The Demonic Hypocrisy Of Democrats Who Invoke Reagan With The Words, “Why, Even Ronald Reagan [Fill In The Blank].”

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “even Reagan” attacks on Republicans from liberals such as, “Even Reagan raised taxes,” or “Even Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants.”

I mean, Reagan cut the damn taxes, okay?  Can we please stop the bullcrap?  The top rate went from 70% to 28% under the Reagan tax cut which ignited the economy like nothing ever has before or since.  You’ve got to be not only a fool but a DAMNFOOL – which unfortunately is a synonym for “Democrat” – to try to argue that Reagan “raised taxes.”  If some taxes went up, while most taxes went down and the overall tax rate went WAY down, it’s pretty pathetic to cling to the couple of times that Reagan raised some minor tax to try to argue against the FACT that Reagan cut taxes.  And yet the left does it all the time.

I googled the phrase (with quotes) “even Reagan” and got 27,700 hits, including the first one from the New York Slimes titled, “ObamaCare and Reagan.”  The author’s thesis is apparently that Reagan was a confused man who didn’t understand socialism (you know, because he only understood it enough to defeat the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics against the steadfast resistance of the Democrat Party whose mantra had become, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”).  If you search for “Even Ronald Reagan” you get another 33,800 results, with the first one being titled, “Even Ronald Reagan Agrees With Bernie Sanders.”  Oh yes, Ronnie would be a wild-eyed socialist today, wouldn’t he, you deluded liberals?

This actually isn’t about Reagan, although if any group of people on earth would refuse to allow a dead man to rest in peace, it would most assuredly be liberals.  This is about the current conservative view on policy issues and the left’s rhetorical game to take down those conservatives.

First of all, it’s kind of interesting for the left to play the “Even Reagan” game.  If you actually believe that what Reagan believed wasn’t right, why on earth would you ask someone to hold to the views of a guy you say is ignorant?  Isn’t that kind of crazy of you to do?  I mean, do you want to say “Even Hitler…” in a way intended to make one side hold more closely to Adolf Hitler’s policies?  It’s like virtually all other leftist talking points: it’s a word game.  It’s actually a pretty stupid one.

Let me explain what is so desperately wrong with this attack and why the left keeps advancing it by a parallel argument: “Even Jimmy Carter was opposed to abortion.”  As president, Jimmy Carter said, “I am convinced that every abortion is an unplanned tragedy, brought about by a combination of human errors and this has been one of the most difficult moral and political issues I have had to face. As president, I accepted my obligation to enforce the “Roe v. Wade” Supreme Court ruling, and at the same time attempted in every way possible to minimize the number of abortions.”  Hardly a triumphant shout of “women have the right to choose to kill as many of their babies as they want to and let the fathers of those babies rights be damned!” statement; it was a regretful, “This is wrong, but I have no choice” statement.  So even Jimmy Carter believed abortion was a “tragedy.”  And why shouldn’t you be flash-frozen to that view the way you want to flash-freeze me to Regan’s views?

Here’s another one: “Even President Jimmy Carter didn’t believe in same-sex marriage.”

Even Jimmy Carter didn’t believe in …” and you name it, you could certainly advance that thesis if you want to compare Carter’s stated views and policies to Obama’s.

But on the left’s incredibly disingenuous and profoundly hypocritical narrative, only Democrats have the right to have any evolution of their views.  Democrats have “evolved” a damn MILE, but let Republicans evolve an INCH and they are therefore on this incredibly hypocritical narrative without any question a bunch of extremists.

I mean, even REAGAN!

Let’s put aside the fact that EVEN JFK believed that reducing taxes caused increased opportunity and incentivized economic growth.  That is a FACT of history, and anyone who isn’t an idiot knows it.  But hell, Republicans are “extremists” for wanting a little more than what Reagan wanted, whereas Democrats are WHAT for doing a COMPLETE U-TURN AND WANTING SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY AND PROFOUNDLY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT THEIR GREATEST PRESIDENT WANTED????

Which party has actually wildly veered into extremism???  It sure couldn’t be the damn party that urinated on the entire history of the human civilization in imposing homosexual marriage, let alone their precious Darwinian evolution and it’s edict of “survival of the fittest” defined as “Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations.”  Good luck fertilizing an egg by all the sodomy in the world, queers.  And if you’re a lesbian, keep licking furiously; but if you’ve got a functioning brain cell in your head, you ought to know naught will come from it beyond the hairballs you cough up.

One party not only utterly abandoned the history of civilization, not only abandoned the history of every major religion, but also abandoned the very pretense of science they claimed they held the mantle of.  But it’s not like they went “extremist” or anything.

I think we should “fundamentally transform” our calendars and start with BS: “Before Sodomy.”  Because one rabidly extremist political party wildly transformed the universe (in a shockingly depraved way).

If you’re a Democrat, you are at this point by definition a hypocrite to the last cell of your vile little cockroach brain, so there is absolutely NOTHING WRONG with MASSIVE SHIFTS in policy; if you are a Republican, however, any change is somehow defined as a “radical” and as an “extremist” shift toward some demagogic monster.

Since Democrats love the mantra “even Ronald Reagan…” let’s punch them in the mouth with a little bit of “Even Bill Clinton…”

Let’s look at what an actual QUESTION would have looked like had the one Democrat debate not been an example of the Democrat Party’s most powerful super PAC rather than legitimate journalism:

Mrs. Clinton, back in the 1990s your husband concluded the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed legislation repealing the Glass-Steagall restrictions on affiliations between banks and securities firms, and embraced welfare reform and cuts in capital gains taxes. In 1996, he famously declared “the era of big government is over.”

Today you are running on a pro-tax, pro-regulation, pro-spending platform that is almost the opposite of your husband’s economic record. If his policies worked so well in the 1990s, why are you running against them today?

I mean, EVEN BILL CLINTON…  not that Democrats give a flying damn about their wild swing into the most extremist policies imaginable even compared to their last Democrat president.

There is a constant, unwavering attempt by the mainstream media and the Democrat Party and in particular the most demagogic president in the entire history of the republic, Obama, to demonize and slander the Republican Party has having become “extremist.”  And their most darling argument to that bogus end is the “even Reagan” mantra.  Reagan was a great president.  But he was last president very nearly thirty years ago.

Ronald Reagan massively changed the social, political and economic landscape with policies that were fundamentally different from what had been done before.  He fought very hard for his core beliefs and was willing to do something that Barack Obama has proven to be pathologically incapable of doing: reaching out to the other side.  Reagan REGULARLY met with his Democrat Party opposites and worked out deals.  You tell me the number of times that Obama ever sought to meet with Republican leaders.  He was either arrogantly stating to them, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won” or neither he nor anyone on his damn STAFF even had the Republican leaders’ phone numbers to reach them.

How about this one, “Even Reagan” leftist lecturers: how about “EVEN OBAMA”

On the debt:

Obama: 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. — July 3, 2008

What’s the damn debt again, you demon-possessed HYPOCRITE???  It’s $18.5 trillion and skyrocketing by the nanosecond.  You’ve added NINE TRILLION by your lonesome and you aint even DONE yet!

Or how about this one:

“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. For me, as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Oops.  So much for gay marriage.  “Even Obama!”  I mean, holy crap, what about THAT “even Obama” compared to your current precise opposite “even Obama”!!!???!!!???

How about this “even Hillary” from Hillary, who now is actually trying to claim that her installation of a secretive private server giving her sole control over her emails so that she could purge tens of thousands of them without ANYONE being allowed to examine them even after her secret server and all of her emails on it had been lawfully subpoenaed by Congress?   Consider what Hillary said about the Bush White House that did NOT use secretive private servers:

HILLARY CLINTON: You know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, about the secret military tribunals, we know about the secret White House email accounts.

So Hillary Clinton needs to be thoroughly investigated and convicted for her shredding the Constitution.  EVEN HILLARY agrees.  At least when she’s not being an abject cockroach hypocrite.

We’re not talking about a party “evolving” over thirty years; we’re talking about a party that swung wildly and radically extremist in ONE CANCEROUS PRESIDENCY that now seeks to further infest and infect America with THE NEXT CANCEROUS PRESIDENCY.

Every single Democrat or “journalist” who has ever used any phrase containing the words “even” and “Reagan” is simply demon-possessed.  There is no other way to explain such massive hypocrisy and such massive dishonesty and such massive depravity.

Barack Obama has just as massively “fundamentally transformed” the political landscape by his tyrannical determination to either get his way exactly the way he wants it or do what he wants through executive order without bothering to deal with the inconveniences of the House and Senate or the Constitution.  And Reagan’s way of doing things won’t work with that level of fascist hate for everything our republic stands for that the Democrat Party has degenerated into since Reagan left office.

This was frankly proven even in Reagan’s own time.  Consider what the Associated Press tried to do to Republicans by invoking Reagan’s “amnesty” for illegal immigrants in a manner that attempted to frame them as hypocrites for opposing Obama’s amnesty.  It’s just another example of “even Reagan..”  Hey, let’s ignore some major differences, such as the fact that Reagan signed a bill into law that had been duly passed by the House and Senate; whereas Obama IMPOSED an amnesty that had been explicitly voted down by Congress by act of sheer executive tyranny.  AFTER having repeatedly stated that he didn’t have the authority to do what he did, that it would violate democracy, that he would be an emperor, etc.  HOW ABOUT THAT EXAMPLE OF “EVEN OBAMA…”???  Let’s also consider the fact that Reagan’s amnesty FAILED by all accounts – so why the hell do more of what already has been proven not to work???  And let’s also consider the flat-out LIAR that Democrats proved to be given a condition for Reagan’s signing that law in the first place:

Rising levels of illegal immigration [led to] the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA).  It provided amnesty for 3 million illegal immigrants, in return for increased border security and penalties for companies “knowingly” hiring illegal immigrants.

Democrats dishonestly proved to be liars who refused to make good on either one of those two conditions.  They proved that they are utterly illegitimate negotiating partners.  And they have been dishonest negotiating partners ever since.

Even Reagan can’t be “even Reagan” when he could literally trust the pathologically dishonest Soviet Union more than he could trust the Democrat Party.

Again, this is just another example of “even Reagan,” so if Republicans oppose Obama doing what he did, it’s only because they’re “extremist.”  Because you see, it’s only fascist when Republicans evolve, at least it is if you’ve got enough legions of demons screaming in your insane brain.

To hold one party to a standard that old even as your own party has swung wildly and massively to the left is quite literally clinically insane both in terms of schizophrenic (by believing “facts” that are blatantly false) and sociopathic (by manifesting profound deceit and insincerity and an appalling absence of remorse or shame).

I am so sick of these sneering pseudo-intellectual HYPOCRITES creating “facts” by the despicable manipulation of rhetoric otherwise known as “political correctness.”

