|
Post by philunderwood on Aug 30, 2011 9:30:39 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=16Obama’s eroding base Published August 30, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain A new CNN poll shows that one in four Democrats would prefer the party nominate someone other than Barack Obama for the presidency. That’s not good territory for an incumbent seeking election to be in. It also shows a negative trend to the question posed: A new poll by CNN and ORC International finds that 27 percent of Democrats would like to see their party nominate a candidate other than Barack Obama for president in 2012. In response to the question, "Do you think the Democratic party should renominate Barack Obama as the party’s candidate for president in 2012, or do you think the Democratic party should nominate a different candidate for president in 2012?" — 72 percent said they wanted to see Obama renominated. But 27 percent, slightly more than one in every four, said they wanted to see Democrats nominate a different candidate. One percent had no opinion. That’s down from July where slightly less (22%) but still a significant number want another nominee. Don’t forget now, this is a poll of nothing but Democrats. And this demonstrates a high level of discontent and disapproval with this president among his own base. It means, for whatever reason, the bloom is off the rose when it comes to Obama, and while it is probable that if Obama remains the nominee for a second term, a good number of them will reluctantly pull the lever for him, given the alternative. But, and in cases like this there is always a “but” that keeps campaigns awake at night, what this also demonstrates is a large and widening “enthusiasm gap”. The new poll is another indication of Democratic unhappiness with the president, but it does not mean Obama will face a challenge in his party’s primaries. Despite the complaints of a few liberals like Sen. Bernard Sanders, the odds of a Democrat opposing the president appear to be something less than zero. But the new poll is still a matter of concern to Democrats, because it is yet another indication that there is significant disillusionment with the president within his own party. Whether those disaffected Democrats will come around to supporting Obama next year is an open question — and perhaps the most worrying of the president’s re-election bid. So you have any number of disaffected Democrats who have little enthusiasm for a repeat of the previous four years. Obama no longer excites them (if he ever did – my guess is a significant number of these Dems were Hillary supporters) and they’re less likely than previously to take the time to go to the polls and vote. When it was candidate Obama, the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort by the left was very effective because the Democratic electorate was wildly enthusiastic about the man. Of course GOTV efforts cost massive amounts of money – something candidate Obama gathered to himself quite well. As you might imagine, GOTV efforts with a less enthusiastic electorate cost even more. And still many are going to choose not to participate. I think that the story quoted is likely correct. Both parties have seen what primary challengers do when introduced in a presidential re-election campaign. The result is rarely good for the incumbent. I think Democrats will do everything in their power to avoid that. However, keep in mind these polls. They reflect a very disturbing trend for the Obama campaign. He won on the wild enthusiasm he generated with a vague campaign about “hope and change”, an unpopular lame duck president and a poor choice for an opponent. The “hope and change” express has derailed, he no longer has Bush to blame and he is stuck, for once, running on his own record – as dismal as it is. Seeing polls indicating an unenthusiastic and eroding base has to keep him up at night. Trying to restrike the spark that Obama rode to victory has to keep his campaign up at night. Methinks both are going to suffer many sleepless nights before next November. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Aug 31, 2011 5:21:58 GMT -5
www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Hillary-Clinton-Obama-2012/2011/08/30/id/409193?s=al&promo_code=CF22-1Pressure Grows on Hillary to Challenge Sinking Obama Tuesday, 30 Aug 2011 03:56 PM By Martin Gould She says no, that she never wants to run for office again. But the pressure is growing on her to change her mind as Obama continues to slide in the polls — and as the left bloc of the party and Latino and black voters become more vocal in their disapproval of the president. And when White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about the possibility at a press briefing on Monday, he was less than convincing with his answer. “You’d have to ask her,” Carney stammered after Lester Kinsolving of World Net Daily posed the question. “We’re fairly confident that we need to focus on the task at hand.” More than 1 in 4 Democrats — 27 percent — say they want someone other than Obama to run next year according to a CNN/ORC International poll. And while Obama’s job satisfaction figures have been running at 39 percent, the latest figure for the secretary of state, albeit from March, put her with a job approval rating of 66 percent. Talk of a Clinton run started when independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said last month that Obama needed a challenge because he has drifted too far to the right. “There are millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the president, who believe that with regard to Social Security and other things, he said one thing as a candidate and is doing something very much else as a president — who cannot believe how weak he has been for whatever reason in negotiating with Republicans,” Sanders said. “It would do this country a good deal of service if people started thinking about candidates out there to begin contrasting a progressive agenda as opposed to what Obama believes he’s doing.” Though Sanders did not mention Clinton by name, she is seen as the most viable Democratic challenger to Obama. She ran hard against him for the nomination in 2008 and generally has been viewed as the most able member of the administration. Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp took it one step further in her column last week in the New York Daily News. “She'd be tough and liberal,” wrote Cupp. “But far more importantly, she'd be effective. She'd be focused. Whether or not she got signature legislation through the Congress, she'd get the country back on the right track.” And on Tuesday, veteran correspondent Andrew Malcolm raised the issue in his blog for the Los Angeles Times. “A challenge to Obama seems pretty far-fetched today, with his job approval hovering around 39%. Hard to imagine the loyal secretary of State, who'll turn 64 in October, abruptly resigning to mount a challenge to her current boss and onetime bitter rival,” wrote Malcolm. “And she swears — well, actually, she just proclaims — that she'll never seek elective office again. “But, say, winter nears and the Republicans are dominating the political news with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry duking it out. “And August's 39% job-approval rating for the president has melted into 33% or 32%. And the economy shows no real signs of improving despite another couple of empty Obama jobs speeches calling for more spending on infrastructure because the first $787 billion didn't work.” The feeling among Democrats that they backed the wrong horse in 2008 has been growing in recent weeks. They have become alarmed that Obama has appeared weak in dealing with Republicans especially over raising the debt ceiling and on spending cuts. One joke going the rounds after last week’s east coast earthquake, was that Republicans demanded it be 5.9 on the Richter Scale while Obama wanted it to be 3.5, so the two sides compromised and ended up with a 5.9. His poll figures among Latinos have fallen from 85 percent approval in 2009 to 49 percent now. His figures among African Americans remain in the 80s, but only this month Rep. Maxine Waters urged supporters to “unleash” her and other Congressional Black Caucus members so they could criticize him more harshly. President Bill Clinton’s former press secretary Dee Dee Myers told the Washington Post, “The president has shown himself unwilling to dig in on a position. He’s for jobs, I’ve heard him say that. He’s for being the adult in the room. But beyond that, I’m not actually sure what his bottom line is.” And North Carolina Democratic strategist Gary Pearce said, “Democrats are worried. He looks weak, he doesn’t say anything that grabs you and people are looking for some kind of magic. “You see a yearning for a Bill Clinton-type approach and Hillary would reflect that. Obama is just a different political animal.” Pollster Pat Caddell, who was working for President Jimmy Carter when Ted Kennedy tried to unseat Carter in 1980, said a challenge will become much more likely if the GOP wins the New York congressional seat formerly held by Anthony Weiner in a Sept. 13 special election. “That seat is the darkest blue Democrat you can be,” he said, adding that a lot of Jewish voters there are unhappy with the Obama administration’s policies on Israel. “If the Democrats lost that seat on the 13th, that’s the kind of earthquake that would start shaking up people,” Caddell told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Tuesday. Cavuto pointed out that nearly all post-war presidents who have seen their poll numbers slip have faced challenges that have fatally weakened them: Lyndon Johnson was challenged by Eugene McCarthy and soon after said he would not run again; Gerald Ford faced off with Ronald Reagan and then lost the election to Carter, and then Kennedy challenged Carter, who subsequently lost to Reagan. Caddell said he did not expect a challenge to come from Hillary Clinton because of her position within the administration. He also said many Democrats are leery about taking on the first African American president in a primary. A challenge is more likely to come from the left of the party, he said, mentioning the name of former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold as a potential candidate. “If the president keeps going down, the job situation gets worse, if we have more problems this fall, at some point you are going to have people who say it’s worth showing the flag, it is worth making the case. “The argument becomes, ‘It is time to get the president’s attention. We can’t be taken for granted and by being wishy-washy you’re going to lose anyway.’” If Clinton does decide to run, the battle within the Democratic Party would almost certainly be even more bitterly fought than it was four years ago. During that campaign, Clinton called Obama “irresponsible and naïve,” and issued a damning campaign advertisement questioning whether he would be the right person to answer a 3 a.m. phone call alerting him to an international crisis.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 2, 2011 6:53:35 GMT -5
Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
By SHELBY STEELE
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.
Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 6, 2011 8:19:16 GMT -5
Our Progressive Economic Wrecking Crew By Arnold Ahlert www.JewishWorldReview.com | On the jobs front, it doesn't get any clearer than zero. Nor did the news get any better during the Friday-before-a-holiday-weekend news dump. One which also revealed that the public part of America's debt (as opposed to the intra-governmental debt we owe to ourselves) topped $10 trillion for the first time in history. That's an increase of 59 percent in public debt since Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20th, 2009. This is a double-barrel dose of reality that can better explained by ideology than economics. Simply put, two progressive nostrums are killing the country. To wit: 1. Government knows best. Only a fool, or a progressive would believe such utter nonsense. But they do, with a kind of religious intensity that would make the Dalai Lama blush. And it has to be religious, because only blind faith--with an accent on the blind part--could look at the gargantuan amount of waste, fraud, inefficiency, and lethargy, coupled with the legions of petty, power-mongering bureaucrats and conclude government is the answer. Yet that so-called answer begs the obvious question: why do progressives believe government knows best? Because they believe the overwhelming majority of Americans are hopelessly stupid and need to be led around by their "betters." Note the two dominating attitudes that draw them to that conclusion. One is the unbridled contempt these people have for their fellow countrymen. As one who has long believed in the innate wisdom of most people--as opposed to the self-aggrandizing, Ivy League, book smart, elitism progressives use as their measuring stick--I find such contempt appalling. If progressives are so brilliant, why has virtually every iota of bad economic news been characterized as "unexpected?" The answer to that question reveals the second attitude. Arrogance. Reduced to it most basic level, progressive arrogance stems from one simple idea: I'm right, and you're not only wrong, but stupid and/or evil to boot. Now mind you, someone suffused with a tad less contempt and arrogance, might look at something like a month where zero jobs were created (or saved), or two-and-a-half years of economic malaise--most notably, the two of those years when progressives had complete and dominant control of Congress and the White House--and come to the conclusion that something's not working. Like about 14 million Americans who are unemployed and another 11 million who are working part-time, or who have given up looking for work entirely, for example. You might say to yourself, "we gave it our best Keynesian shot, it didn't work, let's try something else." Progressives? See government knows best, driven by contempt and arrogance. See a Thursday speech by the president and wait for the infrastructure bank, shovel-ready, command-and-control b.s., packaged with a vocabulary where any mention of the word "stimulus" is a speechwriter's firing offense. I'm betting "targeted investments" is the new catch-phrase. In other words, get ready for a new shade of lipstick on the same economic pig this president and his administration have been pushing since they assumed control. And brace yourself as well for a pig-promoting mainstream media who will tell you that any resistance to the same old same old, is Tea Party-led racism or good old-fashioned Republican obstructionism. Which brings us to our second nostrum: 2. When you're suffused with contempt and arrogance, you can actually believe that, with respect to economics, "coercion" and "incentive" are interchangeable terms. If there is a bigger progressive disconnect than this one, I would be hard-pressed to imagine what it is. Only a progressive would believe you can bash the hell out of America's wealth-creators, burden them with thousands of regulations, many of which are either unknown or more likely unknowable, and embrace crony capitalism with its government-selected "winners and losers"-- and still wonder why those wealth-creators aren't falling all over themselves to hire more workers. Memo to the business world's would-be progressive masters: a substantial portion of America's wealth-creators are on strike. You know what a strike is all about. That's when a worker, or in this case a business owner, decides conditions are so onerous, that it no longer pays to work under them. Or in this case, hire under them. And when those wealth-creators see one of the worst examples of unbridled coercion to ever come down the pike--as in the NLRB suing Boeing airlines for daring to open a plant in a right to work state--it's not going to get any better. Even we dullard Americans recognize a government-sponsored shakedown when we see it. As for the president's upcoming jobs speech, Americans would be wise to note it's not a jobs speech at all. It's a campaign speech. Ergo, even if by some miracle, the dedicated socialist/Marxist/progressive who currently occupies the Oval Office did a one-eighty and embraced any sort of Reagan-esque, genuinely business-stimulating ideas that got us out of the last recession, they would be ephemeral at best. It is absolutely critical that Americans understand one over-arching reality regarding Barack Obama: This economy is the one we've got while this man is desperately seeking re-election. In other words, it reflects his best efforts with respect to getting elected for another four years. Four more years in which he will no longer be constrained by the necessity of winning votes. Four more years in which his habit of bypassing Congress and doing whatever he pleases will be amplified, not diminished. The common political wisdom which has preceded this president has long been the idea that no one man, no matter how bad a president he is, could ruin the nation. This is one American who believes that theory no longer applies.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 7, 2011 9:52:04 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=34Richard Cohen: Obama has lost the Hamptons Published September 7, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain Interesting “read between the lines” column by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today. In it he relates his sojourn in New York’s Hamptons on Long Island. As he describes it, “[t]he Hamptons is where the Democratic energy, money and intellectual firepower of Manhattan goes for R&R. It’s just not another beach.” Or said another way, it is an enclave of the East Coast liberal elite. So given that fact, and frankly it is pretty indisputable, you’d believe there’d still be a lot of support for Barack Obama – given the alternative. Yes? No. Cohen: Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned. It’s taken them 3 years to become disillusioned, but per Cohen, they finally are. And what are they disillusioned about? The very same thing we’ve harped on for 3 years. The fact that Obama isn’t a leader and certainly not the guy this country needs in charge in this time of crisis. The difference is we knew that before he ever took office: I expected more than a few people to defend the president. No one did. Everyone — and I do mean everyone — expressed disappointment in him as a leader. In that area, they thought he was a bust. And this wasn’t something that was anticipated given his thin resume and his lack of ever being in an actual leadership position previous to the White House? You know, at times I wonder about the supposed elite in this country. As is obvious in the case of Barack Obama and the wool he pulled over the eyes of the rich and powerful on the left, critical thinking is apparently not a requisite skill for making money. That’s further demonstrated by the fact that they then handed over gobs of it to a political novice with no leadership experience and precious little experience in much of anything of worth when it comes to governing. But here we are. And now they’re “disillusioned”. Imagine that. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 10, 2011 7:35:02 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?p=11516The Irrelevant President? Published September 9, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain Dana Milbank discusses the “atmospherics” of the speech last night. A bit of a look at how it was all perceived, regarded, treated by those in attendance. Some nuggets: Presidential addresses to Congress are often dramatic moments. This one felt like a sideshow. Usually, the press gallery is standing room only; this time only 26 of 90 seats were claimed by the deadline. Usually, some members arrive in the chamber hours early to score a center-aisle seat; 90 minutes before Thursday’s speech, only one Democrat was so situated. Relevance? When you can only inspire the filling of 26 of 90 seats in the press gallery, how relevant are you? Or perhaps a better question is, how much news does the press think will actually be made with the speech. If those numbers were a poll, they wouldn’t be a very favorable one. And enthusiasm. One Democrat arrived early to grab a coveted isle seat? If you’ve ever watched the entrance of a president, it is clear those seats were claimed to get a little face time and flesh pressing with the President. One Democrat was interested. In fact, as Milbank points out, most of the empty seats (those not in the press gallery) were to be found on the Democratic side: Almost all Republicans ignored the calls of some within their ranks to boycott the speech. In fact, the empty seats were on the Democratic side. Democrats lumbered to their feet to give the president several standing ovations, but they struggled at times to demonstrate enthusiasm. When Obama proposed payroll tax cuts for small businesses, three Democrats stood to applaud. Summer jobs for disadvantaged youth brought six Democrats to their feet, and a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed produced 11 standees. Obama spoke quickly, urgently, even angrily. Rep. Jesse Jackson (D-Ill.) stared at the ceiling. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) scanned the gallery. Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) was seen reading a newspaper. In fact, it is apparent a whole lot of folks in that chamber really didn’t want to be there. Then there’s this: Republican leaders, having forced Obama to postpone the speech because of the GOP debate, decided they wouldn’t dignify the event by offering a formal, televised “response.” And the White House, well aware of Obama’s declining popularity, moved up the speech time to 7 p.m. so it didn’t conflict with the Packers-Saints NFL opener at 8:30. Priorities. A presidential speech to a joint session of Congress rates lower than an NFL game (ok, given, it is the opening game of the season, but still). And the GOP waives off a rebuttal? Again, the anticipation of anything new was just not there. And in that department, Obama did not disappoint, serving up old hash and calling it new. And although Milbank still tries to push the “GOP forced Obama to postpone” meme, it is clear that the bloom is off the Obama rose for good. The supposed best orator of our era has been outed. He’s all blow and no go. Why be enthusiastic about that? Why even show up? Well, most showed up because they had to or they were forced too by good old politics: Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) had planned to skip the speech to host a football party, but the Senate majority leader thwarted his plan. “Typical Harry Reid,” Vitter tweeted. “He’s now schdld votes that should’ve been this morn 4 right b4 & right AFTER prez’s speech. Pens me in 2 have 2 stay.” Interesting when you have to go to lengths like that to assure attendance to a Presidential speech, isn’t it? Moves like probably wouldn’t be necessary if a president was still relevant, would they? The press gallery would be standing room only, Democrats would have arrived hours early to grab isle seats and standing ovations would have been a dozen a minute for a relevant president. Or at least that’s what history shows us. Respect is earned, not granted. This president has obviously not yet earned the respect he thinks he deserves. But he is certainly getting the level of respect he has earned. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 13, 2011 8:54:18 GMT -5
Back to the Future? By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along? Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy? Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending! Only the words have changed — from "stimulus" to "jobs" and from "shovel-ready projects" to "jobs for construction workers." If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words? Or just because Obama now assures us that "everything in this bill will be paid for"? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost. When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers' unions, and "thousands of transportation projects." The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can "grow the economy" by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending "investment." Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy. Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now. Obama says he wants "federal housing agencies" to "help more people refinance their mortgages." What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford? No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. When people pay the price of their own mistakes, that is when there is the greatest pressure to correct those mistakes. But when taxpayers who had nothing to do with those mistakes are forced to pay the costs, that is when those and other mistakes can continue to flourish — and to mess up the economy. Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics — including the great political game of "Heads I win and tails you lose." Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: "Things would have been even worse without this policy." It's heads I win and tails you lose. Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending. Are we really supposed to fall for ploys like this? The answer is clearly "yes," as far as Obama and his allies in the media are concerned. Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama's speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe — that "the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own." Have you heard anybody in any part of the political spectrum advocate that? If not, then why was the President of the United States saying such things, unless he thought we were fools enough to buy it — and that the media would never call him on it?
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 14, 2011 7:59:32 GMT -5
Back to the Future: Part II By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | Some people are hoping that President Obama's plan will get the economy out of the doldrums and start providing jobs for the unemployed. Others are hoping that the Republicans' plan will do the trick. Those who are truly optimistic hope that Democrats and Republicans will both put aside their partisanship and do what is best for the country. Almost nobody seems to be hoping that the government will leave the economy alone to recover on its own. Indeed, almost nobody seems at all interested in looking at the hard facts about what happens when the government leaves the economy alone, compared to what happens when politicians intervene. The grand myth that has been taught to whole generations is that the government is "forced" to intervene in the economy when there is a downturn that leaves millions of people suffering. The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s. What most people are unaware of is that there was no Great Depression until AFTER politicians started intervening in the economy. There was a stock market crash in October 1929 and unemployment shot up to 9 percent — for one month. Then unemployment started drifting back down until it was 6.3 percent in June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place. That was the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which more than a thousand economists across the country pleaded with Congress and President Hoover not to enact. But then, as now, politicians decided that they had to "do something." Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits. Then, as now, when "doing something" made things worse, many felt that the answer was to do something more. Both President Hoover and President Roosevelt did more — and more, and more. Unemployment remained in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade. Indeed, unemployment topped 20 percent and remained there for 35 months, stretching from the Hoover administration into the Roosevelt administration. That is how the government was "forced" to intervene during the Great Depression. Intervention in the economy is like eating potato chips: You can't stop with just one. What about the track record of doing nothing? For more than the first century and a half of this nation, that was essentially what the federal government did — nothing. None of the downturns in all that time ever lasted as long as the Great Depression. An economic downturn in 1920-21 sent unemployment up to 12 percent. President Warren Harding did nothing, except for cutting government spending. The economy quickly rebounded on its own. In 1987, when the stock market declined more in one day than it had in any day in 1929, Ronald Reagan did nothing. There were outcries and outrage in the media. But Reagan still did nothing. That downturn not only rebounded, it was followed by 20 years of economic growth, marked by low inflation and low unemployment. The Obama administration's policies are very much like the policies of the Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. FDR not only smothered business with an unending stream of new regulations, he spent unprecedented sums of money, running up record deficits, despite raising taxes on high income earners to levels that confiscated well over half their earnings. Like Obama today, FDR blamed the country's economic problems on his predecessor, making Hoover a pariah. Yet, 6 years after Hoover was gone, and nearly a decade after the stock market crash, unemployment hit 20 percent again in the spring of 1939. Doing nothing may have a better track record in the economy but government intervention has a better political record in getting presidents re-elected. People who say that Barack Obama cannot be re-elected with unemployment at its current level should take note that Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected a record four times, despite two consecutive terms in which unemployment was never as low as it is today. Economic reality is one thing. But political impressions are something very different — and all too often it is the political impressions which determine the fate of an administration and the fate of a nation.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 14, 2011 12:55:43 GMT -5
Spin this–White House tries to spin NY-9 loss
Published September 14, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain
We really saw this trend start with Scott Browns Senate win in MA when he took the seat of Ted Kennedy after Kennedy passed away. Many saw that election as the first repudiation of Obama and his agenda. And, of course, it took place in a very blue state. The trend continued with the 2010 election when the GOP took a number of seats in blue districts. Yesterday the trend continued with upstart Republican Bob Turner took NY-9 in a special election to replace the disgraced Anthony Wiener. But as usual, the White House is sure it’s a special case that has little to do with the President or the President’s popularity (or lack there of).
Obama won the district, which spans southern Brooklyn and Queens, by 11 percentage points in 2008. His approval rating there is now 33 percent. The president’s top political aides concede that if his numbers had been “sturdier,” it might have had a slightly positive effect for Weprin. That means no Obama-voiced robocalls to most Democrats in the district—just text messages targeted at younger voters. More-popular Democrats, like Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Bill Clinton, are lending their voices to the get-out-the-vote effort. Democratic strategists studying the district say Turner’s strength comes from independents and traditionally Democratic voters in Orthodox Jewish communities, a demographic displaying an enormous amount of interest in voting. So, what about those cross-over “traditionally Democratic voters”? This is a seat that has been held by Democrats for 88 years. 88 years, folks. How is it that any GOP candidate has a chance in a district that handed Obama an 11 % win? And what does it say about the state of the Democrats if Bill Clinton can’t even rally the troops? And that’s the real problem:
In contrast, secular Democrats in the district, including secular Jews, display the sort of apathy associated with a demoralized political party. Weprin has been hemorrhaging support from all traditional Democratic constituencies. So is that because of Weprin, Obama or both?
