Jul 13 2011
Our Petulant & Errant President
Barack Obama has decided to stomp his foot, hold his breathe and threaten to hurt senior citizens if he does not get his way:
President Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3 if Democrats and Republicans in Washington do not reach an agreement on reducing the deficit in the coming weeks.
Liar.
His administration has millions of options in front of him, the last of which would be to hold checks for our seniors. Talk about your childish temper tantrums. The federal bureaucracy is bloated with over spending and useless projects. Heck, just delaying the start of everything not yet fully up and running could buy months of time.
But the worst part of all this is the delusion that raising taxes is going to fix our economic problems. It won’t. Because the problem is not that we don’t waste enough money in DC (lining the pockets of lobbyists and the political elite).
The problem is our economy is not growing, and the best indication of that is the harsh fact that our work force has been shrinking by what has to be historic numbers ever since the liberals were voted into power in 2008 – and began to screw up on a scale never before seen.
Check out this data that comes out with the monthly unemployment numbers:
The chart shows [click to enlarge) the size of the US labor force in June over the last decade. As can be seen by the blue curve, the labor force began to shrink AFTER President Obama and the liberals came into power. The fantasy “Stimulus Bill” did nothing to stop the loss of jobs – basically because it takes the government at least a year to figure out how to spend money authorized by Congress, and by that time the Federal Bureaucracy has consumed a lot of it. Much more was sent to the states who covered workers who ended up being pink slipped anyway.
The red line shows the steady historic trend for work force growth in a growing economy. Since the 2010 census clearly shows our general population did not shrink over the same decade, the only rationale and sane conclusion is our economy shrunk under the misguided and wasteful policies of Obama, Reid and Pelosi. Furthermore, outside a slight reduced budget between May and September of this year, there has been NO imprint on the economic outlook from the newly elected GOP Congress. That is the only change that has been passed since the 2010 elections.
That red line shows 2.5 million fewer workers in the work force. It also shows that if the work force was at its normal level, we would be at 10.7% unemployment in June – not 9.1%, This trend has been running for months now (see here, here and here). The broader measure of employment pain is in the U6 number, which would be a crippling 17.2% if we added those unemployed, those underemployed and those who abandoned the work force all together.
Now President Obama is holding seniors’ financial security hostage until he gets to do more of the same. His policies brought in a paltry (and probably overly optimistic) 18,000 new jobs in June. With 2.5 million new jobs required to just get the workforce back to its proper level, and then many millions more jobs to get the unemployment down, it is clear taxing those people best able to invest and create all those needed jobs is basically stupid.
This simple and obvious fact is clearly beyond a community organizer to grasp. When one lives in a TV-Land world – where government is on the right hand of Gaia and average people are evil and incapable of even the smallest achievements – there is no way one can grasp the basic solution here. Unburden the engine of our economy – small businesses.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”
Are these people kidding? We must kill off small business, strangle its ability to create the jobs we need to get back on track, in order to save wasteful and mindless federal programs????
This ‘vision’ is moronic. Simply moronic. And I do not think Geithner is expressing his own personal view here. I think we are finally seeing the warped and dysfunctional thinking that embodies Barack Obama.
The question for our petulant President is how many more lives of average Americans need to be sacrificed on the alter of progressive idiocy? How many more Americans must see their careers and futures lost to incompetent bureaucrats?
AJ,
Obama is going to take the USA into default.
This is him and his insider brain trust trying to recreate the 1995 government shut down magic Bill Clinton did with Speaker Gingrich.
Republicans cannot stop him from doing it if he really want to do so.
The upshot is that there is no down side for Republicans sticking to their guns on taxes, because if they give in on taxes, Obama will demand more and still default.
About 200.
Obama, Biden, and 90% of the Democrats in Congress.
To misquote President Reagan, “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. And a recovery is when Obama and the Democrats lose THEIR jobs.”
This is an easily defeated proposition as you point out AJ.
The trouble is where are the Republicans who would rebutt it?
Are they waiting for Sarah Palin who at the moment is not elected to anything to haul their water.
These despicable cowards go on the news shows and Boehner praises Obama and his sincerity instead of articulating the false choices and strawmen you have so aptly pointed out.
How about just one of these incompetents just asking one mainstream media hack how OBLahBlah intends to get away with cutting social security, military pay and Republican leaning projects while funding his and congress salaries, the salaries of their aids, czars, vacations, fact finding missions (vacations), and their latest grants for study of the three toed spotted lizard?