We now live in a time when liberals are so hypocritical and frankly so blatantly morally depraved that liberals believe that it is okay for their members to label police as “murderers” and that “law enforcement” is tantamount to “white supremacy” but it is somehow intolerable for a Republican to talk about the ACTUAL MURDERERS and criminals who are flooding into our nation via illegal immigration.

Liberal Hollywood tycoon Quentin Tarantino appeared on liberal MSNBC and doubled-down after calling police murders.  He said (“whined” being a more accurate term):

That’s the way they attack me …  for standing up for the rights of unarmed citizens who have been killed by the police.

They want to demonize me.  They want to slander me and imply that I said things I didn’t say.  And the reason is because they want me to shut up and they want to make sure that no other people like me, prominent citizens, will stand up for that side.

First of all, you turd, WHY ARE THE CITIZENS UNARMED AGAIN???  Oh, that’s right; because of liberals like YOU dedicated to denying us our 2nd Amendment freedom in spite of the fact that basically every single movie you ever made glorified gun violence – because, yeah, to be a damn liberal is to be a damn hypocrite.  And second, what about the left trying to destroy Donald Trump for pointing out the fact that “unarmed citizens” are rather routinely getting MURDERED by illegal immigrants that this administration refuses to deal with?  What about the far MORE fascist tactics that the left routinely uses to demonize any debate???

You can’t reason with or argue with a hypocrite.  Democrats constantly shift in their double-standards.  As I believe I’ve amply demonstrated above, the goal posts move on every single play with them while they demonize us for not PERFECTLY holding to the ideals of a man from three decades ago.

It is literally Satanic for the Democrat Party that has swung further to extremism than any political party has in American history to label the Republican Party as “extremists.”  Just as it is literally Satanic for the mainstream media to act as that extremist party’s most powerful super PAC by backing their demagoguery.

Pawlenty on Obama: ‘You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.’

Tim Pawlenty just went way up on my list of candidates after that particular remark in my title.

Is Obama anti-business?  Well, how about this for a factoid: 77% of investors think he is.  He was anti-business in 2009.  He was anti-business in 2010.  And he is still anti-business in 2011.  How many eggs are you going to get when you’re out to get all the chickens and when the chickens know you’re out to get them?

Here’s an article that talks about this former governor who has been successful where Obama has failed, failed and failed some more.  What is interesting is how we hear Pawlenty talk about how to fix our broken economy, and Obama talking about wtf???

Republican presidential candidate Pawlenty: ‘We are in deep doo-doo’
By Abdon M. Pallasch Political

How badly has President Barack Obama managed the United States’ economy?

Pretty badly, says plain-talking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a campaign stop in Chicago Tuesday.

“We are in deep doo-doo. We are in deep crap,” Pawlenty said Tuesday, in a locale meant to drive home the Republican presidential candidate’s differences with the president.

In a classroom at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies, located across the street from the law school where Obama used to teach, Pawlenty laid out his tax-slashing, budget-cutting proposal that he says will save the U.S. economy:

There would be only three tax rates: Zero, for low-income earners who currently pay no federal tax; 10 percent, for single people earning up to $50,000, or married couples who earn up to $100,000; and 25 percent, for people who earn more than that (down from a top rate of 35 percent now). He would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and end the estate tax.

Those tax cuts, plus a freeze on federal spending, would spur growth of 5 percent a year, he said.

Democrats immediately said Pawlenty’s proposed tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who finished a speech on the North Side just before Pawlenty started his, credited Pawlenty with “good stagecraft” for holding the speech on Obama’s old stomping grounds. But he said Obama’s budget-fixing recipe is better.

Pawlenty “left his own state with a $5 billion deficit and now he’s counseling the rest of the country on how to handle finances,” Axelrod said. “He proposes massive new tax cuts for upper-income Americans … that would produce huge new deficits. He wants to replay the same formula that got us into the jam in the first place.”

But Pawlenty told the classroom full of students at the university that people should not focus on “whether this makes some group a little more wealthy or a little less wealthy. You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.”

Flirting with the so-called “third rail” of American politics, Pawlenty said he would raise the retirement age for younger workers to start collecting Social Security in the future. People nearing retirement now would not be affected, he said.

“If you’re coming in new to the work force, gradually, over time, we are going to raise the retirement age,” Pawlenty said. “If you’re wealthy, you’re not going to get the cost-of-living adjustment.”

Proposals that can be short-handed as “cutting Social Security” can kill campaigns, but Pawlenty said, “It’s going to be the ‘Jack Nicholson election.’” Referring to the movie “A Few Good Men,” Pawlenty said, “There’s that famous line when he’s on the witness stand and he said, ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ The American people, I think, can handle the truth. It doesn’t mean we freak ’em out. It doesn’t mean we scare ’em. … I’m only doing this because I love the country. We’ll only get it to a better place if people are willing to tell the American people the truth. I am. President Obama isn’t. He’s ducking, bobbing, weaving.”

In a speech at the Misericordia, a home for children and adults with disabilities, Axelrod told the story of how, back in April, he and Obama were crafting a joke about Pawlenty for Obama to use at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. The two were interrupted by a National Security Council staffer who had to brief Obama on something, so Obama asked Axelrod to leave the room.

When Axelrod came back in, Obama rejected a suggestion for a joke about how Pawlenty “could really be a strong candidate but for his unfortunate middle name: bin Laden.”

“ ‘That’s so hackneyed, bin Laden, that’s so yesterday, Why don’t we take that out,’ ” Obama said, Axelrod recalled. “ ‘We’ll put in “Hosni.’’ ’ ” Axelrod didn’t think that was as funny, but he agreed to it.

“It was only the next day that we realized that he had not only eliminated Bin Laden from the joke. He had given the order to eliminate bin Laden from the face of the Earth,” Axelrod told the crowd.

Later, speaking to reporters, Axelrod laughed when asked if he agreed with potential Republican candidate Sarah Palin, who said over the weekend that Paul Revere’s famous ride was an attempt to “warn the British’’ — that the British were coming.

“I think that’s a good reflection of why we can’t abandon education,” he said. “We need good education so everybody knows their history lessons and gets them properly.”

Pawlenty just laughed when asked the same question. He proceeded to a fund-raiser.

Well, first of all,we are – to put it in Pawlenty’s accurate term – ” in deep crap” – and the best Axelrod can do is talk about a joke that Obama’s people are going to go after Sarah Palin for an impromptu remark about Paul Revere when their guy is on the record saying he’d visited 57 states with one more yet to go?

And Obama’s going to talk about Pawlenty’s $5 billion deficit?  Seriously?  And just how many TRILLIONS of deficit does he have just so far???  Obama’s budget just for this term would add THIRTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS to the national debt.  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama proposed a $3.73 trillion budget Monday  for fiscal 2012 that he said will start reining in runaway budget deficits, but  his plan envisions the gross national debt swelling by almost $13 trillion over  a decade.

Obama’s budget sets up a clash with the  Republican-led House of Representatives over how to recover from the deep  recession of recent years and strengthen the economic foundation for the future,  with federal spending the pivotal battleground.

Obama added $3 trillion to the deficit in less than two years.  Another way to put it: In just nineteen months, Obama added more to the debt than every single US president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan – combined.

And this idiot is talking about $5 billion???  Like we’re not supposed to laugh our asses off and then impeach Obama as a clear and present danger to the United States?  Particularly when in fact Pawlenty in fact DID actually leave office with the budget balanced?  If you’re going to talk about devastating developments after the guy was gone – especially when that characterization is being made by the guy’s political enemies – at least have the courtesy to do the same sort of redacting with Bill Clinton’s legacy – who managed to take all the credit for balancing the budget but wasn’t in any way responsible for the disastrous Dotcom crisis that unfolded on his watch.

Which is to say, Democrats should either give Tim Pawlenty plenty of credit for balancing the budget or at least shut the hell up.

Tim Pawlenty as a man has a good, solid life.  And he’s got the background and the bona fides to get behind.  He is a candidate worthy of consideration.

On Cavuto’s Fox News program on Friday, Cavuto pointed out that the White House was questioning whether Tim Pawlenty was being realistic about whether he could create the kind of 5% GDP that he is talking about.  Pawlenty’s response was almost as good as his quip in my title.  I don’t have an exact quote, but basically he said “I’m an optimist, and I have an optimistic view of America’s future.  We’ve been great before, and I believe we can be great again.  And if Barack Obama could say that he was going to provide jobs for the all the jobless, slow the rising oceans, heal the planet, end all the wars and basically remake our nation, I think I can talk about doubling our GDP.”

Touché.

Tim Pawlenty wants to increase our GDP and grow our economy and create jobs by NOT being anti-chicken while claiming to be pro-egg.  In other words, the man actually makes sense.

Obama has spent three years demonizing and attacking businesses while demanding that they create more jobs.  That, by stark contrast, is 100% pure insane, no additives or preservatives.

Pawlenty wants profound tax cuts.  And while liberals want to ignore history and argue that the more you tax, the more you collect in tax revenue, Pawlenty cites the fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have dramatically increased our tax revenues.  See my article “Tax Cut’s INCREASE Revenues; They have ALWAYS Increased Tax Revenues” for that documented history.

Think of it in terms of gas (as I’ve argued before in more detail).  As the price of gas went up and up and up, did people buy the same amount of gas?  No way; they very quickly cut back on their driving.  If you increase the price of something, you sell less of it.  And in the same way, if you increase tax rates, you invariably end up encouraging counter-productive behavior, as the wealthy find it worthwhile to quit investing and instead pursue tax shelters and loopholes to protect their assets.

It is simply a repeatedly documented fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have ended up with increased revenues, as businesses and individuals were encouraged to invest because they were being rewarded with the ability to actually keep more of their own profits.  It comes down to this: if I give you a job, and you work hard, but at the end of the day the tax man comes and takes it all away, you’re not going to bother to take my job.  With total taxes exceeding 50% in a number of states, businesses and individuals are put in a position in which they take all the risks in hiring and investing – and if they lose they lose big – but even if they win they aren’t allowed to keep enough of their money to make the risks worth taking.

Democrats claim that the deficit has increased with lower tax rates.  And that is true.  But that isn’t the fault of the lower tax rates – WHICH AGAIN ACTUALLY INCREASED THE GOVERNMENT REVENUES DRAMATICALLY.  The bizarre argument that Democrats are making is analogous to the argument that the guy who lives in his parent’s basement and makes minimum wage and lives within his modest means actually makes more money than the multi-millionaire who buys multiple mansions, yachts and cars and then finds himself in debt.  It was the reckless spending that put us into the hole, not the tax policies that resulted in the politicians who spent that money having more money to spend.  Pawlenty is arguing that we need to profoundly cut tax rates and simultaneously have a balanced budget amendment and dramatically cut our spending.