The Republican Jewish Committee and independent Democratic allies like former New York Mayor Ed Koch have called the race a referendum on President Obama’s policies in general, and specifically his orientation toward Israel. They say a Turner victory would send a message that they don’t want to be the president’s rubber stamp. But Congress, controlled by Republicans, is no more popular in the district than Obama. And when polled, conservative Jews don’t list Israel among their top concerns. But of all voters who do say Israel is at the forefront of their minds, a mega-majority supports Turner. Still, Obama always has had trouble with Orthodox Jews, and two Obama advisers said they understand that at least some of the frustration may be exercised in the form of a vote against the Democratic candidate. They concede that the election might bring to the fore how difficult it will be for Obama to win back the trust of independents—no matter what their faith. This New York contest would seem to have implications beyond Brooklyn and Queens. Last two sentences are key. Obama lost independents with his health care debacle, er, law. With a supermajority against the bill, he and Congress rammed it through anyway. And then Scott Brown won his election as the first indication of independent ire. And so on. NY-9 is an indicator of a serious problem for Democrats and the president. Weprin may not have been the strongest candidate, but then for 88 years that’s really not mattered in NY-9. It has, until now, reliably “rubber stamped” the Democrat in every election. Why is now different?
Mostly because of Obama – no matter how the White House tries to spin it. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 15, 2011 7:40:17 GMT -5
Obama Becomes the Fall Guy By Victor Davis Hanson www.JewishWorldReview.com | Suddenly, liberal op-ed writers are trashing -- even lampooning -- Barack Obama as a one-term president ("one and done"). Centrist Democrats up for re-election in 2012 openly worry about inviting a kindred president into their districts, lest the supposed new pariah lose them votes. Left-wing think tanks, environmentalists and academics vent their anger against Obama for supposedly being too soft on Republicans, and too ready to compromise with right-wingers. But what really caused the left-wing falling-out, less than three years after the hope-and-change crush on Barack Obama? For now, polls. Obama's popularity has plummeted to little more than 40 percent approval. Suddenly, Democrats worry that the public anger could be contagious. It might infect them as well -- in the way a sinking George W. Bush hurt congressional Republicans up for re-election in 2006. Yet the left cannot fairly blame Obama. After all, he rammed through on a strictly partisan vote the century-old liberal dream of a federal takeover of health care -- something that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton never could do. Keynesians never dreamed that a president could actually borrow $5 trillion for domestic spending in less than three years. The Obama administration even tried to shut down a brand-new Boeing aircraft plant on the shaky argument that the company might thereby be hiring fewer union workers somewhere else. For environmentalists, Obama kept oil producers out of new fields in Alaska, the American West, the Gulf and other offshore sites. Hundreds of billions in borrowed federal money went to failed "wind and solar" plants in an effort to jump-start "millions of green jobs." The Obama revolution under the radar was even more insidious. Open-borders activists were promised that the government would not bother illegal aliens unless they were wanted for felonies. Never before has the United States joined a foreign government in suing one of its own states -- in the fashion that both the Justice Department and Mexico have either filed or joined suits seeking to overturn Arizona's immigration law. From January 2009 through 2010, Obama advanced the liberal dream with a passion not seen since the New Deal days of Franklin Roosevelt. He bulldozed all opposition and rammed through most of what he wanted from a Democratic Congress -- Obamacare, record borrowing, record spending, hundreds of hard-left presidential appointees and judges. Far from being namby-pamby, Obama has gone after opponents like no president since Richard Nixon. He urged Hispanics to "punish our enemies." He called his political opponents "hostage takers." The affluent were lumped together with the super-rich and derided as "millionaires and billionaires, "corporate jet owners" and "fat cat" bankers. His supporters in unions and the Congressional Black Caucus freely blasted the Tea Party with slurs -- with the unspoken assurances that the president's constant calls for civility certainly did not apply to them. Critics may lampoon Obama's use of a teleprompter, but he still uses it to good effect in his near-daily speeches. Obama is a far better megaphone for left-wing policies than was the lackluster Jimmy Carter, the pompous Al Gore or the condescending John Kerry. He easily outshines the wooden Harry Reid and the polarizing Nancy Pelosi/person>. Compared to Obama and his smoothness, an often gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden can seem a liability. Obama is as charismatic as "I feel your pain" Bill Clinton -- as we saw in 2008, when Obama destroyed the primary challenge of Hillary Clinton. So the left cannot really complain either that Obama betrayed the cause or proved particularly inept in advancing it. Instead, what Obama's supporters are mad about is that the public is boiling over chronic 9 percent unemployment, a comatose housing market, escalating food and fuel prices, near nonexistent economic growth, a gyrating stock market, record deficits, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, and a historic credit downgrading. And voters are not just mad, but blaming these hard times on the liberal Obama agenda of more regulations, more federal spending, more borrowing, more talk of taxes, and more "stimulus" programs. A mostly moderate-to-conservative public has concluded that it does not like the new liberal agenda. After three years, it believes that the big government/big borrowing medicine made the inherited illness far worse. Voters may or may not like Obama, but they surely do not like what he is still trying to do. In response, the left needs a sacrificial lamb. So it has nonsensically turned with a fury on Obama as if he were culpable for getting through the left's own agenda. If Democrats do not blame the public's anger on their once-beloved messenger, then they are left only with their message itself. And that is something they simply cannot accept.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 15, 2011 7:53:02 GMT -5
Back to the Future: Part III By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | Ninety years ago — in 1921 — federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on "the rich" got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn't actually pay those taxes. The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up — equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today's money — declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke? It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year and up vanished into thin air. So did the tax revenues that the government hoped to collect with high tax rates on the top incomes. What happened was no mystery to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He pointed out that vast amounts of money that might have been invested in the economy were instead being invested in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds. Secretary Mellon estimated that the amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities had nearly tripled in a decade. The amount of this money that the tax collector couldn't touch was larger than the federal government's annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. Big bucks went into hiding. Mellon pointed out the absurdity of this situation: "It is incredible that a system of taxation which permits a man with an income of $1,000,000 a year to pay not one cent to the support of his Government should remain unaltered." One of Mellon's first acts as Secretary of the Treasury was to ask Congress to end tax exemptions for municipal bonds and other securities. But Congress was not about to set off a political firestorm by doing that. Mellon's Plan B was to cut the top income tax rate, in order to lure money out of tax-exempt securities and back into the economy, where increased economic activity would generate more tax revenue for the government. Congress also resisted this, using arguments that are virtually unchanged to this day, that these would just be "tax cuts for the rich." What makes all this history so relevant today is that the same economic assumptions and political arguments which produced the absurdities of 1921 are still going strong in 2011. If anything, "the rich" have far more options for putting their money beyond the reach of the tax collectors today than they had back in 1921. In addition to being able to put their money into tax-exempt securities, the rich today can easily send millions — or billions — of dollars to foreign countries, with the ease of electronic transfers in a globalized economy. In other words, the genuinely rich are likely to be the least harmed by high tax rates in the top brackets. People who are looking for jobs are likely to be the most harmed, because they cannot equally easily transfer themselves overseas to take the jobs that are being created there by American investments that are fleeing from high tax rates at home. Small businesses — hardware stores, gas stations or restaurants for example — are likewise unable to transfer themselves overseas. So they are far more likely to be unable to escape the higher tax rates that are supposedly being imposed on "millionaires and billionaires," as President Obama puts it. Moreover, small businesses are what create most of the new jobs. Why then are so many politicians, journalists and others so gung-ho to raise tax rates in the upper brackets? Aside from sheer ignorance of history and economics, class warfare politics pays off in votes for politicians who can depict their opponents as defenders of the rich and themselves as looking out for working people. It is a great political game that has paid off repeatedly in state, local and federal elections. As for the 1920s, Mellon eventually got his way, getting Congress to bring the top tax rate down from 73 percent to 24 percent. Vast sums of money that had seemingly vanished into thin air suddenly reappeared in the economy, creating far more jobs and far more tax revenue for the government. Sometimes sanity eventually prevails. But not always.