Story Of Obama

Rule of the Blob
By U.S. Senator Jim DeMint

What did last Friday’s jobs numbers mean? The same thing they meant last month, and in the months and months before that: President Obama’s economic policies are too big to succeed.

Million-, billion- and trillion-dollar plans that were pitched as targeted, thoughtful measures to alleviate unemployment and foreclosure have congealed into an all-encompassing mass of new laws, mandates and regulations that ooze over everything. This might be great fun for the government officials who create the rules, but not for the entrepreneurs trying to create jobs.

The Obama administration has put us under rule of the Blob -- the bureaucracy has become indescribable, indestructible, and it seems like nothing can stop it from engulfing us all. Politicians assure us every expansion of the state will create jobs. Yet three years and several trillion dollars later, the only jobs being created seem to be in Washington, home to four of the nation’s five wealthiest counties despite creating almost nothing of actual economic value.

Instead of jobs, we got the Blob.

The federal government does create jobs, sort of, but not the ones it claims. The only jobs Obamanomics creates are for government employees to administer the rules, trial lawyers to sue perceived violators, compliance lawyers to get companies up to code, environmentalists to conduct impact studies, union bosses, executives of companies favored with grants, subsidies and loan guarantees, and Wall Street bankers to buy and sell all our debt.

There are three big problems with this. First, these jobs don’t add value to the economy. They don’t manufacture or build or innovate or create their own wealth -- they just siphon wealth from others.

Second, the money Washington uses to create these special interest windfalls kills many more jobs.

And third, these special interest jobs cannot survive without government handouts, so they either become a permanent drag on the economy or, like so many of the president’s green-energy gambles, they eventually fail, losing both jobs and taxpayer money in the process.

The unemployment rate has been at 8 percent or higher for the last 41 consecutive months -- almost the entire time Obama has been in office. That’s not counting the desperate millions who have part-time jobs but want full-time work, or those who have dropped out of the labor force completely.

The Associated Press’s economics writer Paul Wiseman has calculated that the economy has lost 5 million jobs since the Great Recession officially ended three years ago.

The 80,000 jobs added last month did not come anywhere close to keeping up with population growth, so even modest gains are actually big losses. Historic proportions of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months. Indeed, more Americans went on disability in June than obtained new jobs.

We’re living in an economic horror movie. And, there’s no telling what the Blob will do next.

No one knows what tax rates will be next year. Nobody knows what the rules governing ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, carbon emissions or even monetary policy will be. Nobody knows what will happen with Europe, our own debt crisis, or where another round of handouts, carve-outs, or bailouts will take the Blob.

Business have two options: hide from the Blob and hope it passes them by, or become a special interest itself and try to get rich off the Blob. This is no way to run an economy, and no way to create jobs.

In the 1958 movie classic, Steve McQueen saves the day by discovering “The Blob” can be only defeated by freezing it. That could be America’s last resort against Washington today: if we can somehow freeze the government, we might free the economy.

Less Blob means more jobs.

 

BS.

(The "blob" is shrinking. Over 600k public sector jobs have been lost during this recession.)

 

Given their traditionally abysmal productivity, we can certainly do without a few million more of those cushy jobs. Just talk to anyone who works for a private business and one who works for the government and compare notes. I think Bain Capital et al should be given the go ahead to modernize the operations of the public sector and save us a few $trillion, balance the %%$$## budget

 

Whatever. The point is that the "blob" thesis is wrong. And no one is holding off hiring because of regulations. These authors you're quoting are clearly not in business.

 

Obama: Tax 'the Rich'
by Michael D. Tanner

Here’s a big surprise: President Obama wants to raise taxes on “the wealthy.”

By some counts, this represents the 25th time the president has rolled out this proposal — something to keep in mind the next time he warns against “refighting the battles of the past” over something like repealing Obamacare. Regardless, repetition hasn’t done anything to improve either the policy or the president’s truthfulness in describing it.

First, the president’s definition of wealthy is a little shaky. It turns out that the “millionaires” he refers to in his speeches are actually individuals earning $200,000 per year and couples earning $250,000 — about 2.5 million Americans. While $250,000 is a lot of money in many areas of the country, in high-cost regions such as New York City that earning category would include a teacher with 22 years of service married to a police captain. The president’s definition of “rich” would also include some 750,000 independent and small businesses that do not pay income taxes as businesses; instead, their taxes are paid through the owners’ individual tax returns. We are not exactly talking Warren Buffett here

Moreover, many Americans earning less than $200,000 are likely to suffer collateral damage from this tax increase. For example, the president’s proposed tax hike on capital gains is likely to reduce the value of 401(k) funds that millions of middle-income Americans rely on for retirement. And the business taxes will drive up the prices of goods and services, not to mention costing jobs. Given current unemployment rates, it seems especially hard to think of any reason why raising taxes on small businesses would be a good policy.

