I Didn't Realize You Could Pile Baloney That High
I watched President Obama's non-State of the Union speech Tuesday night. What a waste of my time. The man says nothing very well.
Putting aside the constitutionality of what he proposes, where does he propose to get the money for all the things he wants to do?
He's wrong about his history -- government intervention of this nature has been proven a failure time and time again. It's not just me saying so -- it was FDR's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau. Secretary Morgenthau testified to Congress that "We've spent more than we've ever spent before and yet unemployment is, well, by and large unchanged." from 1933 to 1940 unemployment averaged 18%. So that means the New Deal didn't work.
Basically, all President Obama had to say was let's throw money at all our problems. That has not worked. We've had the New Deal, the Great Society, Carterism, and now Obama's Raw Deal, and time after time the economy has gotten worse. Jimmy Carter tried policies like these and his major achievement was to give us double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, and double-digit interest rates all at the same time, something economists insisted was impossible until Carter did it. Japan tried to do this and got a decade of total stagnation. It doesn't work.
These are not new ideas. They are very old ones that have been repeatedly tried and have repeatedly failed. He just wants to do them on a grander scale.
Obama's proposals reduce the degree of freedom to direct our own lives and the degree of responsibility for our own lives. And they spend massive amounts of money to do so. The porkulus bill alone added almost a trillion dollars to our deficit. Where does he propose to get that money?
Government has no money. It can get it only by printing funny money (inflation), taxing the people (we pay very high taxes as it is), borrowing (thus drying up credit markets and driving up interest rates), or some combination of those three.
Unfortunately, nothing President Obama says is believable as far as I am concerned. He's been caught not telling the truth about the so-called "stimulus" bill, as well as other issues. In his speech Tuesday he just plain would not tell the truth about the causes of the mortgage crisis. It was caused by the Clinton administration pressuring banks (under the threat of government action) to issue mortgages that everyone knew could never be paid back. Obama is more Clintonian than the Clintons.
Obama is talking the language of "Yes we can" but practicing the politics of "No we can't." His policies promote limits and suffering and pain. The implication of both his rhetoric and his policies is that you can't -- and shouldn't -- achieve, or make many decisions for yourself without bad stuff happening to you, so he'll just take over your life and run it for you so it can be run better. That is insultingly offensive. It's also authoritarian.
It's also clear from his rhetoric and his proposals that he doesn't see you or me or other Americans -- he sees groups, never the individuals.
Furthermore, his ongoing theme of "remaking" America -- not reviving, renewing, or restoring, not even reforming, but remaking -- shows that he fundamentally does not believe in the American vision and the American dream handed to us by our Founders. You do not try to remake what you think is fundamentally well done, well built, well structured. Only if there is a systemic, fundamental flaw do you try to remake something. In other words, Barack Hussein Obama does not believe in America.
President Obama's latent anti-American attitude is showing. So are his authoritarian impulses. He is going to tell us what health care we can have, tell the banks how to operate, and tell everyone he can how to do everything. Big Brother is watching you – on a big-screen TV in the White House residence.
I find this speech and this President extremely disturbing.
posted by Tim at 5:44 PM