That isn’t even mentioning the constant hypocrisy of the Democrats as they fail to live up to their own demagogic rhetoric.

Then there’s the issue of the Bush tax cuts.  Democrats say we’ve had the Bush tax cuts, and look what’s happened.  Two things.

First, consider this: Obama signed the compromise to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years on December 17, 2010.  Many experts believed Obama would be forced to do this as a result of the Republican landslide victory that changed the political landscape in early November.  So let’s look at what has happened to the jobless rate since November:

November 2010: 9.8%
December 2010: 9.4%
January  2011: 9.0%
February 2011: 8.9%
March    2011: 8.8%
April    2011: 9.0%
May      2011: 9.1%

Interestingly, Obama initially appeared to be reaching out to the business leaders he had been attacking.  After getting his head handed to him in November 2010, Obama began to reach out to Republicans.  And then in mid December, he began to reach out to business – with his signing of the Bush tax cuts extension a major part of that reaching out.  In early January, he appointed as his new chief-of-staff a man who had a “business-friendly” persona.

And the market, the investors, the businesses, ordinary Americans, liked what they heard.  The public clearly, overwhelmingly wanted to see Obama reach out to the party that had just won massively.  Republicans are the party of business; reach out to business.  Let’s get to work growing this economy rather than attacking the people who grow the economy.

But even as people liked what they heard, there was always a question, as asked in this case by CNN Money:

“So is Obama really changing his tune on big business? Or is the president merely glad-handing big business while plowing ahead with his 2012 goal of making the rich pay more?”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before the business and investment community realized that Obama hadn’t changed his spots at all.  It’s either “same lies, different tune,” or “different lies, same tune” with this guy.

Before hardly any time had passed, “William Daley” became an afterthought and Obama was right back to attacking business with the same ferocity as before.

Obama’s senior economist Austan Goolsbee – now the FIFTH senior Obama economist to jump Obama’s HMO Titanic (with “HMO” standing for “His Majesty Obama” had this to say shortly before HE left.  And this according to an obvious liberal:

When Amanpour asked [Goolsbee] what the Administration could or should be doing to improve conditions, he ticked off items you’d expect to hear from a typical GOP Presidential adviser:  we’ve got to get the debt under control; we have a White House effort to identify and get rid of governmental regulations that are preventing the private sector from growing the economy; we should pass “free trade” agreements backed by the Chamber of Commerce; and we should leverage limited public dollars to release billions in private funding for investments.

Goolsbee’s bottom line:  “It’s now up to the private sector.”  That’s exactly what you’d expect from President Romney’s economic adviser.

And, of course, that brief flash of clarity was immediately followed by Goolsbee’s resignation.  We won’t be having any anti-Marxist heresies on Comrade Obama’s watch, no sir commissar.

Just in case you’re wondering why the economy seemed to be improving before going back into the toilet, there’s your answer.  The people who actually create jobs began to think that Obama finally had some level of actual awareness about how the economy and business and job-creation works, before Obama slammed the door on that idiotic thesis.  They believed Obama’s lies right after the election, then Obama demonstrated (“dictated” is more like it) that he hates business as much as he ever did, then he renewed his war on business, and it’s right back into the crapper with the U.S. economy.

So there’s the backstory behind the economy appearing to improve before diving headfirst back into the gave.  Obama is right back to being “pro-job” but “anti-chicken.”

Up above, I said there were “two things” about the Bush tax cuts and their impact on the economy.  The first point is that the extension of the Bush tax cuts DID work for five months of straight improvement – at least until Obama and the Democrats made sure that businesses and investors knew that they were as hated as ever.

The SECOND point about the Bush tax cuts – or ANY other tax cuts, for that matter – is that they have to be consistent and long-term before they will truly succeed.  This is because businesses need to know their operating environment before they will be willing to take risks such as hiring more workers.  They need to have a clear, long-term picture (most think at least five years) of what their tax liability will be.  And they need the same kind of knowledge about their health care liability and their regulatory liability.  If you start or expand a business, you’ve got one primary question: “Am I going to be able to make this work?”  And in order to answer that fundamental question, you need to know what your costs will be.

Obama signed the Bush tax cut extension for two years – and then very quickly went back on that signature by demagoguing the very thing he’d signed.  Will these tax rates be there for them in two years?  Certainly not, if Obama wins.  And there goes the window to make important investment/growth decisions.  Obama made sure that business owners wouldn’t have a long-term understanding of their taxes.  ObamaCare has thousands of pages being written as we speak; Obama’s regulations are being written as we speak; and nobody knows anything about how any of it will affect them.

Hence the paralysis.

Tim Pawlenty knows that no nation and no economy has ever had a recession that lasted forever – save when leftists have been allowed to run those nations/economies.  He also knows that economic growth and expansion are there just waiting for Obama to leave us the hell alone and get off our backs so that business owners can build better lives for themselves and their families – and create the jobs that result from those businesses growing – by allowing wealth creators to keep more of their own money.

He knows that if you really want to be pro-job, you had better be pro-business.  And that is something that Barack Obama has now proven he will never be, regardless of what he might say to the contrary.

[Update, 8/13]: Today, Michelle Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, versus Pawlenty – who had spent a lot more time and money – coming in a very distant third.

I can’t explain why Iowans basically walked away from Pawlenty, but I can tell you why I’ve been annoyed with him.  It’s simple: his non-stop attack on Michelle Bachmann.

You want to go after people, Tim?  Go after Obama.  Heck, go after Mitt Romney like a lot of people said you should have done during the first debate.  But to go after Michelle Bachmann is just dumb.

To not go after Romney and then go after Bachmann makes you look like a guy who was afraid to fight the star quarterback and then started punching a cheerleader to show you were still “tough.”

You’re trying to present yourself as a true-blue conservative.  Everyone KNOWS Michelle Bachmann is a true conservative.  So why go after her when you could be going after a Mitt Romney who has held whatever position made him look good at the moment?

To continue, some of your attacks against her are just stupid.  Like the one that Michelle Bachmann didn’t stop things like cap and trade and ObamaCare being passed in the House.  As if she was somehow the Imperial Queen of the chamber rather than one minority Republican (at the time) in a chamber with 434 other representatives.  That was just a plain dumb attack.

You finished a distant third, Tim.  Which apparently will allow you to survive.  But if you keep tee-ing off on Bachmann, you won’t be around much longer.

‘Unexpected’ Increase In Tax Revenues: More Confirmation That Lower Taxes Increases Growth/Revenue

I just finished responding to a pair of enjoyable comments from Robbie (here and here).  And Robbie posts an excellent 5:46 minute video of the great economist Thomas Sowell:

As Robbie points out, I say much the same things as Sowell.  What he says about tax rate cuts and increased investment and growth having been proven by four presidents over nearly a century (Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George Bush) is exactly what I pointed out in my article “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues.”

We just had more confirmation of the effectiveness of tax cuts in INCREASING tax revenues (which means that when the government has lower tax rates, it actually collects MORE in tax revenue than it would were it to have higher tax rates):

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner now is saying that, contrary to his recent dire warnings of “catastrophic economic consequences” should Congress fail to increase the nation’ debt limit, there has been an apparent unexpected increase in projected tax revenue, and the deadline for possible default has been benched until mid-spring.

Allow me to define “unexpected” for you: it is an adjective in Democratese for, ‘We’re too stupid to understand why, and too dishonest to admit it, but conservative economic policies are working.'”

A little more information as to why we had this “unexpected” increase in tax revenue comes out of an interview:

CHIOTAKIS: So how did the Treasury Secretary do this? I mean, I thought the old deadline of July 8th was pretty firm.

GENZER: Yeah, that’s what everybody thought. But Geithner actually got a little help from you and me, Steve — the taxpayers. It seems the IRS actually took in more tax revenue than expected last month.

There was an expectation that was building for the entire second half of 2010 that Republicans would win big in November, which greatly stimulated the stock market:

“More than 85 percent of institutional investors see the GOP taking the House next month. While political polls suggest that changes are likely in Washington, a staggering number of professional investors think that the Republicans will win back the House of Representatives in November and that may be adding to their sense of a better business environment going forward. Since government policy error remains the biggest fear of investors, according to the poll, the view of DC trends matters.”

The unemployment rate – which had been steadily going UP, has gone down every month since Republicans were overwhelmingly elected and took over the House.  As I have pointed out in the past:

Here’s an interesting factoid that doesn’t seem to get any mention in the mainstream media: Unless I’m seriously mistaken, the unemployment rate has gone down every month since Republicans took control of The House in January:

Unemployment was if anything going UP.  And then Republicans took over, and whammo.  It started going down.  But Republicans didn’t receive so much as a scintilla of credit from the mainstream media.  It’s just amazing.

One of the things that investors and businesses were looking for from Republicans was their central promise that they would not budge in demanding that the Bush tax cuts be extended.  And as confidence grew that the Republicans would win in November and force Obama to reverse his repeatedly stated intention of pursuing Marxist class warfare and punishing investment, production and growth, people who actually produce in this nation began to act accordingly.

Hence the “unexpected” increase in tax revenue.

Democrats invariably point to the Clinton years as “proof” that the century proving that tax rate cuts increase revenues was just a ninety year fluke.

But the Clinton years actually prove the opposite: conservative policies were right during the Clinton years, too.

First, Clinton and Democrats increased taxes on the top marginal income rates in 1993.  Did wonderful things happen after that?  Well, if you’re a Republican, yes, they most certainly did: as a result of the complete failure of Clinton’s economic policy, 1994 marked the biggest takeover by Republicans in history, with Republicans slaughtering Democrats and taking over both the House and the Senate.

It wasn’t until Clinton reduced the capital gains rates that we really saw the kind of growth that Democrats love to point to.  It wasn’t until AFTER Clinton announced “the era of big government is over.”  And yet the actual reasons for that growth prove that their policies are totally wrong.

With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that Bill Clinton was forced to say, “The era of big government is over.”  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “good” Clinton years came as a direct result of Republicans dominating both the House of Represenatives and the United States Senate.  With the help of mainstream media propaganda, the American people have largely forgotten that the “Clinton surplus” was the direct result of the Contract with America and its pledge for a balanced budget – literally over Clinton’s constant attempts to prevent it.

The mainstream media – like the Democrat Party whose propaganda whores they are – WILL NOT tell the truth about such matters.

But here we are again.  Republicans pass tax cuts, and then there’s an “unexpected” increase in revenue.  Just like every single other time.

After George W. Bush passed his tax cuts, we had dishonest and confused liberals reacting as the New York Times did:

“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.”

And for the record, President George Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

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.

