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Posts Tagged ‘John Hayward’

We are witnessing the beginning of the era of black hole government

by Mojambo ( 133 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Politics at August 4th, 2011 - 8:30 am

For Barack Obama it will always be about wealth redistribution, making others “pay their fair share” of taxes, increasing spending, and getting more an more people dependent on the government (which makes them almost automatically wards of the Democratic Party). That will always be (as the author states) his default position.

by John Hayward

President Obama​ gave a speech in praise of the debt ceiling bill passed by the Senate this afternoon.  It quickly became clear that this great “compromise” hasn’t put much of a dent in his vision of ever-expanding government.  The Era of Big Government famously ended under Bill Clinton​ in the 90s, to be followed by the Era of Freaking Huge Government.  Today, the Era of Black Hole Government began.  Our betters in Washington don’t want to hear another peep about deficits until the process of collapse is complete.

In his speech today, Obama repeated his incessant demand for more money to spend on “infrastructure,” without explaining what happened to the last pile of money he grabbed for that purpose.  He’s spent more on “infrastructure” than any of his predecessors already.  Why do we still have an “America that needs rebuilding,” as he put it today, and why shouldn’t he be held accountable for it?

With his big new spending plans outlined, the President immediately lunged into his usual tired call for tax increases, which he describes with the focus-grouped euphemism “balanced approach.”  He also blew the dust off the “wealthiest Americans paying their fair share” bromides he borrowed from Bill Clinton.  This is a real jab in the eye to Republican compromise salesmen who assured us that tax increases were off the table.  Obama didn’t even bother with that pretense for one single hour.

“Since you can’t cut the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach,” the President insisted.  Like hell you can’t. Would Mr. Obama be willing to put some skin in the game, and immediately surrender his office to someone who can provide a detailed plan to eliminate the deficit without tax increases?  We’d have him out of Washington before dinner tonight.

What he really means, of course, is that he and his constituents don’t want to reduce the deficit without tax increases, which is an entirely different proposition from saying it “can’t be done.”  But taxes and spending are never presented to the public as a rational transaction.  It’s all about force, command, compulsion, and obligation.

[……]

I gather the President thinks we can balance the budget on the backs of the people who already pay the vast majority of taxes in this country.  No chance of asking the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income tax to “chip in,” right?  That would be as crazy as expecting public union employees to make sacrifices.  The only thing completely off the table, besides Obama’s nightmarish health care plan, is putting an end to anyone’s free ride.

Obama went on to blame his stupendous economic failures on uncertainty over raising the debt ceiling, which apparently reaches all the way back to the beginning of his Presidency.  You’ve been more nervous than you realized, but at last, you can relax.  Everything will be okay, now that the government can spend another few trillion it doesn’t have.

[……]

The most remarkable (or, depending on your perspective, disturbing) thing about Obama is how quickly he snaps back to his default tax-and-spend mode, no matter what happens.  Nothing he called for today was significantly different than what he’s demanded in the past.  He gave no sense of presiding over a newly restrained government that would have to make do with less.  Instead, he continued telling us how we have to make do with less, to empower his continued stewardship of the American economy… which he was running so beautifully, before evil Republicans began making everyone nervous by taking the debt ceiling seriously.

Read the rest – The era of Black Hole Government begins

The Madness of King Barack

by Mojambo ( 129 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Cult of Obama at July 25th, 2011 - 11:30 am

Remember when sycophants such as Christopher Buckley, David Brooks,  and Peggy Noonan crooned over Obama’s “first class temperament”  and even (in Brooks’ case)  the crease in his pants? Well the Golfer-in-chief has acted like the spoiled, petulant child that we all suspected him to be. In fact he acts as if he has had a nervous breakdown with the tantrums, pouting, and storming out of meetings. We have found the issues in which to beat him on and it is apparent that he cannot deal with  any opposition and will become immature and whiny when he meets firms resistance. The  man/child cannot take a punch.

by John Hayward

On Friday, right after his Democrat colleagues in the Senate used a procedural maneuver to kill the Cut, Cap and Balance Act without a real vote, President Obama held a town hall meeting at the University of Maryland before a carefully screened, very supportive audience.  He said a few interesting things in this relaxed and comfortable environment.

Obama blamed divided government for the debt ceiling crisis.  “I’m sympathetic to your view that this would be easier if I could do this entirely on my own,” he told a questioner who brought up the theory, fashionable in some liberal circles, that the 14th Amendment gives the President power to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally.  The President went on to remark, with a chuckle, that this would give him more time to spend with his daughters.

In addition to recoiling in horror at the thought of America’s chief executive being arrogant enough to even speculate about the joys of dictatorship out loud, a thoughtful town hall attendee might ask why the Democrats didn’t balance the budget when they had total control of Washington from 2009 to 2010, and point out that they have controlled both houses of Congress since 2006.  But you’re not supposed to ask questions like that.

Obama also told his audience that “it’s hard to keep up with all the different plans” for handling the debt crisis.  No, it isn’t.  There’s are only two real plans: the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, which enjoys the support of a huge majority of Americans, or leaving the debt ceiling where it is.  There are no other plans. There are only vague outlines… absolutely none of which have come from President Obama, who has made no concrete proposals at all.

[…]

On the topic of his conduct so far, the architect of the new Depression said, “we’ve made good choices so far.”  (I am not making this up.  He really said that.)  He also declared, “The United States of America doesn’t run out without paying the tab.  We pay our bills.  We meet our obligations.”