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 15, 2011 8:42:26 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=16The polls are consistent – Obama’s job approval rating dropping like a rock Published September 15, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain Another in a long line of polls showing the President’s approval job ratings continue to fall. Some key elements of the latest poll’s findings: A majority of Americans don’t believe President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan will help lower the unemployment rate, skepticism he must overcome as he presses Congress for action and positions himself for re- election. The downbeat assessment of the American Jobs Act reflects a growing and broad sense of dissatisfaction with the president. Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy by 62 percent to 33 percent, a Bloomberg National Poll conducted Sept. 9-12 shows. The disapproval number represents a nine point increase from six months ago. One reason that the American people don’t believe Obama’s plan will work is because it is simply a rerun of the $800 billion plus stimulus which didn’t work. Additionally, it has since become clear that he is attempting to get his tax increases past the Republican party by making them the funding mechanism for this. Even Democrats are complaining about that (you don’t raise taxes in a recession – Econ 101). Harry Truman he ain’t. And again, electorally, here’s the bad news for Obama: The president’s job approval rating also stands at the lowest of his presidency — 45 percent. That rating is driven down in part by a majority of independents, 53 percent, who disapprove of his performance. If it stays like that, he’ll be introducing himself as the former president in 2013. In Obama campaign headquarters, aka the White House, these numbers probably have sirens wailing, lights flashing and grown men crying: The poll hands Obama new lows in each of the categories that measures his performance on the economy: only 36 percent of respondents approve of his efforts to create jobs, 30 percent approve of how he’s tackled the budget deficit and 39 percent approve of his handling of health care. So on the issues that most concern American voters, he’s not doing well at all. But back to his latest attempt to push his tax and spend package through: By a margin of 51 percent to 40 percent, Americans doubt the package of tax cuts and spending proposals intended to jumpstart job creation that Obama submitted to Congress this week will bring down the 9.1 percent jobless rate. That sentiment undermines one of the core arguments the president is making on the job act’s behalf in a nationwide campaign to build public support. Compounding Obama’s challenge is that 56 percent of independents, whom the president won in 2008 and will need to win in 2012, are skeptical it will work. I would guess its mostly because they recognize the package for what it is, and it is certainly not “new”. It is just another, in a long line of attempts by this administration, to push the same old tax increases through Congress. And despite what Obama claims those tax increases are not something the GOP has agreed to in the past – or ever. He gave them a substantial and supportable reason to oppose the package as Obama has presented it. Finally the big picture as it stands today: Forty-six percent of independents say they definitely won’t vote to re-elect the president, compared to 21 percent who definitely will support him. In 2008, Obama was backed by 52 percent of independent voters, compared to 44 percent who backed Republican nominee John McCain, an Arizona senator, according to exit polls. And enthusiasm for Obama? Waning: Of the respondents who said they’ve supported Obama at one point since he launched his presidential campaign in 2007, fewer than half say they still support him as fervently. Thirty- seven percent say their support has waned and 19 percent say he lost their backing because they’ve grown disappointed or angry with his leadership. Almost a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents say they’d like to see Obama face a primary challenge. Yeah, grim. He’s been found to be an empty suit by many of his own core supporters. Plus he has to run on his record for a change. NY-9 nationally. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 19, 2011 7:55:25 GMT -5
Obama's magical thinking on green jobs By Mark Steyn www.JewishWorldReview.com | The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his American Jobs Act. That’s a good name for it: an act. “Pass this bill now!” he declared 24 times at a stop in in Raleigh, North Carolina, and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: “Pass this bill now!” Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, “I love you!” “I love you, too,” said the president. “But… .” Oh, no, here it comes: conditional love. “But, if you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill!” You’d be surprised how effective this line is: I tried it on Darlene in the back of my Ford Edsel when I was 17, and we didn’t get home till two in the morning. Pass this bill now, or I’ll say “Pass this bill now!” another two dozen times! With this latest inspiration, Obama has taken the post-modern phase of democratic politics to a whole new level. “Pass this jobs bill”? Simply as a matter of humdrum reality, there is no bill, it won’t “create” any jobs, and it will be paid for with money we don’t have. But the smartest president in history has calculated that, if he says the same four monosyllables over and over, a nonexistent bill to create nonexistent jobs with nonexistent money will be yet another legislative triumph in the grand tradition of his first stimulus (the original Dumb And Dumber to the sequel’s Stimulus And Stimulusser). The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course correction in Washington boils down to: seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back. This $447 billion does not exist, and even foreigners don’t want to lend it to us. A majority of it will be “electronically created” by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Don’t worry, it’s not like “printing money”: we leave that to primitive basket-cases like Zimbabwe. This is more like one of those Nigerian email schemes, in which a prominent public official promises you a large sum of money in return for your bank account details. In the case of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, one prominent public official is promising to wire a large sum of money into the account of another prominent public official, which is a wrinkle even the Nigerians might have difficulty selling. But not to worry. On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” – and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent – $17.2 billion – and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! USA! USA! So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications. Just to put it in perspective, the breezy $447 billion price tag for the Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill is about 20 times higher than the most recent Greek government deficit currently threatening the stability of the entire Eurozone. Indeed, Greece’s projected 2011 deficit – $24 billion at last count – is little more than half of just one of Obama’s boutique, niche “green jobs” programs. As Churchill almost said, never in the field of human con tricks has so much been owed by so many to so little effect. Fortunately, there is no “American Jobs Act”. Indeed, the other day, tired of waiting for Obama to turn his telepromptered pseudo-bill into a typewritten actual bill, the Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert waggishly introduced an “American Jobs Act” all of his own. But back on the campaign trail the chanting goes on, last week’s election results in Nevada and New York notwithstanding. America has the lowest employment since the early Eighties, the lowest property ownership since the mid-Sixties, the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since the Second World War, the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, the highest government dependency rate of all time, and the biggest debt mountain in the history of the planet. And the president has just announced to the world that he’s checked the more-of-the-above box. The Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill proclaims that this is all he knows and all he wants to know. In my new book, I point out that Big Government leaves everything else smaller – and, when it’s bigger than anything ever attempted, the everything else is going to be way smaller. Maybe if you’re a “public service” worker or a tenured professor at Berkeley or a green-jobs racketeer or a New York Times columnist married to an heiress, you can afford Obama. But, if you’re not, look at your home, look at your savings, and figure out what’ll be left after another four years of “stimulus.” “I love you!” squeals the Obammybopper in North Carolina. “I love you, too,” says Obama. “But… .” But: You gotta take this half-trillion dollar bill, and the next one, and the one after that. Like Al Gore says in “Love Story,” love means never having to say you’re sorry.