It boils down to this: the more you hate America; the more you hate American economic power; the more you want to see the American people suffer; the more you should vote Democrat.

Now, I mentioned two comments to Robbie.  The other comment was about QE2 and its impact.

QE2 is the economic equivalent of sugar in nutrition.  Will it provide quick energy?  Sure it will.  Will that quick energy come at the expense of future health?  You bet it will.

Right now, as a result of the Obam Federal Reserve’s policy of increasing the monetary supply by buying debt from itself (literally creating money out of thin air), there is more economic activity.  Right now, as a result of this policy, credit rates are lower.  Fewer banks and corporations are going under because of the ready access to cheap money.  Investors see the stability and invest.

We should all feed our children tons of sugar, so we can enjoy the short term bonanza of frenetic activity.

Unless you worry about all the cavities, the weight gains, the diabetes, and of course that huge depressing crash with all of those catastrophic health consequences that necessarily come later..

The first time we ended QE1, the stock market lost 16% of its value in two weeks.  Which is to say it didn’t work the first time for the same reason it won’t work this second time.  Or a necessary third time, etcetera.

One of the more sinister effects of quantitative easing is that it essentially becomes a tax on saving.  You were busy at work putting away as much as you could during a period when your money was worth more.  But now, as a result of artificially increasing the money supply, all that money you accumulated in saving is worth less.  Why is this?  Because you can increase the money supply all you want, but you’ve still got the same finite amount of goods and services.  And when you’ve got twice as many dollars in the money supply as you had before, over time those same goods and services will cost twice as much as before, and so on.

Right now, prices are going up dramatically on virtually everything that matters.  And yet the only ones who refuse to admit it are the federal government and its stauchest mainstream media propagandists who think and report what the Obama regime wants them to think and report.

Meanwhile, the key factor that led to the economic crash in 2008 – the housing market – just had its worst quarter since the darkest depths of that crash.  And as bad as that is, the experts are saying that we are STILL  a ways off from hitting bottom.  Obama hasn’t solved anything.  And economists are described as being in the fetal position over this “unexpected” – (there’s that word again) – development.

It’s just like feeding that little kid sugar: frenetic activity that actually accomplishes nothing, followed shortly afterward by a nasty crash.

The Pathological Stupidity Of Obama’s ‘Fairness’ Meme Of Taxing The Rich

We need to balance our insane budget deficit, Democrats say.  And it’s time the rich paid their fair share.

All the top 10% of earners paid is 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.  That’s nothing.  It’s those poor poor who suffer the most.  The bottom 50% have to pay a whole bunch of nothing.  It’s just brutal for them every April.  They want to write a check to the government, but only the rich get to do stuff like that.  And the bottom 40% are so screwed by our federal income tax system that they actually are forced to accept free money in addition to paying a whole bunch of nothing.  Unless the Associated Press is lying about it.

Nothing makes me more annoyed than the phrase “give the rich tax cuts.”  Because it presumes that the government owns us and graciously allows us to keep some of what we earn.  The way liberals understand things, they own all the means of production.  They own my labor and whatever I earn from my labor.  And I am lucky if the commissars allow me to keep enough to feed myself.  It derives from a tenant of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  At the core is central planning; government stands above us, it stands above God (which is why consistent Marxists deny God exists and religion is merely an opiate of the masses), and government should redistribute everything according to its divine power.

That is the intrinsic logic of their view that allowing the rich or anyone else to keep more of their own money is considered a cost to the government.  But it ISN’T a cost to the government to allow me to keep more of my own money; anymore than it is a cost to me to allow my next door neighbor to keep more of his own tools.

Obama gave an address in which he paid lip service to reducing spending – even though his budget that he released only TWO MONTHS AGO didn’t reduce any spending at all – and in fact stated that it would be dangerous to do so.  Obama has no plans to cut spending; in fact, the deficit in just the first six months of this year shot up another 15.7%.  Obama is going to do what he’s been doing since he started running for president; he’s going to offer meaningless rhetorical platitudes about cutting spending and reducing costs, while demonizing the rich and demanding that the ONLY people who pay REALLY START TO PAY.

Obama is going to talk about “fairness.”

The ‘fairness’ meme
April 12, 2011 – 4:47 am – by Roger Kimball

We don’t know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say when he fires up his teleprompters at George Washington University tomorrow. The color, we do know, however: it’s red, as in “red ink,” what Mitch Daniels at his speech at CPAC earlier this year called “the new red menace.” (I like to think that the invocation of the old “red menace,” the Communist, socialist one, was deliberate: it is, I would argue, apt.)

The substance of the speech, as ABC notes, is “closely held.” Everybody thinks that there will be at least pro forma acknowledgement that spending on such programs as Medicare and Social Security needs to be reined in. But the big O will also return to one of his favorite themes, a by-word from his 2008 campaign: “increased taxes on the wealthy” (that’s according to “White House officials”).

Here’s my bet: the operative word in Obama’s speech tomorrow night, the mantra that will be repeated endlessly not only by O but also by the left-wing commentariat, is “fairness.” You remember his campaign shtick: the Saddleback Church event, for example, when Rick Warren asked candidates John McCain and B.O. about taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. McCain tossed out an income of $5 million, which elicited derision. But the gravamen of his response came in the elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was B.O.’s response: What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That, as I noted at the time, is B.O.’s refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing revenue but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal back then, recalled Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

“For purposes of fairness”: that means, “for purposes of economic egalitarianism.”

McGurn observed:

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to the socialistically inclined.

It worked in 2008. Let’s see how it goes down tomorrow. Over the last two years, Barack Obama has presided over an economic Armageddon. Everyone knows about that $14 trillion that is the federal debt. Few people, I suspect, really appreciate what that unimaginable figure represents. And the kicker is, $14 trillion is only a tithe of the trouble. As Kevin Williamson and others have pointed out, the country’s real debt, when you facotr in state indebtedness and unfunded so-called “entitlement” liabilities, is closer to $130 trillion. That horror-movie figure is just too awful to contemplate, so I will draw a veil.

[…]

For the record, I wrote an article entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues,” in which I documented that every single time the United States has reduced the income tax rate, federal revenues have gone up.  I go back to Warren Harding to document that.  I include John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush – who increased federal revenues by lowering tax rates.

But this recurring documented fact of U.S. history is tantamount to rocket science to liberals.  Because they adhere to the entirely unrealistic premise that if I were to double your taxes, I would collect double the revenue, because people wouldn’t react to the tax increase by altering their behavior.

Recent developments give me a crystal clear example of why liberals couldn’t be more wrong:

Gas Price Rise, Americans Drive Less
By Rachel Smith
Posted: Apr 12, 2011 10:30 a.m.

Americans are taking rising gas prices seriously. They’re already driving less, “reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel,” the Associated Press writes. “For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.”

The average price of gas is an obvious indicator of why national fuel consumption is dropping. At the end of March, AAA reported that gas reached an average of $3.60 nationally. Today, AAA says the national average is $3.79 for regular grade, a 29 cent jump in about two weeks. Business Week reports that many analysts forecast that these numbers will worsen, and expect that consumers could pay as much as $5 a gallon this year due to political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which supply much of the United States’ oil. The $5 per gallon speculation has been floating around the industry for some time, but last year, CNN stated that former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister predicted that Americans could pay $5 a gallon by 2012. Analysts have bumped that date up.

“Drivers are already reacting to the change,” writes Kicking Tires. “In the first week of April, consumption was down 3.6%, or 2.4 million gallons of gasoline,” based on data from MasterCard Spending Pulse.

One of the best ways to combat rising gas prices is to drive less, but there are other simple things you can do. […]

Even uneducated, ignorant and frankly stupid people understand this incredibly basic concept: cost goes up, activity goes down.  And yet you have liberals with PhDs staffing agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office utterly fail to understand that if they make taxes go up, they will end up with reactions that will invariably produce less revenue for the government.

If even high-school dropouts understand that if the price of gasoline goes up, they need to drive less, how is it that brilliant businessmen won’t realize that if their tax rates go up, they need to protect their money?

Here’s another analogy that might be spot on the money.  Suppose your going to work and a mugger jumps you and takes all your money.  As he’s walking off, counting your (well, his now) cash, he says, “I hope you’ve got as much dough tomorrow, because I’m going to mug you again.”  Now, if you’re smart, you won’t be happening by that way at all the next day.  But if you’ve absolutely got to go that way to get to work, will you have as much money that next day?  Not if you’ve got a single functioning brain cell.  On my analogy, if you figure out some other way to get to work, that’s tax avoidance.  If you stash your cash somewhere so you don’t have it for the robber to take, that’s tax sheltering.  And if you’re too stupid to understand that this is what people do when their taxes go up, that’s liberalism.

The more taxes increase, the more activities that were previously not worth doing – such as sheltering assets, moving assets overseas, investing in collectibles, purchasing tax-exempt investment vehicles, or just dodging taxes – become worth doing.

And so,what happens every single time happens yet again.  Raise taxes expecting more revenue, get less revenue, and hurt the economy in the process by penalizing productivity and investment risk and thereby restricting growth.  And when you encourage growth by reducing the tax burden and allowing people to keep what they earn, lo and behold, cetaris parabis, there is a surge in activity, an increase in economic growth and a corresponding increase in federal tax revenue.

I say “cetaris parabis” because if you throw in a socialist Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that undermine something as vital as our housing mortgage market by imposing morally and fiscally insane policies until the system comes crashing down, such as what occurred leading up the crash in 2008, the best tax rates in the world can’t save the system.

Here are just a few articles I wrote on that subject, in order of date written with the earliest listed first:

Biden: ‘We Misread The Economy, And It’s All Republicans’ Fault

AEI Article: How Fannie And Freddie Blew Up The Economy

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

We need to have intelligent economic policies.  If we don’t have such policies, we’re going to struggle regardless of our tax rates.

Quickly, another liberal policy that will not even possibly work is the Federal Reserve QE2 (that’s the second shot at quantitative easing) that artificially reduces interest rates by artificially increasing the money supply in order to increase lending.

Here’s the problem with that.  Short term, it might seem to work.  The stock market looks at the apparent backstopping of our economy and follows the leader (Uncle Sam) up until the ship starts to sink.  After which they will sell, sell, sell.  But the ship ALWAYS sinks.  Why?  Because you have a lot more dollars chasing after the same supply of finite goods and services (if anything, in the last few years, we have a LOWER supply of finite goods and services).  So what happens?  More dollars chasing less stuff.  That’s inflation.  It will INVARIABLY require more devalued dollars to buy the same things.  The more you inflate the money supply, the worse that inflation gets.  And we have massively increased our money supply.