Do these elected Repubs have not a clue or are they so afraid of OBlahBlah and what his Presstitutes will say should they utter the truth about the Liar?
Sarah Palin save us from Obama and the casterated eunichs in congress.
dhunter, my thought too. Is Sarah the only person to tell it like it is? But if she does, the in the bag media will crucify her.
meanwhile, Lindsey Graham has come out this morning and is saying that we really need to raise taxes if that’s what Obama wants.
Looks like its time to admit that he needs to be primaried out of his seat as soon as possible. South Carolina, the state that elected Nikki Haley, can do better than this.
Again, everyone needs to read Reckless Endangerment to understand that it is these very democrats who got us into this deplorable mess and we don’t need to send them ONE MORE PENNEY TO FIX what THEY created. The OWE US restitution, imho, for their imho, criminal, behavior.
Read Reckless Endangerment. You won’t want to send ANOTHER penny to DC. They caused this problem and imho, now THEY must pay.
How can you NOT “send taxes” to WDC with 16th amendment…automatic payroll deduction, which should never have been enacted (enacted under a progressive WH and legislative branches).
The Republicans’ message needs to improve. Mitch tried and is getting crucified. Both rightly and wrongly. They need to do something like Charles Krauthammer suggested last night to push back on Obama.
Pethokoukis saw a Goldman Sachs report that indicates the government DOES have enough money to pay interest, ss checks, medicare, medicaid for the entire month of August. So Obama is wrong.
Lindsay has always been an idiot and I just cannot understand why he continues to get re-elected.
Bernanke says that the Fed may launch a new round of stimulus???? Which will drive inflation up and devaluate the US dollar!
http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/07/call-his-bluff/
If Obama is so hot not to pay social security checks even though there will be enough money on hand to pay those checks, and all other essentials including payments due on the national debt, then let him do it. Because he won’t.
“This simple and obvious fact is clearly beyond a community organizer to grasp.” I almost feel sympathy for this pawn of the left.
Does Bobo have any skill set applicable to running a country? I’ll bet he sucks at basketball too—probably like the kid that always says he was fouled even when he trips over his own feet. And I wonder how many mulligans he takes in golf. He thinks he gets one for the stimulus.
KauaiBoy, did you see him when he tried to throw out the first pitch at a ballpark once? He bounced the ball off the dirt halfway to the plate, it was pathetic.
We’ve elected Urkel to be President.
WWS—-And if that is not proof he is not American, I don’t know what is!
MerlinOS, I agree. Bret’s all star panel indicates that the Republicans are losing the debate to Obama because of the mainstream media explaining that they walked away from the debate.
Charles said that reality doesn’t matter but perception does.
So Obama raised about 47 B in the last quarter and DNC raised the rest?
Can they raise just as much or more in the next quarter?
Obama tried this same blackmail scheme with military pay several months ago. He sounded ridiculous then as much as he does now. In the end he backed down.
Is this really the way to get votes? Raise taxes and fail to send out SS checks? I’ll bet his thinking is to pull a fast one like the dims have in the past: blame the republicans. He wants republicans to pass tax increases thinking that by the next election the public would have forgotten it was he who instigated the increase. He also plans to blame the republicans for the default just as Clinton got away with blaming them for the budget crisis in the 90s. His whole modis operandi is to blame the republicans for all ills even the ones he implemented. That is, after all, the democrat way.
If the republicans have any sense at all and if they come to an agreement on downsizing the government whether with tax increases or not, the republicans would do well to have the whole agreement in one bill and not let them get away with passing tax increases in one bill and not passing downsizing in another one as they have done in the past.
I doubt the tea party congressmen will pass any tax increases though. It would be political suicide. Which is what McConnell just committed along with Graham. These elites need to be primaried out. Neither of them have a clue avut the public’s anger. They act like it is business as usual. I sometimes wonder if the dims have something really big on these people to force them to go against their constituents like they do.
Lindsay Graham replaced liberal Dem. Ernest “Fritz’ Hollings as SC Senator. Lindsay is the epitome of a real RINO. Note that the last time he had real competition, the Dems managed to manufacture a “drug ” charge against his opponent which allowed Graham to win in the primary. Since the anti white dems have no chance of winning a major election in SC, they have settled for keeping Graham, the psuedo republican, who supports the Dem agenda more than he supports the Republican agenda, in office. .
[…] Obama does not want to shrink government – at all costs. He and his administration have said they would rather tax small business (so called millionaires) to stave off government cuts. Even the Senate Democrats acknowledge they don’t want to make the cuts required to stop the […]