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 20, 2011 7:54:46 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?p=11592Obama’s hometown newspaper urges him to not to run again Published September 19, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain Steve Chapman, a member of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, has penned an article which can only be described as a nice way to say to Obama, “hey, do us a favor and let someone else take the reins before you totally screw up Democrats chances of ever getting the White House for decades”. But there is good news for the president. I checked the Constitution, and he is under no compulsion to run for re-election. He can scrap the campaign, bag the fundraising calls and never watch another Republican debate as long as he’s willing to vacate the premises by Jan. 20, 2013. What is remarkable about this is it is finally being said out loud, and not just whispered in conversations among Democrats. It is starting to emerge as a mainstream idea, Chapman among the first to put it in writing. Obama has become a political liability and most of the rational on the left realize that. All the hype has deflated and all the glitter fallen off. This, it is increasingly apparent, is a failed presidency. Oh, certainly, the economic circumstances haven’t helped, but neither has the Obama administration. In misstep after misstep they’ve compounded the problem. And, of course, as I’ve been saying for quite some time, Obama’s real problem this election cycle isn’t that he doesn’t have a record to examine. Instead his problem is he does have a record, for the first time, to examine, and it is not a good one. So Chapman, like the chief of staff who tries to convince his incompetent boss its time to step down, comes up with a list of excuses with a positive spin that make it sound like a good idea: It’s not as though there is much enticement to stick around. Presidents who win re-election have generally found, wrote John Fortier and Norman Ornstein in their 2007 book, "Second-Term Blues," that "their second terms did not measure up to their first." Presidential encores are generally a bog of frustration, exhaustion and embarrassment. They are famous for lowest moments rather than finest hours. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal, and Bill Clinton made the unfortunate acquaintance of Monica Lewinsky. Administration officials get weary after four years and leave in droves. The junior varsity has to be put into service. New ideas are hard to come by. And besides – Hillary is ready: Besides avoiding this indignity, Obama might do his party a big favor. In hard times, voters have a powerful urge to punish incumbents. He could slake this thirst by stepping aside and taking the blame. Then someone less reviled could replace him at the top of the ticket. The ideal candidate would be a figure of stature and ability who can’t be blamed for the economy. That person should not be a member of Congress, since it has an even lower approval rating than the president’s. It would also help to be conspicuously associated with prosperity. Given Obama’s reputation for being too quick to compromise, a reputation for toughness would be an asset. As it happens, there is someone at hand who fits this description: Hillary Clinton. Her husband presided over a boom, she’s been busy deposing dictators instead of destroying jobs, and she’s never been accused of being a pushover. That’s all true to a point, unless the current foreign policy, like everything else this administration, collapses in the interim. And it is fraying around the edges fairly badly. Arab spring has turned the clock in the Middle East back 40 years, Turkey, a NATO member is rattling its saber at Israel and there seems to be a very good chance that it may go the Islamist extremist route as well. However, again, this is one of those read between the lines columns that tries, in a nice way, to say “you’re a loser, step aside”. It broadly hints that Obama just isn’t up to the job. It makes the point that there are a growing number on the left who feel that keeping the White House is much more important than who it is actually occupying the Oval Office. Chapman is saying “take one for the team, please” or it is becoming increasingly clear that the team may lose. I wonder if Obama will actually listen? ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 22, 2011 8:07:40 GMT -5
Obama's Economy --- Running Out of Excuses By Larry Elder www.JewishWorldReview.com | Two and a half years into the Obama presidency, why does the economy still sputter? The first and most popular line of defense, of course, remains to blame it on the George W. Bush administration. Pundits like CNN's Fareed Zakaria falsely attribute the current $1.5 trillion deficit to the "Bush tax cuts," while Obama puts the "cost" at $70 billion a year. MSNBC's Ed Schultz asserts that "98 percent of you" were not affected by the cuts, an odd argument considering that Obama supports extending the Bush-era rates for the very 98 percent that Schultz claims received no benefit. Others blame the "costly" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the average annual cost of the wars — as well as the "cost" of the Bush tax cuts for the rich — come to no more than 20 percent or so of the deficit. When considering the "cost" of the Iraq War, critics never compare it to the "cost" of another 9/11 or worse. The New York Times recently tried to put a price on 9/11 and our response: "In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar al-Qaida spent planning and executing the attacks. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt." Did Iraq play a major role in the lack — so far — of another successful attack on U.S. soil? Ask al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new al-Qaida leader after the killing of bin Laden, both called Iraq the "front line" in the battle against the infidels. Bin Laden, in 2004, made this quite clear: "The issue is big and the misfortune is momentous. … The world's millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate. … The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation." Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander in charge of the Iraq invasion, said: "The Global War on Terrorism will be a long fight. But make no mistake, we are going to fight the terrorists. The question is do we fight them over there — or do we fight them here. I choose to fight them over there." Another excuse is that the "Great Recession" was a financial recession and, therefore, lasts longer than the non-financial type. No one said anything abut a "financial recession" when Obama's economic advisors pushed the "stimulus" as a means to prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent, while predicting that 3.5 million jobs would be "saved or created," with 90 percent of these jobs coming from the private sector. A recently and increasingly popular excuse: Blame unemployment on … the rise of the machines. President Barack Obama, June '11: "There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate. So all these things have created changes in the economy." Chris Matthews, MSNBC, September '11: "CVS used to employ a lot of people just above the poverty level, above minimum wage, and you walk in there now, it's all machines. Now, it's very convenient for the customer. It's all machines. … I used to have about seven or eight cameramen. I don't have them anymore, it's automated, it's all robots. … I used to go to a gas station, have — somebody would check your tires and check your oil. There ain't anybody there. There's nobody working in a gas station." Christiane Amanpour, ABC, September '11: "But what about the very real problem, and that is many businesses seeing precisely because of the efficiency of, let's say, online and the new sort of technology, that it is much cheaper to buy a machine to do the job — you don't have to train it, you don't have to pay it wages — rather than hire a person. This seems to be the structural reality of the economy now." So after blaming Bush, bad luck and machines, where does this leave us? What about the assortment of tax increases on the very people who produce jobs? Or ObamaCare and the placing of a large slice of the economy under the s of an inherently inefficient and wasteful government? Or the failed trillion-dollar "stimulus" program? Or the reckless, inflation-inducing printing of money? Or billions of dollars in new business regulations with a fear of more to come? Or the constant threat of not renewing the Bush-era tax cuts for the so-called rich? Or the refusal to allow oil drilling that could produce as many as more than a million jobs. Or …
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 24, 2011 10:01:16 GMT -5
neoneocon.com/2011/09/23/looking-back-at-obama-the-con-man/September 23rd, 2011 Looking back at Obama the con man I was impressed by Richard Fernandez’s recent piece on—what else?—Obama: Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan are intelligent, well-educated people. Nobody has seriously suggested they are either perverse or evil. Now they see the truth. But once upon a time they didn’t have a clue. So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong?… Given the paucity of investigative information on Obama, given his near absolute lack of a substantial track record, it was natural for Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan to be taken for a ride. Not because they were dumb, but because they were “quality” people. Now the quality people can see certain kinds of truth, because they are familiar with the sort of data that now alarms them. Now that they can observe the betrayal of Israel, the lunacy of Obamanomics, and the erratic management, the full magnitude of their error becomes apparent. But they didn’t see it at the outset; lurking on the edge of his expression as he campaigned, nor in the little niggling inconsistencies the media was determined to ignore. Now the problems are as big as life: upheaval in the Middle East, the bankruptcy of the country, the scandals of the administration. Now they can use the Bayesian. Perhaps a little late, but better than never. “Welcome back to the fight, Rick. This time we win.” But there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will. The idea of Obama as huckster who appeals to certain people is one I explored close to two years ago, in this article for PJ. Here are some excerpts from it that I offer as a companion piece to Fernandez’s observations: The con artist is able to gain trust by using the right vocal inflections to fit the mark (or, in Obama’s case, the audience), changing accents and speech patterns to match. In addition, a con doesn’t usually stay in one place very long (it has been remarked how often Obama changed jobs) because, although people may not catch on to his game all that quickly, he is afraid that if he sticks around they eventually will. Even though most of us would like to think we couldn’t get taken in by a con—we would know better—the truth is that many people are vulnerable. It’s not a question of intelligence, because some marks