Um… Mr. President?  Running a huge deficit means, by definition, that you are not “paying your bills,” and you are the one who keeps threatening that your government will not “meet its obligations,” by shutting off Social Security checks, veterans benefits, and other essential services.

It’s time to face the unpleasant truth.  President Barack Hussein Obama has gone mad.

He’s mad in both senses of the word.  Later on Friday, after House Speaker John Boehner declared he would no longer waste his time “negotiating” with Obama, the President gave an astonishing press conference that played out like a nervous breakdown.  I don’t know why the press covered it.  They really shouldn’t cover any of his press conferences anymore.  The price of a seat at the negotiating table is a plan, and Obama doesn’t have one.

There is no reason to pay the slightest attention to anything else the President says, until he produces a concrete proposal with real numbers.  Otherwise, as Boehner discovered, no meaningful “negotiation” can occur.

[…]

He mouths the language of fiscal responsibility knowing the media will never even ask him to define the words he’s using.  Afterward, they hold round-table discussions that turn into Mad Hatter tea parties, because they pretend the President actually has serious ideas about deficit reduction.  Meanwhile, at the University of Maryland, Obama wrapped up his town hall by promising the audience… another “stimulus” package, and more “infrastructure” spending.

Some “deficit hawk.”  This delusional President needs to be controlled and neutralized, not bargained with.  He’s demonstrated nothing more clearly than his determination to keep writing gigantic rubber checks, until the checkbook and pen are taken away from him.  He’s among the final champions of a system that sinks further into madness as its foundational assumptions are revealed to be expensive frauds.  Besides being delusional, this system is dangerously paranoid, because it thinks all of its problems can be solved by designating the proper combination of enemies.

Insanity, as defined by Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results.  The President himself just said, before one of the last few friendly audiences his handlers could cobble together for him, that “every Democratic and Republican president” has tried the same thing he wants to try again… and yet, our insolvent sham of a government is about to slam into a debt ceiling 14.3 trillion dollars high.

As for the rest of us, sanity is still an option.  We won’t like what happens on the day it becomes inescapable.

Read the rest: Barack the Mad

Recovery Summer 2011 – the sequel to Recovery Summer 2009

by Mojambo ( 91 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, unemployment at June 14th, 2011 - 8:30 am

Since Recovery Summer 2009 was such a smash success, get ready for Recovery Summer 2011 coming to your state soon. “Let’s bet on the private sector for a change”   – what a novel idea!

by John Hayward

President Obama swings through North Carolina today, where he’ll be “selling the advantages of his 2009 stimulus packages for green jobs,” according to a Fox News report.

This is a vicious insult against the good people of North Carolina, since the President apparently thinks the state is packed with imbeciles who haven’t noticed that much of the stimulus loot vanished into thin air, unemployment is far higher than Obama said it would be without the stimulus, and there aren’t any “green jobs.”  It would have been more interesting to watch Obama sell this twaddle to people in South Carolina, where it would be easy to pack an auditorium with people whose jobs Obama and his union pals are actively working to destroy.

Recovery Summer II kicked off with an Obama defense of his General Motors bailout so transparently fraudulent that even friendly media outlets felt compelled to call him on it.  Now the President is abandoning any pretense of actually doing his job to fly off on a big fund-raising tour, and tout his “achievements” in a desperate attempt to win big-money Wall Street donors back.

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Just last Friday, Obama touted all of the wonderful job growth his big auto bailout supposedly created in peripheral industries, such as Chet’s Restaurant in Toledo.  Chet’s Restaurant promptly went out of business.  Even without this darkly comical demonstration of Obama’s economic death touch, the point he was trying to make was bizarre and offensive.  Are we supposed to be happy about a future in which we all work at low-wage service jobs, to provide food and comfort for the lucky winners King Obama and his royal court choose to subsidize with our tax money?

We serfs, on the other hand, will be lucky if we can afford to eat anywhere better than McDonalds, which was single-handedly responsible for half of the job growth in the already horrifying May unemployment report, and fully a quarter of the jobs created in the month before that.  And the man who engineered all this is taking a victory lap?

Obama is also trying to build political support for another “stimulus” spending spree.  Obama surrogate Larry Summers, who used to be one of the President’s top economic advisors, is pumping out op-ed pieces warning that we need another huge round of Keynesian deficit spending to avoid falling into a “Lost Decade,” where presumably not even McDonald’s will be hiring.  Apparently only the previous trillion-dollar slush fund saved us from a Great Depression.  Summers should probably wait a little longer before claiming we avoided that depression.

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Republicans should make it clear to this Administration that it will not be trusted with any more “stimulus” money, given more regulatory power, or allowed to spin its way out of the catastrophic economy it has created.  The only thing we need from Barack Obama, besides accepting responsibility for his actions and cancelling all the recreational and fund-raising nonsense drawing him away from the duties of the Presidency, is his plan to cut government spending back to 2008 levels, before he got his hands on Uncle Sam’s credit cards.

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I’ve got a proposal for the people who think we should run up the national debt even more, so we can have another round of “stimulus” spending.  We’re always told that pro-growth tax cuts would “cost” the Treasury too much in lost tax revenue.  Let’s put it to the test.  Instead of betting more money on the President who failed miserably last time, let’s bet on the private sector for a change.

Give us dramatic tax simplification and big pro-growth tax cuts, and let’s watch what actually happens to tax revenues.  The worst that could happen would be incurring the kind of “cost” liberals want to blow on more stimulus spending anyway… and at least we’d be taking a chance on something new, instead of pouring billions more into the same leaky Keynesian plumbing that left us both insolvent and unemployed.

Read the rest – Recovery Summer II claws its way from the grave