Let me go back to what I wrote going on a year ago now:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs.  And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation.  Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate.  Why?  Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued.  There’s simply no way it can’t be.  If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire.  The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems.  If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency.  And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins.  Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

And let me point out that we’re looking at huge inflation now – even as Obama declares victory over the recession – in insanely rising gas prices, food prices, clothes prices, all prices:

Hope ‘n Change Coming To Fruition: Cost Of EVERYTHING About To Go Up

Instability, Food Riots And A Heaping Dose Of ‘I Told You So’

Just like I said would happen.  And just like the long list of economists said would happen when they begged Obama not to do the $3.27 trillion stimulus.

This phenomenon is going on all over the world because most of the world is tied to the U.S. dollar – the currency that Obama has been poisoning hoping for short-term political gains.

And, again, a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts (which doesn’t help businesses and individuals who are desperately searching for consistency so they can predict their costs) is not going to help us out of this kind of moral and fiscal insanity.

But what we are going to see is Obama now demagoguing all the massive economic failure that his own policies are responsible for creating in the first place to demand that the rich “pay their fair share.”

Obama Causes Official End Of The Nation Of Makers

This is something that conservatives saw coming from the very fist days of the Obama administration.  From Cato, February 26, 2009:

Cato begins that article with a quote from Obama from a couple of days previous: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day… Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.”

But like virtually everything else, it was a lie.  Obama’s own proposed massive increase in federal spending proved that.  And since Obama took office, he has spent as no government has ever spent in the history of the human race.

And thus is it utterly no surprise at all to anyone but ignorant fools that we are now here:

APRIL 1, 2011
We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers
More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.

By STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

California?  Unions?  Consider this from the Los Angeles Times:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The People’s Republic of Kalifornia was cursed with a R.I.N.O. governor who championed abortion, a $6 porker giveway for stem cell research, gay marriage, and a whole bunch of other liberal crap.  And the legislature is one of the most overwhelmingly Democrat in the country.  And the only things that have changed is that the People’s Republic is now officially under a Democrat Governor (Jerry Brown) and they actually added a Democrat seat in the legislature.

Illinois was described by NBC as having the worst unfunded pension crisis in the country.  Maybe they didn’t know how bad California’s really was when they reported that.  But more likely, they probably had no idea how bad Illinois’ problem truly was and is, either.

The United States is so screwed it is absolutely unreal.  And that is largely due to unions and the Democrats who support those unions in exchange for votes.  It’s an unAmerican scheme that works like this: labor unions give Democrats big campaign donations and provide the muscle and infrastructure for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.  And in exchange, Democrats give unions other peoples’ money to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.  They don’t give a damn about the 88% of Americans who AREN’T in unions.

Unions are parasites that have sucked the blood out of every industry they have ever seized their vile little talons onto.  Autos, airlines, manufacturing, education government at every possible level – you name it; they’ve ruined it.  And the rest of America is the host that the parasites feed off of.  And Democrats care about the parasites, and not one damn about the rapidly dying host.

And Barack Obama is far and away the most pro-union president ever.  And that was true BEFORE he signed three new hard-core union-agenda executive orders into law.

Obama has just gotten caught red-handed using his ObamaCare to give huge payouts to unions and corporations that advanced his agenda (fascism alert).  Remember that G.E. – one of the corporate beneficiaries of ObamaCare, not only paid zero taxes but actually got money from the taxpayers.

Do you remember Obama’s preacher for over twenty years said, “No, no, no, not God bless America.  God DAMN America.”  And then said that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”???

You need to understand our actual situation and look at our real debt to understand that AMERICA is the chicken – and Obama has cut its head off and thrown it into a pot of boiling water:

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling. […]

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie.

Every single one of these massive entitlements that is poisoning America they way Japan’s tsunami has poisoned her nuclear reactors with toxic meltdowns came from the vile minds of DEMOCRATS.  And it is DEMOCRATS who will cause the once mighty America to shortly go the way of the Dodo bird.

Social Security was a ponzi scheme from the outset.  And the only thing that has kept it going was that it is a really, really BIG ponzi scheme.  We find out that FDR – who wanted a massive takeover of the private sector by the federal government – worked hard to kill an amendment offered by a Democrat (Senator Bennett Champ Clark): ” It would have allowed workers to go with the new government system or, if they wished, to have their money put into a private-insurance plan. Either way, the contributions would be mandatory.”  Had that amendment been allowed to pass, it would have forced the government’s filfthy paws off the “trust fund” that they subsequently ripped off for the next seventy years and beyond:

We wouldn’t be saddled with today’s fiscal disaster. Hundreds of billions of dollars that politicians have “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund for all sorts of pork spending would not have disappeared. Instead, all that capital would have been invested in the economy, leaving us a lot more prosperous. Moreover, the Clark Amendment would have been a model for state pension plans, which are now bankrupting local governments, as well as for other nations.

There was a much better idea from the private sector – but in the end Democrats wouldn’t have it.  They wanted their government fascist control instead.  They didn’t care about the American people; they wanted to be able to raid those retirement funds for their own partisan ideological ends.

Then there was the much more colossal failure known as Medicare.  Ronald Reagan famously warned America about that fraud in 1961:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Medicare now represents the largest share of our unfunded liabilities today.  The private market could have done a much better job at a much lower cost, but again, Democrats wanted socialism, and they were hell bent upon getting their socialism.

Now we face collectivist bankruptcy.  We were previously told that if current trends held, Medicare would go broke by 2017.  But current trends didn’t hold, because Obama robbed Medicare of $500 billion to fund the ObamaCare boondobble that bears his name.

As the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  And voilà, here we are.

When it comes to how John F. Kennedy viewed the socialist redistribution of wealth via “progressive taxation policies,” you will find that Kennedy was solidly on the side of fiscal conservatives today.  As it stands, today’s vile Democrats are fundamentally at odds with the man widely recognized to be the greatest Democrat president.

As we speak, Republicans are trying to cut a tiny fraction of the bloated, totally-out-of-control federal budget.  And Democrats are demonizing them at every turn for it.  Because Democrats have been using government spending to massively pad the coffers of the government-sector unions who make their elections possible.  And to be a Democrat means you don’t give a damn about America’s future; you only selfishly want – to put it in John F. Kennedy’s famous words – “what your country can do for you.”

God HAS damned America in the person of Jeremiah Wright’s parishoner for 23 years.  And the most ignorant generation in America’s history voted for it.

New Jobs Figures A Real April Fools Day Joke On America

This is a joke that needs a little explaining.  But the real joke is on anyone fool enough to fall for the charades:

U.S. employment jumps in March, jobless rate falls
Apr 1, 2011
Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employment recorded a second straight month of solid gains in March and the jobless rate fell to a two-year low of 8.8 percent, marking a decisive shift in the labour market that should help to underpin the economic recovery.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 216,000 last month, the largest increase since May, the Labour Department said on Friday. January and February employment figures were revised to show 7,000 more jobs than previously reported.

The strong job gains come amid indications the economy suffered a minor setback early in the year as bad weather and rising energy prices dampened activity.

“All the evidence is pointing to a strengthening labour market,” said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston.

First of all, remind me never, EVER to do business with John Hancock Financial Services.

Just to point out how incredibly and massively biased the “experts” who are spinning these numbers are, let me quote this same Bill Cheney from the same John Hancock from when Bush was president and the unemployment rate was more than THREE POINTS LOWER:

“We were expecting to celebrate New Year’s and instead got slapped with a pink slip,” said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services.

The subtitle of that CNN Money article was “Jobs grow by just 1,000 in December, although unemployment rate drops to 5.7%.”

So, for those who are keeping score, when liberals are allowed to have a voice, 8.8% unemployment is good; 5.7% is bad.

I’m just saying: this couldn’t be more biased, full-of-crap propaganda by people who write the news based entirely on their leftwing ideology.  And they manage to track down economists who do the same thing.  And voilà: a expert-confirmed news story.

And this is just part of a very long, very well-established pattern of mainstream media “journalists” denouncing Republican economic data and blessing Democrat economic data even when the Republican data is BETTER than the Democrat numbers.

Here’s an interesting factoid that doesn’t seem to get any mention in the mainstream media: Unless I’m seriously mistaken, the unemployment rate has gone down every month since Republicans took control of The House in January:

Unemployment was if anything going UP.  And then Republicans took over, and whammo.  It started going down.  But Republicans didn’t receive so much as a scintilla of credit from the mainstream media.  It’s just amazing.

That’s first.  Second, there’s the facts that you have to dig for:

Still, the job gains haven’t led many people who stopped looking for work during the recession to start again. Fewer than two-thirds of American adults are either working or looking for work — the lowest participation rate in 25 years. […]

The unemployment rate has fallen a full percentage point since November, the sharpest four-month drop since 1983. Stepped-up hiring is the main reason. But a more sobering factor is that the number of people who are either working or seeking a job remains surprisingly low for this stage of the recovery.

People without jobs who aren’t looking for one aren’t counted as unemployed. Once they start looking again, they’re classified as unemployed, and the unemployment rate can go back up. That can happen even if the economy is adding jobs.

Just 64.2 percent of adults have a job or are looking for one — the lowest participation rate since 1984. The number has been shrinking for four years. It suggests many people remain discouraged about their job prospects even as hiring is picking up.

This magnificent unemployment rate success largely reflects the fact that more and more people are just dropping out of the employment picture altogether.  And three of the four years this has been going on have been going on under Obama.

Here’s a graph of the labor participation rate:

Note how it skyrocketed under Ronald Reagan.  Note how it went DOWN under Bill Clinton until the Republicans OWNED the Democrats in 1994 and took over both the House and the Senate.  Note how it went down under Bush following the Dotcom bust (and the 9/11 attack) that Bush inherited from Bill Clinton.

As I point out in a previous article:

George Bush inherited the policies that led to the 9/11 disaster only months into his presidency.  George Bush inherited the Dotcom disaster that wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq index along with $7.1 trillion in American wealth that was just vaporized as a result of Bill Clinton’s economy.  And rather than spend the next two years blaming his predecessor, Bush cut taxes and turned the economy around.  At least until Democrat policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act and Democrat refusal to reform and regulate Democrat-created Fannie and Freddie brought America crashing down.

Why don’t we blame the president who actually sued banks to force them to make bad loans to people who couldn’t afford the home loans that the banks were forced to provide???

By the standard the Democrats used to demonize George Bush in 2004, Barack Obama is the worst president in American history.

But the media prefers “the unexpected” to “the truth.”

You never hear how the first two years of Clinton were such a failure that he got the worst shellacking in fifty years; and then suddenly under Republican control things got mysteriously better as THEY cut spending and balanced the budget mostly over Clinton’s vetoes.  You just keep hearing that “Clinton balanced the budget.”