are otherwise quite smart. What distinguishes them, however, is that they’ve been disarmed. For one reason or another, they happen to be susceptible to a particular con artist’s brand of charm: The core … however, was that the mark desperately wanted to believe in the dangling get-rich-quick scheme. ..That is how the classic con is distinct from straightforward fraud: in the con, the victim is actively complicit in his undoing. Both the con and Obama offer something the mark fiercely desires and show characteristics s/he desperately wants to see. For many wordsmiths (even Republicans such as Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley) that would be their perception of Obama as an intelligent, articulate, and especially a literary spokesman. For others — especially the young — the hook is Obama’s perceived coolness. For others it might be his race and his promise of healing the racial divide (in fact, he embodies this quite literally in his very own bi-racial person). For some, it was and is enough that he be the antithesis of whatever it was they’d hated about Bush. For so many, it was the rhetoric of hope and change, which tapped into their earnest desire that — just this once — it would be different, and that this politician wouldn’t be crooked or in the thrall of special interest groups. And if the hope is that strong to begin with, the need to believe that great, then all the more reason to deny evidence to the contrary that comes in later. Who among us wants to admit to having been a patsy? It’s no accident that we call the first 100 days of a presidency the honeymoon period. Obama’s honeymoon is over now, and reality is just beginning for many who fell in love with him. But don’t expect much change of heart soon. A cautionary tale is that of the famous British con artist Ronnie Cornwall, many of whose victims remained true to him: uch was [Cornwall’s] charm that none of the people he ruined went to the police: one even confessed to missing Cornwell’s intoxicating company. As time goes on and disillusionment grows, people may come to miss the intoxicating company of the Obama to whom they originally felt so strongly attracted, and some will always remain in thrall to that powerful magnetism. The process of learning about the con (or the grifter, as Fernandez puts it) is a sobering and disillusioning one. A lot of people have been getting an education in how it works.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 28, 2011 7:56:32 GMT -5
Blacks leave Obama By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann www.JewishWorldReview.com | Behind the president's whining to the Black Caucus, begging them to "quit grumbling," is a decline in his personal popularity among African-American voters that could portend catastrophe for his fading reelection chances. According to a Washington Post/ABC News survey, his favorability rating among African-Americans has dropped off a cliff, plunging from 83 percent five months ago to a mere 58 percent today — a drop of 25 points, a bit more than a point per week! Nothing is more crucial to the president's reelection strategy than a super-strong showing among black voters. In the election of 2008, he was able to increase African-American participation from 11 percent of the total vote in 2004 to 14 percent. He carried 98 percent of them. This swing accounted for fully half of his gain over the showing of John Kerry. Now his ability to repeat that performance is in doubt. And the emergence of Herman Cain as a serious Republican candidate could not have come at a worse time for the embattled president. Cain's alternate narrative — self-help, entrepreneurial skill, hard work and self-improvement — stands in stark contrast to the victimization/class warfare argument that the president has adopted. Over all, how's that class warfare working out for you, Mr. President? Well, here are some unpleasant numbers for you: Before Obama's speech to Congress and the nation — watched by 34 million families — his job approval averaged 44 percent. Now it averages 43 percent, according to realclearpolitics.com. He deployed his ultimate weapon — a nationally televised speech to Congress — and came up empty. The president's personal favorability has taken a big hit even as his job approval has shown no gain. The Post/ABC poll has his rating down to 47 percent, the first time in his presidency it has dropped below 50. Clearly, the spectacle of a class warrior leading the country is grating on most Americans. Usually, despite drops in his job approval, his personal ratings have stayed high. Not anymore. The most recent New York Times/CBS poll had his favorability actually lagging behind his job approval by four points — the first time it has ever done so in their polling. Young people, the core of Obama's base, now hold equally favorable and unfavorable views of the president they once adored. And his favorability among self-described "liberal" Democrats has also dropped. The percentage of those who say they are strongly favorable has fallen from 69 percent in April to 52 percent now. For a president whose reelection chances hinge on his ability to turn out his base, these numbers are depressing indeed. Obama's advisers likely think that fervent appeals to liberal views, including class warfare, are the best way to repair the gaping holes that are now appearing in his political base. But this is a conviction born of instinct and intuition, not generated by polling data. The fact is that as the president has ratcheted up his class warfare rhetoric, his personal popularity has fallen and his job approval has edged down slightly. Obama stepped on his own jobs initiative speech a week after he delivered it by proposing a class-based tax revenue plan. He poured on the class rhetoric, dwarfing any focus on the job creating aspirations of his spending program. So the message we get is that the president proposes to solve our economic problems by taxing rich people. To some this is counterintuitive, since the top 2 percent spend 33 percent of the money in this country. To others, it seems like an irrelevancy, as the president once again indulges his agenda for social reform rather than promoting economic recovery. With only 26 percent of Americans approving of Obama's handling of the economy (Fox News poll), the president's ratings are bound to drop further, until and unless he can post real economic gains on the scoreboard, something his rhetoric alienating the GOP House of Representatives and scaring the daylights out of the business community is unlikely to achieve.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Sept 28, 2011 8:43:20 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=63Obama: Likeable but incompetent? Published September 28, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain One of the enduring truths about national political elections in the US is you can’t win with just the support of your party base. There just aren’t enough of them. Roughly 30% on the left consider themselves to be Democrats and about the same on the right call themselves Republicans. Even if a candidate got every vote, he or she is going to be shy of the majority needed to win the office. So another enduring truth is you must win the independent vote – that big, supposedly moderate 40% in the middle – to win an election. That’s why you hear people talk about politicians “running to the middle”. So when you’re looking at a presidential race or polling, the most interesting demographic are the “independents”, because where ever they’re going or whatever they’re saying is likely to determine the election. Since early last year, that demographic has been increasingly deserting the Democrats in general and Barack Obama specifically. To put it succinctly, they’re not at all happy with the condition of the country, it’s direction or his policies even while many of them find Obama to still be likeable. In 2008, Obama carried independents by a decisive 52% to 44% margin and took 30 states. In 2004, John Kerry narrowly won independents over George Bush 49% to 48%, reversing Bush’s 47% to 45% win against Al Gore in 2000. In only nine of the last 32 months has the IBD/TIPP Presidential Leadership index been above 50, and the positive months were all in 2009. Since January 2010, the index has stayed in the negative territory (below 50). The averages were 57.5, 44.2 and 44.6 for 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. Independents also believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Only 19% of them are satisfied with America’s direction and 80% are not satisfied. But will likeable be enough in 2012? Not likely. An overwhelming share of independents (74%) like Obama personally, and 59% believe he has the vision to be president. A similar share (58%) also believe the president cares about the needs of people like them, and 59% think he’s worked hard to bring about change compared with 40% who say that he has mostly talked about it. On the other hand, 62% disapprove of his policies, and by 63% to 35% they think he lacks the experience to be an effective president. A majority of independents (51%) do not believe that he is someone they would be proud to have as president; only 42% would be proud. Reality is a stark reminder that performance, not rhetoric is what counts. And likeability will only carry you so far. Good intentions are laudable but only if they lead to solid results. Also of note is most people are willing to give a politician a chance to accomplish things and are even appreciative of hard work and that the politician “cares”. But the bottom line is that only results get someone re-elected. To this point, Obama simply hasn’t provided those. Independents may like him for the most part, but his job performance has not impressed the majority: Only 15% give Obama an A or B for his handling of the economy, 16% give him good grades for managing the federal budget, and just 12% see him favorably for creating jobs and economic growth. These low grades more than cancel out Obama’s non-economic successes, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Nearly eight in 10 (79%) independents say his handling of the economy weighs more in their minds than getting the al-Qaida leader and mastermind of 9/11 (11%). Funny and ironic … in his run for the presidency, his lack of a resume was probably his biggest strength. What was to criticize? What was there to assess? He sounded great. Now, on the other side of winning the presidency, he has to finally run on his record. And, given this poll’s results, it isn’t a good one. ~McQ