All this would come, of course, on top of the Obamacare tax increases, which will start hitting in the next two years. A large part of those tax hikes will also fall directly or indirectly on the middle class.

The president’s argument that this tax hike is about fairness is also more than a bit specious. Wealthy Americans already pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes. The top 1 percent earn 16 percent of all income in the United States, but pay 36.7 percent of all federal income taxes. In fact, the 400 richest Americans together pay nearly as much in federal income taxes as do the 50 percent of taxpayers at the low end of the scale.

The current tax code is already highly progressive. The wealthy pay a far higher effective tax rate. After all deductions and exemptions are included, the rich pay roughly 24 percent of their income in taxes, compared to 11 percent on average for all taxpayers. The rich, it would seem, already pay more than their “fair share.”

Of course, one might ask in general what is fair about taking wealth away from those who have earned it through their own industriousness and hard work and spreading it around to others who didn’t earn it.

Finally, the president is disingenuous in suggesting that revenue from the higher taxes would be used to bring down the deficit and balance the budget.

Balancing the budget isn’t rocket science. All that is required is for revenues to grow faster than spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s alternative budget scenario, revenues will grow over the next several years, as a result of such natural factors as population growth and a return to more normal levels of economic activity, from their current 15.8 percent of GDP to 18.5 percent of GDP by 2022 — even if the Bush tax cuts are extended in their entirety. Even without a tax hike, the government will have a lot more money.

In fact, it will have so much more money that it isn’t even necessary to cut spending in order to balance the budget. If spending were simply held constant in inflation-adjusted terms, a growing economy would reduce federal spending to 18.3 percent of GDP by 2022. Thus, we could balance the budget with no tax increase whatsoever.

Yet President Obama is seeking an additional $3.9 trillion in new taxes over ten years, above the projected revenue growth discussed above, and these new taxes still wouldn’t balance the budget.

Why not?

Because the president wants to increase spending even faster than he wants to increase taxes. President Obama’s proposed tax hike would raise roughly $65 billion in 2013. At the same time, the president proposes to increase spending next year by $202 billion. The tax hike would pay for only 32 percent of the proposed new spending. Or put it another way: Over ten years, the new taxes would cover roughly half of the $1.6 trillion in new subsidies and Medicaid spending under Obamacare.

That means that not a penny of Obama’s proposed tax increase would, in fact, go toward reducing the budget deficit, let alone paying down the debt. Rather, every cent of the tax hike would go toward paying for increased federal spending.

And it is that spending, and the bigger and more intrusive government it represents, that is the real burden on the economy and the American people. President Obama’s tax hike is just a symptom of the big-government disease.

In short, the president’s plan amounts to nothing more than the same old tax-and-spend tune that we have heard so many times before. It is a plan that hasn’t improved with age.

 

Clueless In Chief

President Obama walks into the Bank of America one morning while in downtown Washington, D.C., and says to a cashier, "Good morning Ma'am, could you please cash this check for me?"
Cashier: "It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?"
Obama: "Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me, as I didn't think there was any need to. I am President Barrack Hussein Obama, the president of the United States.”
Cashier: "Yes sir, I know who you are, but with all the Government regulations, monitoring of the banks because of imposters and forgers, etc., I must insist on seeing ID."
Obama: "Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am."
Cashier: "I am sorry, but these are government and bank rules and I must follow them."
Obama: "I am urging you please to cash this check."
Cashier: "Look, this is what we can do: One day Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods, he pulled out his putting iron and made a beautiful shot across the bank lobby into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and we cashed his check."
"Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and served an ace shot directly into the center of our bank logo 90 feet away. With that spectacular shot, we cashed his check. So, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you?"
Obama stood there thinking, and thinking. Finally he says,
"Honestly, nothing comes to mind. I can't think of a single thing I can do."
Cashier: "Will that be large or small bills, Mr. President?"