Note how Bush brought that declining labor participation back up after his tax cuts were passed and began to take effect.  And how that has happened AGAIN as the successful Republican-Bush tax rates were continued and things suddenly got miraculously better.

But let’s consider some other things.

We added 216,000 jobs last month.  Congratulations.  Here’s how many NEW unemployment claims were added every single WEEK in March:

Something just seems so wrong with this picture.  It makes that 216,000 jobs being added during the entire month of March just seem really, really sucky.

Somewhat similarly, the replacement rate due to population growth, etc. is 300,000 jobs a month:

“In order to make a real dent in the unemployment rate, economists estimate that at least 300,000 jobs need to be created each month.”

Meaning, we need to create 300,000 jobs a month just to stay even. But we created 216,000 jobs in March, which caused the unemployment rate to drop.  How’s that?!?!?

For the record, Gallup reported unemployment at a far more believable 10% in March.

What is truly being heralded here as a giant success is that millions of Americans are simply giving up and abandoning the work force altogether in Obama’s God damn America.

Obama Maims Tax Cut Extension: When Will Democrats Realize They Have A Failed President On Their Hands?

So Barack Obama decides to cave in to Republicans, thinking if he keeps using his demagogic rhetoric his base won’t realize he’s abandoning them for his own political future.

Obama gave a televised session (you know, to go along with the million billion other televised sessions the media whore has done by now), and likened Republicans to terrorist-hostage-takers for voting according to their basic principles.

Only Democrats should be able to vote according to their principles; anyone else doing it is evil.

Republican leaders have largely ignored the fact that, if they are “hostage takers” for “holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage” to tax cuts for the rich, then Democrats are every single iota as much “hostage takers” for “holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage” to Marxist class warfare ideology.  Republicans seem to think that that fact is so obvious only a moron wouldn’t understand it.

What they don’t realize is that approximately half the country are morons.

But Obama’s “Rhetoric for Dummies” didn’t work for him; because while Obama was demonizing the Republicans who were willing to strike a deal (that they also weren’t particularly thrilled with), Democrats were screaming themselves into the mother of all hissy fits.

So Obama – ever the demagogue – went back to demagogy in yet a second media session.  This time against his very own party as he labeled them as “sanctimonious.”  Which I don’t doubt drove the sanctimonious Democrats absolutely crazy (well, beyond crazy, anyway; they were already crazy).

So Obama demonized the people in the rival party who were willing to accept his deal; and then he demonized the people in his own party who weren’t willing to accept his deal.

You’d think that kind of approach would work every time, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, for those who don’t live in plastic bubbles, it didn’t:

House, Senate on Collision Course After Dems Reject Tax Cut Bill
Published December 09, 2010

The House and Senate appear to be on a collision course over President Obama’s controversial tax plan, after House Democrats voted to block the package from coming to the floor in its current form.

Though the vote was not binding, the House Democratic caucus on Thursday approved a measure by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., effectively rejecting the GOP-negotiated deal unless and until a majority of Democrats support it. One Democratic leadership aide said the vote “shows how much the White House screwed this up.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, told Fox News he expects the Senate to take up the bill anyway without any substantive changes Thursday afternoon. He predicted the measure would pass, a belief echoed by a number of Senate Democratic aides interviewed by Fox News. But that would send the bill straight to the House, where some members are mounting a rebellion.

“If it’s take it or leave it, we’ll leave it,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, after the caucus vote Thursday, adding that he thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take her cue from the caucus.

Pelosi, releasing a statement shortly after the vote, said only that the party would “continue discussions” with Republicans and the president to “improve the proposal” before a floor vote.

“Democratic priorities remain clear: to provide a tax cut for working families, to create jobs and economic growth, to assist millions of our fellow Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and to do this in a fiscally sound way,” she said. The White House said that Congress was working through the “normal process” of debating legislation.

The Democrats’ resolution specifically stated that the tax package in its current form “should not come to the House floor for consideration.”

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., said “it’s a pretty clear message. We don’t like the bill.”

The vote came after 54 Democrats, led by Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont, signed a letter in opposition to the tax cut deal. The 54 Democrats, by themselves, would not be enough to block the package in the House, depending on how much support it gets from Republicans. But the caucus vote could shake things up.

Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s No. 3 Democrat, said when asked what comes next, “I don’t know. We’ll wait and see.”

The White House continues to face an uphill climb in convincing his party to get on board with the package. The administration appeared to be breaking through after Vice President Biden visited the Hill on Wednesday, and some Democrats left acknowledging that the package could have enough support to pass.

As of Thursday, Democrats were all over the map. Most Republicans seemed to be standing by the negotiated package, but a few prominent conservatives were peeling off and criticizing it as too expensive.

Speaking Thursday at a White House event promoting American exports, President Obama said the vote will determine whether the economy “moves forward or backward.”

The president again pressed Congress to pass the agreement, saying it has the potential to create millions of jobs. He said if it fails, Americans would see smaller paychecks and would result in fewer jobs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

So, let’s sum up: Republicans, who are willing to support the bill by giving some of what they don’t want to get some of what they want, are “hostage takers.”  And Obama is vilifying the party who in his own words are trying to create millions of jobs and prevent Americans from seeing smaller paychecks and fewer jobs.  Because that’s just the kind of turd he is.  Meanwhile, Democrats, who refuse to support the bill unless they get everything they want, are NOT hostage takers.

And that’s the operating narrative, because, yes, half the country is actually that stupid.

But let’s take a moment to consider something else: just how shockingly terribly the guy who has refused to show us his birth certificate has butchered this negotiation.

And the beauty of it is that you don’t have to listen to conservatives like me to hear that anymore; just pay a little attention to what DEMOCRATS are now saying about Obama.

How about this little gem of class?  From ABC:

An unidentified Democratic lawmaker let slip his frustration at President Obama’s proposed tax compromise, apparently muttering “f**k the president,” during a heated debate this morning.

I don’t know, maybe they’re pissed off because Obama basically didn’t even bother to consult them before undermining their agenda.  Because Obama is an abject failure as a leader and as a president.  He’s already “led” the Democrat Party to it’s worst “shellacking” since 1938, and now he hasn’t even gotten out of the lame duck session before he’s warming up to lead them to an even BIGGER shellacking in 2012.

What’s great about this is that it is shaping up to be a win-win for Republicans.  By being the first to agree to Obama’s offer, they have the upper hand if Democrats refuse it.  I mean, idiotic morons I mean Democrats aside, WHO’S responsible for making every American pay more in taxes if this deal falls through???  And then add to that the fact that if the deal doesn’t go through now, Republicans will be in an even STRONGER position when they take over the House of Representatives in January.

It’s shaping up to be funny, it its own twisted way: as terrible as Obama is for America, he’s even worse for the Democrat Party.

 

 

 

Permanent Unemployment Bennies: Paying People Not To Work (Surprise!) Encourages Unemployment

A couple of  summer articles from The Wall Street Journal that – given the latest unemployment figures – are more true than ever:

AUGUST 30, 2010
The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment
My calculations suggest the jobless rate could be as low as 6.8%, instead of 9.5%, if jobless benefits hadn’t been extended to 99 weeks.
By ROBERT BARRO

Congressman John Boehner recently suggested that President Obama replace his top economic advisers. I think he may have a point. The economic “recovery” has been disappointing, to put it mildly, and it has become increasingly clear that the blame lies with the policies of the Obama administration, not with those of its predecessor.

In general, the current administration has been too focused on expanding government, redistributing more from rich to poor, and stimulating aggregate demand. I have previously criticized the stimulus package as cost-ineffective. In particular, whatever tax reductions were in the package did not involve the cuts in marginal income tax rates that encourage investment, work effort and productivity growth.

Now the administration wants to kill the 2003 income-tax cuts, at least the parts that reduced marginal income tax rates for high-income earners and for all recipients of dividend income. This proposal is particularly disturbing because the 2003 law was George W. Bush’s main economic achievement; unlike most of Mr. Bush’s policies, this one was well-conceived and effective.

I want to focus here on another dimension of the Obama administration’s policies: the expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to as much as 99 weeks from the standard 26 weeks.

The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion—providing for persons temporarily without work—and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.

In a recession, it is more likely that individual unemployment reflects weak economic conditions, rather than individual decisions to choose leisure over work. Therefore, it is reasonable during a recession to adopt a more generous unemployment-insurance program. In the past, this change entailed extensions to perhaps 39 weeks of eligibility from 26 weeks, though sometimes a bit more and typically conditioned on the employment situation in a person’s state of residence. However, we have never experienced anything close to the blanket extension of eligibility to nearly two years. We have shifted toward a welfare program that resembles those in many Western European countries.

The administration has argued that the more generous unemployment-insurance program could not have had much impact on the unemployment rate because the recession is so severe that jobs are unavailable for many people. This perspective is odd on its face because, even at the worst of the downturn, the U.S. labor market featured a tremendous amount of turnover in the form of large numbers of persons hired and separated every month.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, near the worst of the recession in March 2009, 3.9 million people were hired and 4.7 million were separated from jobs. This net loss of 800,000 jobs in one month indicates a very weak economy—but nevertheless one in which 3.9 million people were hired. A program that reduced incentives for people to search for and accept jobs could surely matter a lot here.

Moreover, although the peak unemployment rate (thus far) of 10.1% in October 2009 is very disturbing, the rate was even higher in the 1982 recession (10.8% in November-December 1982). Thus, there is no reason to think that the United States is in a new world in which incentives provided by more generous unemployment-insurance programs do not matter much for unemployment.

Another reason to be skeptical about the administration’s stance is that generous unemployment-insurance programs have been found to raise unemployment in many Western European countries in which unemployment rates have been far higher than the current U.S. rate. In Europe, the influence has worked particularly through increases in long-term unemployment. So the key question is what happened to long-term unemployment in the United States during the current recession?

To begin with a historical perspective, in the 1982 recession the peak unemployment rate of 10.8% in November-December 1982 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 17.6 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment (those unemployed more than 26 weeks) of 20.4%. Long-term unemployment peaked later, in July 1983, when the unemployment rate had fallen to 9.4%. At that point, the mean duration of unemployment reached 21.2 weeks and the share of long-term unemployment was 24.5%. These numbers are the highest observed in the post-World War II period until recently. Thus, we can think of previous recessions (including those in 2001, 1990-91 and before 1982) as featuring a mean duration of unemployment of less than 21 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of less than 25%.

These numbers provide a stark contrast with joblessness today. The peak unemployment rate of 10.1% in October 2009 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 27.2 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of 36%. The duration of unemployment peaked (thus far) at 35.2 weeks in June 2010, when the share of long-term unemployment in the total reached a remarkable 46.2%. These numbers are way above the ceilings of 21 weeks and 25% share applicable to previous post-World War II recessions. The dramatic expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to 99 weeks is almost surely the culprit.

