candidate who can successfully unite both the big donors who fund the party and the conservatives who would serve as the willing foot soldiers to help carry the message. You need money to win or you can’t win; and you just as much need inspired volunteers to win or you can’t win.
Romney can raise the bucks – probably better than any Republican in the field. But can Romney inspire the troops?
He sure aint inspired me yet. The best thing I can say about Mitt Romney is that at least he would at least be better than Obama (and frankly you’d have to go with guys with names like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong Il to point out people who would be worse than Obama).
But can Santorum inspire the conservative troops? Think about it: Santorum represents the fifth candidate in a chain of candidates whom conservatives have tried to back as the “anti-Romney” choice. He’s the fifth choice at this point. That doesn’t mean he can’t truly rise to the occasion; it does mean he’s got an awfully long way to go to get there.
Romney has got the money; Santorum was able to get people to work like dogs for him in the final few days of the Iowa Caucus. We need a Republican who can do both and do it on a national level.
I said a couple of weeks ago that I feared that neither Santorum or any other conservative would be able to rise that far in the time remaining. And so allow me to talk about Romney for a few moments.
This is what happened to the Republican Party last year: we needed a visionary leader, and we got John McCain – a RINO who couldn’t be counted upon to stand up and deliver the conservative message and the conservative worldview. My fear all along is that Mitt Romney is a John McCain with better hair and teeth.
What did the left do to that RINO McCain who had reached out so many times to Democrats? Basically, this:
They turned him into some kind of arch-über-conservative that would frighten away independents. And of course actual conservatives knew that the brand wasn’t true. So damned near everybody was turned off to McCain.
McCain talked about remaining in Iraq the way we’ve remained in Germany and South Korea; not as “bloodthirsty warmongers,” but as guarantors to safeguard and protect what we had won with too much blood and treasure. That was a message that Obama and his minions proceeded to twist and distort so they could deceive the American people into voting for a fraud who would fail.
And they’ll try to do the same thing to Mitt Romney, mark my words. It doesn’t matter if he’s not a real conservative and every conservative knows he’s not a real conservative; liberals don’t give a flying damn about what’s real; they are all about rhetoric, and they’ll try to use their bogus, vicious rhetoric again. It’s all they’ve got; it’s all they are.
I’ll vote for Mitt Romney and I’ll vote for Rick Santorum. But I’ll sure be wishing for Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was a conservative whom the Democrat and Republican establishments both agreed couldn’t win when he captured the Republican nomination. In fact, when he defeated the establishment candidate George H.W. Bush, the Jimmy Carter campaign staff literally opened champagne bottles and toasted one another.
Reagan shove that bottle right up… well, you know where. He defeated Carter in the biggest landslide against an incumbant anyone alive had ever seen.
But Obama has given us God damn America, and in God damn America you don’t get a Reagan because you don’t deserve a Reagan.
In God damn America, Americams sow the wind and reaps the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).
God damn America is a land that believes lies because they would rather believe lies than face reality.
We’re down to three Republican candidates, and all three of them are deeply flawed even while all three of them remain far superior to the Liar-in-Chief we’ve got now.
I believe this nation – and this world – is in the last days. I believe we’ve kicked the can down the road until there’s no more road to kick the can down any more, and we are about to pay for it with a Great Depression that will make the last one look like a walk on the beach.
A vote for the Republican challenger would be a vote against that fate; but if we are God damn America, we are too much a nation of fools to care about disaster, aren’t we?
November 2012 is going to come fast. And America doesn’t seem to handle deadlines very well. We’ve got a huge choice to make; and my fear is that the American people will vote to kick the can down the road just as they have demanded their representatives do over and over again. Until certain doom overtakes us.
One thing is certain: we don’t have enough road for Obama. A vote for Obama is a vote for fiscal implosion and national suicide. And that is precisely the choice that God damn America would make.
Here’s the essence of the 2012 race in all probability: the Republican Party will be uninspired because they will have an uninpsiring leader; the Democrat Party will be uninspired because their leader is a fraud and a failure. Will the uninspired Republicans be more determined to get Obama out, or will the uninspired Democrats be more determined to keep their failure in?
I hope I haven’t come across as overly optimistic about our choices as Americans.
There’s only one candidate for your heart that will save you from the hell that is coming: and He isn’t a Republican. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
I’ll vote in the election; but I’ve put my trust in Jesus.
(Reuters) – White House hopeful Rick Perry has at least some supporters in the Democratic stronghold of Chicago — President Barack Obama’s re-election team.
The Texas governor, a social and fiscal conservative, is seen by Obama’s top election campaigners and fundraisers as easier to beat than the more moderate Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
“I was praying Perry would get in the race,” said a former White House aide closely linked to Obama’s campaign.