 

America Has Too Many Teachers
by Andrew J. Coulson

President Obama said last month that America can educate its way to prosperity if Congress sends money to states to prevent public school layoffs and "rehire even more teachers." Mitt Romney was having none of it, invoking "the message of Wisconsin" and arguing that the solution to our economic woes is to cut the size of government and shift resources to the private sector. Mr. Romney later stated that he wasn't calling for a reduction in the teacher force—but perhaps there would be some wisdom in doing just that.

Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.

Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years. So if the additional three million public-school employees we've hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically.

To find out if that's true, we can look at the "long-term trends" of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.

Nor can the explosive growth in public-school hiring be attributed to federal spending on special education. According to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the K-12 work force.

The implication of these facts is clear: America's public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement—people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year.

We have already tried President Obama's education solution over a time period and on a scale that he could not hope to replicate today. And it has proven an expensive and tragic failure.

To avoid Greece's fate we must create new, productive private-sector jobs to replace our unproductive government ones. Even as a tiny, mostly nonprofit niche, American private education is substantially more efficient than its public sector, producing higher graduation rates and similar or better student achievement at roughly a third lower cost than public schools (even after controlling for differences in student and family characteristics).

By making it easier for families to access independent schools, we can do what the president's policies cannot: drive prosperity through educational improvement. More than 20 private-school choice programs already exist around the nation. Last month, New Hampshire legislators voted to override their governor's veto and enact tax credits for businesses that donate to K-12 scholarship organizations. Mr. Romney has supported such state programs. President Obama opposes them.

While America may have too many teachers, the greater problem is that our state schools have squandered their talents on a mass scale. The good news is that a solution is taking root in many states.

 

Obama V. Clinton On Taxes
By Dick Morris

President Obama is trying to re-write history when he says that his tax program is the same as Bill Clinton supported “when 23 million jobs were created.”

It’s not that way at all. Clinton’s 1993 increase of personal income taxes on the top bracket to 39.6% had a very negative effect on the economy. It was only after Clinton’s 1997 cut the capital gains tax – the opposite of what Obama proposes – that job growth really piled up.

When Clinton took office he did all the wrong things. He raised taxes sharply, hiking the top bracket from 35% to 39.6% and raised taxes on gasoline. The result was that the economy, which had been recovering, staggered. GDP growth dropped to 0.7% in Clinton’s first quarter (down from 4.3% in Bush’s last quarter) and stayed around 2% for the rest of 1993. Personal income rose 6.3% in 1992 under Bush but slowed to 4.1% under Clinton in 1993.

The tax increases Clinton passed failed to generate the revenue he had expected. The tax paradox set in. Martin Feldstein, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, summed it up in his Wall Street Journal article, “What the ’93 Tax Increase Really Did,” published on October 26, 1995. He said taxpayers reduced their incomes when they saw the tax hikes coming. Feldstein writes that “the Treasury lost two-thirds of the extra revenue that would have been collected if taxpayers had not changed their behavior.” Because of Clinton’s tax hikes, real personal income fell by $25 billion. High income taxpayers, facing the prospect of a tax increase reported 8.5% less taxable income in 1993 than they would have if their tax rates had not changed. The tax paradox!

Then Clinton got wiped out in the Congressional elections of 1994, losing control of the Senate and the House – the first time the Republicans had run the House in forty years!

Clinton suddenly saw the error of his ways and began to hold down spending and push for a tax cut. In 1997, he and the Republican Congress combined to cut capital gains taxes from 28% (the rate to which Bush had increased it) to 20%. The result was electrifying! Real wage growth was 6.5% in the four years after the tax cut compared to minuscule wage growth of 0.8% over the four years after Clinton’s tax increase!

And the tax paradox was again evident: lower rates produced higher revenues! In 1996, the year before the capital gains cut, the tax collected revenues of only $66 billion. In the four years after the cut, they averaged $100 billion a year. But, what was more important was the surge in economic activity that the capital gains tax cut generated. In 1996, before the tax cut, there were $261 billion in capital gains in America. In the three years after the cut, capital gains rose to an average of $440 billion. The increased tax collections and the greater economic activity were such that they pushed the budget into a surplus for the first time since the 1950s.

These facts may be “inconvenient truths” for Obama to face but they are the facts!

 

Yes, I see that:

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/US_GDP_per_capita.PNG/800px-US_GDP_per_capita.PNG">

 

Notice the steep drop at the far right in 2007 as soon as the Dems took over Congress, compared to the fierce upwards move when the Repubs took over Congress in 1994 and forced Clinton to behave rationally

Btw, I believe Clinton was a very good president with all his faults, eg, what seemed like total lack of integrity.

But, you know me: ABO, baby!