To get a rough quantitative estimate of the implications for the unemployment rate, suppose that the expansion of unemployment-insurance coverage to 99 weeks had not occurred and—I assume—the share of long-term unemployment had equaled the peak value of 24.5% observed in July 1983. Then, if the number of unemployed 26 weeks or less in June 2010 had still equaled the observed value of 7.9 million, the total number of unemployed would have been 10.4 million rather than 14.6 million. If the labor force still equaled the observed value (153.7 million), the unemployment rate would have been 6.8% rather than 9.5%.

Consider how the prospects for Democrats in the November elections would look if the unemployment rate were now only 6.8%. Obviously, this change would make all the difference, and President Obama can reasonably blame his economic advisers. They should have protected their boss by standing firm and arguing that a reckless expansion of unemployment-insurance coverage to 99 weeks was unwise economically and politically. Congressman Boehner’s advice to Mr. Obama seems correct, though possibly too late to matter.

Mr. Barro is an economics professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

A particularly interesting point comes from this statement:

The administration has argued that the more generous unemployment-insurance program could not have had much impact on the unemployment rate because the recession is so severe that jobs are unavailable for many people

The Obama administration manifests pathological dishonesty and hypocrisy: on the one hand, they tout their stimulus as being incredibly effective, and tout themselves as guiding the economy back into recovery.  And yet in demanding an additional 13-month extension to the already 2 full years of unemployment benefits, the Obama administration clearly doesn’t believe its own load of crap.

If the stimulus was anything but a failure, and if we are on the “road to recovery,” as they keep saying, we don’t need this giant leap toward permanent unemployment benefits.

Here’s another one from The Wall Street Journal:

JULY 20, 2010
Stimulating Unemployment
If you can’t create any jobs, pay people not to work.

Presidents typically invite Americans to appear at Rose Garden press conferences to trumpet their policy successes, but yesterday we saw what may have been a first. President Obama introduced three Americans—an auto worker, a fitness center employee and a woman in real estate—who’ve been out of work so long they underscore the failure of his economic program. Where are his spinmeisters when he really needs them?

Sure, Mr. Obama’s ostensible purpose was to lobby Congress for the eighth extension of jobless benefits since the recession began, to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years. And he whacked Senate Republicans for blocking the extension, though Republicans are merely asking that the extension be offset by cuts in other federal spending.

But Mr. Obama was nonetheless obliged to concede that, 18 months after his $862 billion stimulus, there are still five job seekers for every job opening and that 2.5 million Americans will soon run out of unemployment benefits. What happens when the 99 weeks of benefits run out? Will the President demand that they be extended to three years, or four?

Only last week Vice President Joe Biden was hailing the stimulus for “saving or creating” three million jobs. This week the White House says we need even more stimulus, in the form of jobless checks, to make up for the jobs his original spending stimulus didn’t create.

The one possibility the President and Congressional Democrats won’t entertain is that their own spending and taxing and regulating and labor union favoritism have become the main hindrance to job creation. Since February 2009, the jobless rate has climbed to 9.5% from 8.1%, and private industry has shed two million jobs. The overall economy has been expanding for at least a year, but employers still don’t seem confident enough to add new workers. The economists who sold us the stimulus say it’s a mystery. But maybe employers are afraid to hire because they don’t know what costs government will impose on them next.

In the immediate policy case, Democrats are going so far as to subsidize more unemployment. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So if you pay people not to work, they often decide . . . not to work. Or at least to delay looking or decline a less than perfect job offer, holding out for something else that may or may not materialize.

The economic consensus—which includes Obama Administration economists in their previous lives—couldn’t be clearer on this. In a 1990 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, labor economist Lawrence Katz found that “The results indicate that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks.”

A March 2010 economic report by Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan Chase examined several studies and concluded that “lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5% points.”

A 2006 NBER study by Raj Chetty of UC Berkeley on a related subject begins, “It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations.”

The current recession is bearing this out, as a record 6.7 million Americans have now been out of work for at least six months. That’s 45.5% of the total jobless, close to the highest share ever recorded. The number was 23.4% in February 2009. Americans tend to support jobless benefits on compassion grounds, but at some point such a policy becomes the false compassion of welfare by keeping people out of the job market and thus not learning new skills.

Mr. Obama also claimed yesterday that he wants to cut taxes on small businesses. That’s a good idea, but Mr. Obama’s proposal to provide one-year temporary tax cuts, such as expensing of certain capital purchases, will be dwarfed by one of the largest tax increases on small- and medium-sized firms in history that is scheduled to hit on January 1. The increase in the capital gains tax will fall hardest on start ups and expanding businesses that need capital for growth. More than half of the “rich” who will pay higher income tax rates next year are small business owners and investors.

The President is right that “we’ve got a lot of work to do” to get Americans back to work and that the toll on families from high unemployment is considerable. There are few things in life more demoralizing than being unemployed for a lengthy period of time. But paying people not to work and adding $30 billion more to nearly $1.4 trillion of deficit spending is a dismal substitute for real economic growth and private job

The way the Democrats describe it, we would literally be much better off as a country if every single American were to quit working and go on unemployment.  Because then we’d get these wonderful benefits that make the whole system work.

Here’s how (thank God in Heaven former) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it:

“Now I think we should use a measure for everything that we do—what does it do to create jobs, what does it do to reduce the deficit?  Unemployment insurance, economists tell us, returns $2 for every $1 that is put out there for unemployment insurance.  People need the money.  They spend it immediately for necessity.  It injects demand into the economy.  It creates jobs to help reduce the deficit.

So what Obama should do is fire EVERYBODY.  And then we can literally DOUBLE our GDP overnight!!!

Unemployment is clearly better than employment.  Which is why the Democrats want to subsidize unemployment to the fullest extent possible.

As incredible as it sounds, that’s actually the way it works in the bubble world of the Democrat Party.

As for me, I’m holding out for a CEO position at a Fortune 500.  And I’ll keep milking my bennies until I get that dream job.  Because Obama says I can.

Meanwhile, Democrats are absolutely dead-set against allowing people to keep the money they earn.  Because they worship the government as God, and believe their Marxist and Stalinist ideology that the state owns the people and everything they earn.  And out of that depraved and literally demonic mindset, they reason that allowing the rich to keep more of the money they earn is actually robbing the government.  Because you don’t work for yourself and for your family; you work exclusively for your god, the government, as epitomized in Barack Obama.

Brit Hume nailed this, arguing:

“But the very language used in discussing these issues tells you something as well. In Washington, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a cost. As if all the money really belongs to the government in the first place in which what you get to keep is an expenditure.”

So what’s the path to prosperity?

Is it paying people not to work, and saying if you work, we’re going to take your money and give it to people who won’t get jobs for 2 years, 3 years, forever; or is it allowing people to keep more of what they earn, and encouraging them to work, and to reward them for working harder?

That’s the difference between the Democrat and the Republican parties.

Obama’s Government As God Believes It Owns Everything The People Earn

“The Universal is to be found in the State…The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth…We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is harder to grasp the Essence of the State…the State is the march of God through the world…” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as quoted in Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed., 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, vol. 2, p. 31.

“…the State ‘has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.'” Author/historian William Shirer, quoting Georg Hegel in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959, page 144).

Hegel, it probably doesn’t surprise you, was an important precursor to Marxism, in that he held that the State owned everything, and had all the prerogatives of God Almighty.

But that was also the view of the founder of the Progressive movement, Woodrow Wilson.  As Wilson put it, the essence of Progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”  Jonah Goldberg noted that:

Wilson’s fascination with power is the leitmotif of his whole career.  It informed his understanding of theology and politics, and their intersection.  Power was God’s instrument on earth and therefore was always to be revered.  In Congressional Government he admitted, “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive” (Liberal Fascism, p. 84).

We also learn of the founder of the Progressive movement that:

“Wilson would later argue when he was president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will.” [And that] “He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God’s side” [Liberal Fascism, p. 85]

“‘Government,’ Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, ‘does now whatever experience permits or the times demand'” (found in Liberal Fascism, p. 86, with footnote].

Jonah Golderg cites Woodrow Wilson from his unintentionally chilling essay, Leaders of Men:

“Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses.  They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth whcih they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.  The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much – everything – for the external uses to which they may be put … He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates … It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield.  Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader” (Liberal Fascism, p. 89; from Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, 1952, pp. 20, 25-26].

And Wilson argued, “we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be intent to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many.”

“God” was useful to Wilson and his fellow progressives in order to seize dictatorial powers and advance the cause of a Government as God.  But the atheist communists founded a system in which God was overthrown, and the State could assume His prerogatives unto itself.  Modern progressives have likewise banished God out of government, but they still fiercely stand for “Government as God.”  “God” may largely be gone from their arguments, but, like Woodrow Wilson and like the communists, their worship of power remains.

Right now, today, we are facing an incredibly important issue in this country which boils down to the following question: Do we own the state, or does the State own us?

Now, someone might argue, “No one’s debating that.  Liberals aren’t arguing that ‘the State owns citizens.'”

And I would argue, “Really?”  And then I’d hand off the ball to Brit Hume.

From Fox News Special Report, Tuesday, September 13, 2010:

BAIER: Senior political analyst Brit Hume is here with some thoughts about what the debate over the soon to expire tax cuts really means.

Good evening, Brit.

BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Hi, Bret.

The running argument over extending the Bush tax cuts may come to nothing if Congress decides to go home in just three weeks, but it has been a revealing exchange nonetheless. The president’s call for extending the cuts for middle class taxpayers is an acknowledgment that President Bush did not just cut taxes for the rich as Democrats are fond of claiming. He cut them for all taxpayers.

Administration officials keep saying it’s a bad idea to keep the cuts in place for wealthier taxpayers because it would cost $700 billion in lost revenue over 10 years. What they don’t say is that keeping them for the middle class which they now support would cost about three times that much.

Still, the president’s position means he agrees with Republicans that raising people’s taxes in the midst of a flagging economy is a bad idea. But the very language used in discussing these issues tells you something as well. In Washington, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a cost. As if all the money really belongs to the government in the first place in which what you get to keep is an expenditure.

This sense of the primacy of government is reflected in the high percentage of stimulus funds used to bail out broke localities and protect the jobs of government workers. Democrats are proving once again that they are indeed the party of government. Americans think government is important, too. They just don’t think financing it takes priority over all else — Bret.

BAIER: Brit, “The Washington Post” is reporting that top Democratic leaders want to rebrand the extension of the Bush tax cuts to call them the Obama tax cuts for the middle class. What about that?