Now, there are two possibilities here.
One is that the Obama campaign is desperately pleading that conservatives are really as stupid as liberal propaganda says they are. They’re saying, “Please swallow our load of malarkey and let us pick the guy who runs against us.”
The other is that the Obama campaign is actually as deluded as the Obama White House clearly is.
If you consider who the mainstream media, the elite talking head establishment, the Democrat Party and even Barack Obama himself are all talking about, then you’d have to say it’s the first alternative. They are begging anybody who will listen to please, PLEASE, dear GOD oh-PLLLEEEAAAZZZE nominate Mitt Romney so they have some chance at re-election.
If you consider how absolutely and completely out-of-touch and disconnected from reality Barack Obama and his White House have been, it may well be the latter.
As one example of how this phenomenon turns out, it is said that the Carter campaign team actually toasted champagne the night Ronald Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush to become the Republican nominee. Because, of course, George H.W. Bush was the “establishment” Republican and Ronald Reagan was the crazy rightwing bomb-throwing governor who didn’t stand a chance. At least not until Ronald Reagan grabbed the Carter team’s champagne bottle and shoved it right down Jimmy Carter’s pencil-neck in one of the worst elections blowouts in history:
There are an awful lot of liberals who don’t want to see Obama curled up into the fetal position on the floor and sucking his thumb while sobbing inconsolably and refusing to let go of his Oval Office chair. And they infest the mainstream media hallways the way cockroaches infest the walls of a public housing apartment building.
Which is why this is the “coverage” that Rick Perry is going to get between now and election day.
We can’t trust what we’re being told by the mainstream media. They constantly spin the news to favor their leftwing bias.
I think the following is far more truthful than the avalanche of media spin on Governor Rick Perry’s entry into the race:
KUHNER: Obama’s worst nightmare Rick Perry is the conservative Middle America has been waiting for
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner and Jeffrey T. Kuhner – The Washington Times
Thursday, August 18, 2011
President Obama can see the writing on the wall: His days in the White House are numbered. This is the real meaning of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry into the Republican presidential race. The GOP now has a candidate who can not only defeat Mr. Obama, but crush him.
For months, the mainstream media anointed Mitt Romney as the presumptive front-runner. The former Massachusetts governor is their ideal GOP candidate – a moderate technocrat from the Northeast, who flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights and enacted universal health care in his state. He is a Rockefeller Republican wolf in Reaganite clothing. His strongest asset is his business background. In a moribund economy, Mr. Romney came across as the only competent, experienced nominee who could kick-start the private sector. No longer.
Mr. Perry has fundamentally altered that equation – and with it the nature of the campaign. His candidacy has an overriding strength: Texas. Mr. Perry is the longest-serving governor in that state’s history. He is entering his 11th year, making him the nation’s senior governor as well. On possessing executive experience, none of the declared 2012 candidates – including Mr. Obama – comes close.
He also has a stellar economic record. From June 2001 until June 2010, Texas added more jobs than the other 49 states combined. Since June 2009, it has generated nearly 40 percent of all net jobs in America. His formula is simple: Embrace fiscal conservatism. His administration has controlled spending, balanced budgets and slashed burdensome regulations. Texas is a right-to-work state. It does not have a personal income or capital gains tax. It is a magnet for businesses, job creators and investment capital.
Mr. Perry is also a Middle American populist, who champions God, country and family. Unlike Mr. Obama, he is not a progressive highbrow who despises the U.S. military. He is a former Air Force pilot. Also unlike Mr. Obama, he is a devout evangelical Christian, who opposes abortion – the seminal moral issue of our time. As governor, he passed a law mandating that sonograms be shown to any pregnant woman prior to having an abortion. The goal is to appeal to her conscience before exterminating an unborn baby. At his core, Mr. Perry is a “10th Amendment conservative.” He champions states’ rights, localism and the devolution of federal power. His Jeffersonian patriotism is the exact opposite of Mr. Obama’s secular socialism.
Mr. Perry’s low-tax, high-growth Texas model stands in stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s dismal performance. The president has no accomplishments he can run on in 2012. Obamacare is deeply unpopular. The stimulus failed. His reckless borrow-and-spend policies have created a debt crisis. Unemployment is high. The recovery is anemic. Inflation is rising. More than 45 million Americans are on food stamps – a historic record. The economy is spiraling toward a possible depression. Mr. Perry is the anti-Obama: a successful chief executive, who can – and will – get America moving again. In short, he is Mr. Obama’s worst nightmare.
This is why the media mandarins must destroy Mr. Perry’s credibility. Within days of his entering the race, Democrats are saying the Texas cowboy is too extreme, too radical and too uncouth to be president. Leftists are flagrantly distorting his statements. Mr. Perry never called for Texas’ secession. That is a lie. During a speech, someone yelled out “Secede!” Mr. Perry responded: “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it.”