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Oct 3, 2011 6:38:48 GMT -5
Finally, The Cognoscenti Ask: What Could We Be Thinking? By Mark Steyn www.JewishWorldReview.com | ''The way I think about it," Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, "is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft." He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53% of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as "hope" and "change": That's more than "a little" soft. "He's probably the smartest guy ever to become president," declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don't have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. "I'm a sap, a specific kind of sap. I'm an Obama Sap," admits David Brooks, the softest touch at the New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: "He wasn't ready, it turns out, really." If you're a tenured columnist at the Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn't know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you're one of Obama's core constituencies, those who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: "Young Becoming 'Lost Generation' Amid Recession" (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse. But don't worry, it's not much better at the other end of the spectrum: "Obama's Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere" (UPI). Gee, aren't you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called "due diligence"? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his "perfectly creased pant leg" or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you're surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk? Hard statism is usually murmured in soft, soothing, beguiling terms: Regulation is about cleaner air, healthier restaurants, safer children's toys. Sounds so nice. But federal regulation alone sucks up 10% of GDP. That's to say, Americans take the equivalent of the Canadian economy and toss it down the toilet just in complying with federal paperwork. Obama and the great toxic alphabet soup of federal regulation — EPA, OSHA, SEC, DHSS — want to take that 10% and crank it up to 12%, 14%, 15%. Who could have foreseen that? The most dismal thing about that David Brooks column conceding that "yes, I'm a sap ... remember, I'm a sap ... as you know, I'm a sap" was the headline his New York Times editors chose to append to it: "Obama Rejects Obamaism." In other words, even in a column remorselessly cataloguing how one of its smartest smart guys had been repeatedly suckered by Obama on jobs, on Medicare, on deficits, on tax reform, etc., the New York Times chose to insist that there's still something called "Obamaism" — prudent, centrist, responsible — that for some perverse reason the man for whom this political philosophy is named insists on betraying, 24/7, week in, month out, spring, summer, autumn, tax season. You can set your clock by Obama's rejection of "Obamaism." That's because there's no such thing. Never was. "Obamaism" was the Emperor's new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president. In part, this is a natural extension of an ever more conformist and unrepresentative establishment's view of where "the center" is. On issues from abortion to climate change, a Times man or Hollywood activist or media professor's notion of "centrism" is well to the left of where American opinion is. That's one reason why a supposedly "center-right" nation has wound up regulated into sclerosis, drowning in debt and embarking on its last decade as the world's leading economy. But in the case of Obama the chasm between soft, seductive, politico-media "centrism" and hard, grim reality is too big to bridge, and getting wider all the time. You would think this might prompt some sober reflection from an American mainstream media dying in part because of its dreary ideological conformity. After all, a key reason why 53% voted for a man who was not, in Tina Brown's word, "ready" is that Tina and all her pals assured us he was. Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing, a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That's what America's elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak indictment of contemporary notions of "accomplishment." Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence. Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as a archetypal exemplar of the "American business community" rather than as an especially well-connected crony. Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still underreported Solyndra "green jobs" scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It's hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader. But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the "Fast and Furious" investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels. It is alleged that the administration chose to facilitate the sale of American weapons to crime kingpins south of the border in order to support a case for gun control north of the border. Evidence keeps piling up: The other day, a letter emerged from ATF supervisor David Voth authorizing Special Agent John Dodson to buy Draco pistols to sell directly to known criminals. Over 200 Mexicans are believed to have been killed by "Fast and Furious" weapons — that is to say, they were killed by a U.S. government program. Doesn't the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Doesn't Newsweek or CBS News? Isn't Obamaism with a body-count sufficiently eye-catching even for the U.S. press? Or, three years in, are the enablers of Obama still so cynical that they accept it as a necessary price to pay for "change you can believe in"? You can't make a hopenchange omelette without breaking a couple hundred Mexican eggs? Obama says America has "gotten a little soft." But there's nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flat-line jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, "green jobs" multibillion-dollar squandering and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, "centrist" government is hard and cruel. Only the coverage is soft-focus.
|
|
|
Post by philunderwood on Oct 4, 2011 7:50:28 GMT -5
Obama proudly declares class war By Deroy Murdock www.JewishWorldReview.com | It's official: America is at class war, and President Barack Obama proudly leads the charge against this country's wealthy. "If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior -- a warrior for the working class -- I will accept that," Obama shouted Tuesday at Denver's Abraham Lincoln High School. "I will wear that charge as a badge of honor." "Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires. A teacher or a nurse or a construction worker making $50,000 a year shouldn't pay higher tax rates than somebody making $50 million." Obama's assault on the affluent rests upon a sky-high stack of lies. Obama is too well staffed and too well informed not to know otherwise. So, maddeningly, he straight-out lies to the American people. For days before Obama opened his mouth in Denver, multiple news accounts and opinion pieces annihilated the casus belli of his War on the Wealthy. Nonetheless, Obama keeps spouting falsehoods, perhaps hoping that his smooth voice will hypnotize Americans into believing his words. "Fact check: The wealthy already pay more taxes," read the headline above a September 20 Associated Press. "President Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries," Stephen Ohlemacher wrote. "The data say they already are." Nationwide, Ohlemacher and others dismantled Obama's soak-the-rich thesis. The rich are soaked today. In 2008, its latest data indicate, the Internal Revenue Service harvested $1.0315 trillion in income tax -- of which the top 10 percent of earners paid $721.4 billion. The top 5 percent shelled out another $605.7 billion, and the top 1 percent relinquished $392.15 billion. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent collectively paid just $27.9 billion. Thus, the top 1 percent of taxpayers furnished 14 times the income taxes that the bottom half of filers supplied. In 2009, the IRS reports, those who made at least $1 million average 24.4 percent of adjusted gross income in federal income taxes. Those who scored $200,000 to $300,000 paid 17.5 percent. Between $100,000 and $125,000: 9.9 percent. From $50,000 to $60,000: 6.3 percent. Those who earned between $20,000 and $30,000 saw income taxes devour 2.5 percent of AGI. Income, schmincome, Leftists chirp. What about payroll taxes that lower-income Americans pay? Counting other taxes still shows that higher earners pay more, Obama's dark fantasies notwithstanding. The Tax Policy Center -- a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution -- reported August 24 that Americans who receive $1 million or more will average 29.1 percent of earnings in 2011 federal income, payroll, corporate, and death taxes. Those clearing between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent, while those from $40,000 to $50,000 will average 12.5 percent. Those federal taxes will extract 5.7 percent from earners between $20,000 and $30,000. Dry? Yes. But these figures demonstrate that Americans who earn more money pay more federal tax. Those who see less pay less. If Obama finds this unfair, he should define fairness. True, the IRS notes, 1,470 households produced at least $1 million but paid no federal income tax in 2009. Still, this is just 0.62 percent of the 236,883 returns that millionaires filed. This reinforces the bipartisan idea of closing loopholes and lowering tax rates -- but not Obama's crusade against "millionaires and billionaires" and his American Jobs Act's tax hikes on people earning as little as $200,000. When Obama accepted the 2008 Democratic nomination in Denver, he espoused national unity. The USA would "come together as one American family," he declared. The nearby Continental Divide might become this republic's only rift, if Barack Obama secured the presidency. How disappointing that the eloquent man who millions hoped would heal this land now actively pits Americans against each other -- not by race or creed, but by income. As London's arson-scorched victims of mob rule learned last August, there is nothing cute about class war.
|
|