HUME: Well, if we had sat here a year and a half ago and one of us had said to the other that Democrats at this stage would be wanting to rebrand the Bush tax cuts and continue them and call them the Obama tax cuts, we’d have both fallen out of our chairs laughing. These are people who opposed these tax cuts when they were passed. They now not only want to extend them or at least the largest piece of them, but they want to put Barack Obama’s name on it. Bret, it doesn’t get any better than this.

BAIER: All right. Brit, thank you.

I recently wrote an article that refutes the Democrat contention that tax cuts have to be “paid for” or “cost” the government.  And Brit Hume points out – as I do – that the Democrats screaming about the $700 billion that the rich’s tax cut would cost the Treasury, while simultaneously calling for a tax cut for the middle class (which they vigorously opposed during George W. Bush’s presidency) that would cost the Treasury $3 TRILLION according to the same report.  But in the above special commentary, Brit Hume destroys the very premise by which the Democrats argue that the tax cuts should be treated as a “cost” to the government at all.  On what ethical basis should allowing people to keep more of the money that they earned be deemed a “cost” to the government?

Think of it this way.  Suppose I believe that my next door neighbor’s property belongs to me, and allowing my neighbor to keep what I think is really mine is a cost to me.  Our prison system is filled with people who think precisely that way.  But is it true?  Well, only if the entitlement mindset of coveting what others have accumulated is the way the world should work.  In that case, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too.  Otherwise, if my neighbor’s property actually belongs to my neighbor, then no matter how much he works or how much he profits, it doesn’t cost me anything.  And it would frankly be immoral of me to think otherwise.

Here’s another way to think of it, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts:

“I had someone ask me in this process — I don’t remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, ‘Are you going to be on the side of the little guy?’ And you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy is going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then, the big guy is going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution.  That’s the oath.”

But while it IS the oath, it is no longer the system.  Rather, we have a system that has been perverted by judicial activism and by the politics of class envy and class warfare.

Then there’s the fact that even the wealthiest billionaire becomes “the little guy” when confronted by the power of government.

Watching the September 16th Larry Kudlow program on CNBC, I learned that China has ten times the growth of the United States, and that China has lower taxes than we have.  Meanwhile, Democrats are using Marxist class warfare and redistributionist arguments to try to raise American taxes even higher.  With all due respect, what should you call a party that is even more communist now than communist China?

So let me ask again: Does the government own all of my wealth, and allow me to keep some of it?  Do I belong to my government, or does my government belong to me?

In Washington under the Democrats’ philosophy, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a “cost.” It’s “lost revenue” for the government.  As if all the money we earn really belongs to the government in the first place and that what government allows us to keep amounts to a government expenditure.  In this mindset, we are wading neck deep into the waters of Marxist collectivism, and the view of Government (big ‘G’) as being our God and as Savior.

The story of abusive big government is not a recent one.  The prophet Samuel describes it in the Old Testament:

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles. — 1 Samuel 8:19-20

Who are we really rejecting? God said to Samuel:
“…it is not you they have rejected, Samuel, but they have rejected me as their king.”  — 1 Samuel 8:7

Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.  Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.” — 1 Samuel 8:10-18

The tenth of everything that God warned the people the king would take was on top of the tenth that belonged to God.   Which is to say that the king would double their taxes in addition to treating the people like they belonged to him.  Of course, that tyrant king was only seizing an additional tenth of his people’s wealth; imagine today, where in the highest-taxed states (which are all Democrat states, fwiw), some Americans are forced to pay more than half of their income in taxes.  A mere extra tenth would be like a blessing to them.

From doubling our taxes to quintupling them; a good definition of “progressivism” is a political movement that is devoted to making things ever worse than they were before.

Our founding fathers went to war in their reaction against tyrannies which are nothing as compared to the tyrannies modern Americans now face every day.

Tyranny is the kind of thing that creeps up on a people.  It’s not like we have a “Tyrant Party” that promises more tyranny, and then we vote for them.  Rather, tyranny is “progressive.”  The wrong people, or people with the wrong worldview, gain power, and then they just seize more and more and more of our freedoms.  Until we wake up and wonder what happened.

47% of Americans pay no federal income taxes at all today, while demanding that a smaller and smaller group of people pay an increasing share of taxes.

But mark my words: the same government that believes that it owns the wealth of the wealthiest will all too-soon understand that it owns your wealth, too.  And that it has the right to take from you whatever it demands.

Update, September 27, 2010: here we go again…

Obama Demoagogues Boehner While Mainstream Media Misrepresents Him

I’ve already written (and still more here) about increasing numbers of Democrats doing a tacit “credit Bush” move – as opposed to the mindless failure of responsibility inherent in the “blame Bush” garbage – by demanding that ALL of the Bush tax cuts be extended at least temporarily.

So you’ll have to forgive me for changing the emphasis of the following excellent article, even as I preserve its substance.

Yes, Democrats are increasingly starting to change their tune on the Bush tax cuts.  Previously, they were blaming Bush’s tax cuts for the economic collapse; now growing numbers of them are saying they should be extended.  But let’s not forget to examine the classless, tasteless, and clueless demagoguery that is daily spit out of the Obama White House.

From HotAir:

Rank and file Dems to Pelosi: extend all the Bush tax cuts
posted at 2:13 pm on September 13, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

After John Boehner reiterated his call to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts expiring at the end of the year, the White House once again tried hammering him as an extremist looking to protect the rich at the expense of the middle class.  House Democrats will undercut that messaging with their own call to put off tax hikes for the next couple of years.  In a letter circulating on Capitol Hill and reviewed by Politico, Blue Dogs and other Democrats tell Nancy Pelosi that this is no time to raise taxes or to extend the uncertainty:

POLITICO has obtained a draft of a letter from rank-and-file lawmakers to Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer urging them not to let tax rates rise for Americans at the highest income levels.

“We believe in times of economic recovery it makes good sense to maintain things as they are in the short term, to provide families and businesses the certainty required to plan and make sound budget decisions,” the House members write in a letter that was being circulated for signatures on Friday and is expected to be delivered today or Tuesday.

Reps. Jim Matheson (Utah), Glenn Nye (Virginia), Melissa Bean (Ill.) and Gary Peters (Mich.) drafted the letter and are working to gather support, mostly from the moderate Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions, for at least a temporary extension of the rates for top income earners as well as those in the lower brackets.

This comes at the same time that Boehner’s remarks have stirred controversy — although largely from the absence of context.  The media originally reported them as a retreat back to the White House petition.  Instead, Boehner said that he would vote to approve a bill that only extended the middle-class portion of the tax cuts if that was all that was offered.  Boehner scoffed at the notion that he was holding those tax-cuts extensions hostage, which a moment’s thought would prove correct.  Pelosi has a 77-seat majority in the House, and can pass anything Democrats want.

Clearly, some Democrats are now wondering if they want a class war right before the election.  That kind of strategy plays well in districts like Pelosi’s, but is falling flat in the rest of the country.  Democrats played that card in 2006 and 2008, and after four years of control in Congress, it’s no longer a trump card.  Democrats need to find a way to generate growth, and the only way to do that is to get people with capital to put it to work — which the coming tax hikes will prevent.

The Obama administration is doing its best to portray Boehner as an extremist.  Unfortunately for Obama, his own party shows that it’s the White House on the extreme, pushing tax hikes in the middle of an economic stall.  It also points to a bigger problem with the strategy, which is that punching down below one’s weight is never a good idea.  Instead of marginalizing Boehner, the White House is practically lending him the bully pulpit by putting Boehner at the same level as the President.  That helps the GOP, because most of the electorate understands that tax hikes will be disastrous for the economy — and Obama doesn’t exactly have a track record of success that gives him the benefit of the doubt.

So Chris Boehner is saying that, as a principled conservative who believes in the radical premises that Americans actually deserve to keep more of the money that they earned, he wants tax cuts for everyone.  But if he can’t get tax cuts for everyone, he’ll vote to give tax cuts to as many people as he possibly can.

Versus Obama (i.e., Obama Akbar!!!), whose position is that he will screw every single American and screw the entire economy unless his Marxist class warfare system prevails.  Because, dammit, he wants to have all the centralized commissar power to “spread that wealth around.”

And Obama calls Boehner the “extremist.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deceitfully misrepresenting Boehner’s principled position into some kind of retreat.

But here’s what Boehner said:

Boehner told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “If the only option I have is to vote for those at $250,000 and below, of course I’m going to do that.”

But, he said, “I’m going to do everything I can to fight to make sure that we extend the current tax rates for all Americans.”

And, he said, “I’ve been making the point now for months that we need to extend all the current rates for all Americans if we want to get our economy going again and we want to get jobs in America.”

I know, I know, what an “extremist.”  And, of course, Obama – who will blow up the entire country if he doesn’t get absolutely everything he wants – what a “moderate.”

And, of course, the media is clearly accurately representing Boehner’s view as a “retreat.”  Because, as any fool (and only fools, fwiw) knows, no conservative wants tax cuts for the middle class.  They just want tax cuts for the rich.  Because conservatives are evil and they hate the middle class.

When Mark Twain said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get it’s boots on,” he could have been talking about the American mainstream media.  Because that seems to be their standard operating procedure.  It is most certainly Barry Hussein’s.

I have written about the fact that tax cuts for “the rich” are the best way to increase both jobs and government revenues.  The arguments are on our side.  And in fact rather than being “extremist,” the position of favoring lower taxes for ALL Americans is the reasonable one we can take.  I hope you take time to read that.

The American people are now recognizing that Obama was fundamentally wrong about his stimulus; he was profoundly wrong about his ObamaCare; he was flagrantly wrong about his cap-and-trade system; he was terribly wrong with his green jobs nonsense; he was terrible wrong about immigration issues and the Ground Zero mosque; he endangered America by being completely wrong on Iran; and now he couldn’t be more wrong about his tax policy.

Where has this clown been right about anything?

Obama has said in his usual demagogic way, “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no.”  The problem with Obama’s analogy is that if he said the sky was blue, it would probably be nighttime and the sky would actually be black.  Look at the sky at 2 AM and tell me it looks blue to you.  Obama began his presidency with a lie, PROMISING he wouldn’t run in 2008.  And not only has he never told the truth since, but he has proven that he is disastrously incompetent, as well.  The other problem with Obama is he’s not saying things like “the sky is blue” that everyone can reasonably agree to; he’s saying extremist, radical things that will implode this country.  If Obama would only pursue semi-reasonable policies, he’d get support from Republicans.

Let’s realize that Obama is a demagogue, a liar, an incompetent, and unfit to be president.  Let’s do an even better job ignoring him.  Let’s realize that if the mainstream media reports something, it is very likely at least mostly untrue.  Let’s realize that cutting taxes for everyone – especially the people who actually create jobs in this country – is far and away the best path to prosperity.  And let’s realize that we need conservative policies if we’re going to get out of this hole and move forward