Recently, in Iowa Mr. Perry said that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s “quantitative easing” – massively printing money – is “almost treasonous,” especially, if he was to unleash the printing presses for a third round in order to artificially boost economic growth. Apparently, for many pundits, this comment is beyond the pale. Even Great Society Republicans are upset. They argue Mr. Bernanke has been unfairly attacked, the political independence of the Federal Reserve is under assault and Mr. Perry should apologize.
But the Texas governor is right. Mr. Bernanke’s loose monetary policy is slowly eroding the dollar. A nation’s economy is only as strong as its currency. The more greenbacks printed, the lower their value. The falling dollar is undermining consumer purchasing power, reducing our standard of living and inevitably leading to inflation – the great threat to middle-class prosperity. Mr. Bernanke’s actions are reckless and pose a clear and present danger to America’s economic security. It may not be “treasonous” but it’s darn close.
Mr. Perry is not perfect – far from it. He passed legislation granting in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants. He opposes building a wall along the porous southern border. He supports some form of amnesty. He is a globalist conservative, not a Robert Taft-style nationalist.
There are other GOP candidates – Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul – who are more ideologically pristine and muscular. But Mr. Perry is easily the most electable conservative in the current field. He will take the fight to Mr. Obama. He will give no quarter and ask for none. And that’s why he will win – and win big.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.
Thanks for your offer to help me pick the most scariest Republican to run against your Messiah, Obama re-election committee. But I think I’ll stick with my guy Rick Perry just the same.
New York – U.S. consumers’ confidence in the progress of the nation’s economy and of their own financial situation plunged in August to its lowest point since May 1980 over worries about the faltering recovery, according to survey results released Friday.
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary August reading on overall consumer sentiment stands at 54.9 points, considerably lower than the 63.7 in July and also far from the expectations of analysts, who believed the index would be around 63.
The figures are the lowest in more than three decades, a result of a series of factors including high unemployment rates, a long debate in Congress over raising the debt limit and the downgrading of the U.S. debt by Standard & Poor’s, Reuters/UMich said.
“Never before in the history of the surveys have so many consumers spontaneously mentioned negative aspects of the government’s role,” survey director Richard Curtin said.
By July the index had already retreated significantly, from 71.5 points to 63.7, which at the time was its lowest level since March 2009 and was largely due to the lack of an agreement between Republicans and Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, which was finally approved at the last minute a week ago.
Worries were further heightened this month by the downgrading of the U.S. debt rating, which combined with other structural factors sank consumer confidence to depths unknown in more than 30 years.
And the subindex that measures consumer expectations about how the economy will fare in a year’s time fell in August to 45.7 points compared with 56 points in July and reached its lowest level since May 1980.
For its part, the index that measures consumers’ perception of current economic conditions and their readiness to make large purchases dropped from 75.8 points in July to 69.3 points this month.
Time for another graph to show the sheer devastation that is Barack Obama:
Well, that’s certainly “change.” And I guess we all “hope” Obama doesn’t double down in ruining our lives and our nation even more than he’s already done.
Did I mention the fact that these are CARTER numbers?
Most people simply do not understand how truly BAD things were under Jimmy Carter. Or just how awful Ronald Reagan had it when arrived at the Oval Office for his first day of work in January 1981.
The numbers told the sad story of the Jimmy Carter presidency: interest rates of 21%; inflation at 13.5%, and an unemployment rate of 7%. And a relatively new economic device called “the misery index” – the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates which Carter had himself used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election – was at a shocking 20.5%.
And those who went through those dark and difficult times may soon be looking back to that period as “the good old days.”
When Ronald Reagan took office from Jimmy Carter, inflation was at a meteoric 13.3% and the country was in the throes of a fierce recession. There was a real question as to whether workers’ wages would keep up with the costs of living, which made people afraid to either spend or save. And nobody knew how to control inflation – which had risen from 1.4% in 1960 to the aforementioned 13.3% in 1980 – causing a real erosion of confidence in the future. Jimmy Carter answered a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering, “It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
But Ronald Reagan had a solution. And by the time he left office, he had solved the problem of creeping inflation increases and had actually reversed the trend: he left behind a healthy inflation rate of 4.1%.
Reagan’s policies set the trajectory for growth that would last for 20 years.
America needs another Reagan or it’s doomed. And the LAST thing on earth we need is four more years of Jimmy Carter:
You will NOT get a Reagan from the Democrat Party.
Your only possible hope is to vote Republican, and then get on your knees and pray that both that Republican president and the American people are up to turning around Obama’s disaster.
Start Thinking Right 