The United States of America was once a dynamic flourishing nation with economic opportunities for those who came here to strive hard. However over time, various Progressive Presidents of both parties began to implement the government redistribution policies. These policies have culminated under Barack Hussein Obama and the result is a stagnant anemic economy. Nations like China, India, Chile, Russia, Israel, Colombia, Panama and Germany are currently cleaning our clocks economically. These nation’s economies are dong good, while we are struggling. When you have a nation like Germany, who once had a stagnant economy and now has embrace free market reforms  lecturing us,  you know the world is upside down. China which is set to overtake us economically now lectures us about our fiscal policies, which they help support by buying our debt.  In short, America has become the economic sick man of the Industrial world.

What worries me about President Obama is really one general issue: his very concrete enjoyment of the good life as evidenced by his golf outings, Martha’s Vineyard vacations, and imperial entourages that accompany him abroad, and yet his obvious distrust of the private sector and the success of the wealthy. Yet my discomfort here is not even one that arises from an obvious hypocrisy of, say, a Michelle on the 2008 campaign trail lecturing the nation about its meanness or her own previous lack of pride in her country, juxtaposed with her taste for the publicly provided rarefied enjoyments of a Costa del Sol hideaway at a time of recession

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We all accept, of course, that the question is not one of a laissez-faire, unchecked robber baron arena, versus a Marxist-Leninist closed economy, but rather in a modern Western liberal state the finer line between a Greece and a Switzerland, or a California and a Texas.

In the former examples, the desire to achieve an equality of result through high taxes, generous public employment, and lavish entitlements destroys incentive in two directions — creating dependency on the part of the more numerous recipients of government largess, and despair among the smaller but more productive sector that sees the fruits of its labor redistributed to others — with all the obligatory state rhetoric about greed and social justice that legitimizes such transfers.

In the latter examples, an equality of opportunity allows citizens to create wealth and capital on the assurances that the incentives for personal gain and retention of profits will result in greater riches for all.

Read the rest: Stay Worried

My Generation (Generation X) really got screwed over. We entered the workforce in the late 90’s when the economic was on booming. Great starting salaries, bonuses and raises. In the 2000’s, the job market became stagnant and although unemployment was low, wages were lower than they were in the 80’s and 90’s. Raises were not keeping up with cost of living and due to outsourcing, we couldn’t demand better wages. Then the economic collapse hit in 2008 and then Obama’s fiscal recklessness has screwed over any opportunity we had to advance. When compared to the Boomers ate a similar age, Generation X is nowhere near their living standards. What we see happening occurred in Argentina. A once great vibrant nation, turned into a 3rd World economic basket case.

America needs massive economic reform in order to attract capital which leads to job creation and upward mobility. If this doesn’t occur, expect to see talented young Americans immigrate to other nations that will provide economic opportunity. The American dream is rapidly turning into the American nightmare.

Update: MacDuff has aa great comment that needs to be added to this post.

As a Boomer, life was great in the 80s and 90s, now I look back on it as if it were a dream, wondering “how did it all go so badly, so quickly?”. Alas, the 90′s were a mirage. Everyone (including myself) were trading stocks online finding that you could actually make some money with little effort. It seemed that it would never end, but we didn’t know that we were building on sand; not only individuals, but businesses as well. All it would eventually take was a tremor to bring it all down.

On 9/11, the tremor came. The ripples that went through the economy revealed the shallow, and speculative nature of our “bubble economy” and those ripples became waves that toppled the castles of sand that we thought was a stable economy. The upshot for me was that a 30 year career was ended by downsizing in 2004 and, at 50, I had to compete with much younger people who had not yet built a “lifestyle” based upon the “arc of continued success”. The arc, unfortunately, was an assumption based upon what proved to be a flawed vision of the American Dream.

Yeah, I made it for a few years, starting over in a new industry and using what I had left of my youthful ambition, combined with a bit of wisdom and experience. Nothing turned out as planned and, in the end, due to having saved some and resisted the urge to indebt myself, I’ll be OK.

I curse those politicians, of both parties, and latter-day robber barons who chose expediency and unrealistic growth projections, funded by debt, over long-term solidity. Their dream has been realized by way of exhorbitant salaries paid for trashing the companies that paid them. I curse the boards of directors who paid these scallywags, and the politicians that put the good of their own career ahead of that of the American economic system. There’s a lot of cursing to go around, and it goes back for more than a half a century.

We need only look to places like Allentown, PA, Detroit and Lansing, MI, to see the ruins of a once great industrial power laid to waste by incompetence and greed.

Internationally, the once grat leader is no more than a follower, being lectured by nations who, just 70 years ago, we decimated in war, then rebuilt. The irony is that their lectures are sound and the message is correct.

WE, and our insatiable thirst for “easy money” has done what no nation has been able to do in our history; it has reduced us to our knees. Many, such as myself, were raised by parents who weathered the Great depression as well as World War II. They told us there was “no free lunch” They told us that the quest for “easy money” was a fool’s errand. But we didn’t listen, we just didn’t listen.

We’re listening now.

This was spot on!