If you read one document this year, read this one. “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise”, has been released from The Office of Budget and Management. It is the closest thing to a blueprint of Obama’s mind a mere mortal will understand. For those of you who are Conservatives, it will make blood shoot out of your eyes. For those of you Republicans who don’t believe Obama is a Fascist, that we have just been too mean to our new President, reading through the 146 page “budget in a nutshell” should push you over the fence. Those of you who are on the Left will either think it’s too far left, right, or just about right…which will show that you are either a socialist, communist, or a fascist.
Page two has some interesting morsels of what is to come. One statement “…we will make the investments in the next three years to double our Nation’s renewable energy capacity,” is convenient since the Department of Energy has claimed this would happen if Congress did absolutely nothing. Further on in the paragraph he mentions creating “green” jobs. Only he forgets to mention that these are usually short in duration and produce about 1/6th the amount of kilowatts of energy per man/hour as non green energy jobs such as coal mining.
On page three, I found this interesting statement “We need to put tired ideologies aside, and ask not whether our Government is too big or too small, or whether it is the problem or the solution, but whether it is working for the American people.” Which means that he would like Conservatives to shut up, sit down, have a “Coke-and-a-smile,” and stop poking around.
Page five is a bunch of “woe is me” statements, filled with half-truths and flat out lies. Take, for example, the statement “With loosened oversight and weak enforcement from Washington, too many cut corners as they racked up record profits and paid themselves millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses.” Just who is he talking about, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Wall Street, or capitalists in general? This type of generalized statement reeks with the intention to stir up class warfare. It is a dangerous game as anyone can move freely between “classes”. This is not a serfs vs royalty system where one was born into the class he died in. Here, anyone can move from a pauper to a millionaire (or vice versa) on their own merit, ideas, and hard work. But he continues, “There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.” This statement is a flat out lie, as the last decade saw more millionaires being created than any other time in America’s history. These statements come from someone who sees the world’s economy as a fixed sum system. Where people can only raise their income at the expense of another. Not only is that type of thinking dishonest, but the irony is, that is exactly what welfare does. It raises some unlucky soul’s income from zero to something, through forcefully taking the hard earned assets of another. On it’s face, his statement is socialistic.
I now call your attention to misleading figure 2 on page 6. While this chart looks scary, remember these are percent declines in job creation from business cycle peaks, not baseline. The light, incomplete line for the current recession (Dec 2007), has about the same slope and just a little more depth than the 1960 recession line. Recessions with steep slopes, such as this one, are the fastest to recover. Recessions with gradual slopes, such as March 2001, are the slowest to recover. For all the talk that this is “the worst recession since the Great Depression,” you would expect the line for Dec 2007 to be far larger [as an aside, why is the Great Depression not depicted here?]. However the 2001 recession is still deeper. Did we spend $2 Trillion dollars to get us out of that one? Did we need to dump money into banks (who are now trying to give it back), car companies, mortgage bailouts, etc? No, of course not. Would this recession be worse if we hadn’t spent that money? With history as a guide, we would have been just fine – but now we will never know.
Figure 4 on page 7 is also slightly misleading for two reasons. One, 1946 was just after WWII. Almost the whole of American manufacturing capacity had been brought to bear against our enemies. After the war, we had several countries to rebuild and resupply, since heavy manufacturing had been laid to waste throughout Europe and parts of Japan. The decline in our manufacturing began in the late 1980’s as our economy shifted from a manufacturing base, to a technology and service base. Robots were being installed in that decade at a record pace. Manufacturing productivity, on the other hand, will have increased in that same time period.
Going back to Obama’s chart, with the exception of a slight 1996-97 uptick in manufacturing jobs, after 1994, it is all downhill. Any guesses? If you said NAFTA, you would be correct in part. NAFTA went into effect on January 1st, 1994, and our manufacturing jobs went away with it. There are, however many other contributing factors, such as increases in automation, and our productivity has still been increasing at just under 3% average per year. In short, we are still producing more and more goods with fewer and fewer people.
I’d like to turn your attention now to page 9. First two paragraphs:
For the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the Nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy. Technological advances and growing global competition, while transforming whole industries—and birthing new ones—has accentuated the trend toward rising inequality. Yet, instead of using the tax code to lessen these increasing wage disparities, changes in the tax code over the past eight years exacerbated them.
According to the Internal revenue Service, the Nation’s top 400 taxpayers made more than $263 million on average in 2006, but paid income taxes at the lowest rate in the 15 years in which these data have been reported. In constant dollars, the average income of the top 400 taxpayers nearly quadrupled since 1992.
Populist, Socialist, garbage! Wealth is not a fixed asset! It grows with GDP! The number of millionaires increased from 1996 to 2006 by 11% to 8.3 million. The number of of households with $500,000 in investable assets (excluding the home), rose by 7% during the same period to over 14 million. More people changed their status. But instead of this being a good thing, it is obvious that he feels those who make good money are to be punished. And something else he does not mention, the amount of tax paid by the top 10% of wage earners, has increased almost 50% since the early 1980’s. Facts do not matter to this man. Retribution is the name of the game! He will use the tax code to punish you. He does not care about revenues to the government either. It is all about taking from the ‘haves’ and giving it to the ‘have nots’, with the government taking about a 90% cut off the top.
This man, and those whom he has surrounded himself with, are socialists. Their insistence that government is the answer shows they are also statists. Throw in the self-aggrandizing worship and you have a fascist. He is following in Mussolini’s footsteps, which is why I call him – Il Duce.
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