Story Of Obama

We didn't build this newsletter - somebody else made that happen
Herman Cain, Cain Connections Newsletter

Like the rest of the country, we were thoroughly chastened this week by President Obama, who explained that those who have achieved wealth and success cannot and should not take credit. It wasn't their smarts and it wasn't their hard work. They would never have made it without the benevolent hand of government.

Well, never let it be said that those of us at Cain Solutions take credit we have not earned. So with that in mind, we hereby introduce our new staff listing, with full credit to those who are really responsible for our success:

Barack Obama - Editor in Chief
Joe Biden - Managing Editor
Nancy Pelosi - Spellchekker
Debbie Wasserman Schulz - Director of Disingenuousness
Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd - Directors of Finance
Harry Reid - Budget Director (it's coming any day now!)
David Axelrod - Director of Ethics

We couldn't have done it without them, we guess. And remember, if you've had success at anything, be sure to apologize to the rest of us and give proper credit to the government. If only we could all operate as efficiently as they do.

 

Rich is Cool
By Herman Cain

If the polls are any indication, it hasn’t worked, but the Obama campaign spent big money over the past month attacking Mitt Romney for what they apparently believe is the worst sin imaginable: He is rich.

And as we know now (not that it was a big surprise), President Obama’s disdain for those who have earned substantial wealth runs deep. He doesn’t like you having all that money (unless you contribute it to his campaign), and he really doesn’t like you taking credit for having earned it. That’s why he said the following:

“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

As far as Obama is concerned, anyone who is successful got that way because of the system, by which he means the government. Democrats sometimes refer to the rich as “the winners in life’s lottery,” which is to say they merely got lucky in a game of chance – and that’s why they need to fork over so much of their wealth in taxes, so Democrats can “spread the wealth around” to all those other smart, hardworking people, who just didn’t happen to win life’s lottery.

What a load of crap. To listen to these people, you’d think being rich was the worst thing anyone could do.

Well I’ve got news for them: Being rich is cool. Not only that, but when someone has become rich, others should endeavor to learn as much as they can about how he or she did it, instead of resenting it and dismissing it as merely lucking out because of all the help the government provided.

The best example I can give you is my dad. He started his adult life in the 1940 with nothing but the clothes on his back. At one point he worked three jobs at the same time. I suppose wealth is relative to everyone’s situation, but my dad had a goal of getting rich as he defined it – and he achieved his goal.

Did the government deserve any credit for his success? When he walked off that small dirt farm in Tennessee, the road wasn’t even paved. I’m not saying there were no government functions that worked well and benefited him. Of course there were. But they were the same ones that benefited everybody else. My dad achieved his particular goals because of his particular dedication, his good plan and his hard work. And yes, he was perfectly within his rights to be proud of himself for being so smart and working so hard.

And let’s be honest: It was true then, and it’s even truer today, that when you get rich you largely do it in spite of the government – its rules, its regulations, its confiscatory tax policies . . . and now the tendency of certain leaders to assail you for your success.

The coolest thing about rich people is that, in order to get rich, you have to make your skill and your capital work for other people. Instead of ripping Bain Capital for its success, the Obama Administration and the media should study what Bain did and how it did it. Bain created thousands of jobs – many more on a net basis than it eliminated via strategic layoffs – because it made smart business decisions and built successful enterprises.

I’ll take that any day over what Obama does, which is to flush money down the toilet in the form of stimulus that doesn’t stimulate, “green energy” investments that lead straight to bankruptcy and tax and regulatory policies that stifle capital formation and entrepreneurial innovation.

Mitt Romney got rich because he is smart and he works hard. That makes him pretty darn cool in my book. Those of you who resent the rich, get over it and study how they did it. Along the way, you’ll discover that the rich not only pay most of the taxes, but in all likelihood they pay your paycheck too.

And you’d better study them while you can, because there’s no telling how many of them will be left once Obama gets finished with them.

 

A Good Ad

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Good Old Ray Stevens

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Yanni. Do you have OCD ?

 

Conservativelly speaking, sorry the truth makes you uncomfortable.

 

5 Ways To Get America Working Again
by: David Harsanyi

Step one? Please, stop.

It would probably strike the average politician as absurd to argue that the best way to fix the economy is to stop trying to “fix it.” But as John Taylor, former economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and professor of economics at Stanford University, argues, the most effective way to regain our edge is to change the way we think about the economy. This means returning to “first principles.” As an economic matter, Taylor defines this by saying that “families, individuals, and entrepreneurs must be free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell, and how to help others.”

Not exactly a radical notion. Yet, from health care reform to environmentalist policy, from fiscal reform to the gutting of welfare reform, the economic agenda of Washington the past four years—and even longer—has corroded our traditional understanding of economic freedom.

Washington has many immediate tasks in front of it, of course: stopping the fiscal cliff that would result in a bevy of 2013 tax hikes, reforming entitlements and dealing with the explosion of dependency programs. But on a macro level, what the nation needs most, as Taylor argues, is predictable government, the rule of law, incentives that derive from the free-market system rather than activist government.

In other words, we need to get back to basics. Here are five ways Washington can stop “fixing” and start helping:

1. Austerity now!

Not long ago, few Americans knew, or cared, about the Baltic nation of Estonia. Nowadays, the small country is mentioned regularly within free-market economic circles as a pristine example of how cutting back government spending can spur economic growth. As Daniel J. Mitchell, an expert on supply-side tax policy at the Cato Institute who recently toured some Baltic nations tells Human Events, the turnaround in Estonia is real and so are the cutbacks. “They asked themselves a simple question,” Mitchell says, “What do we want? Our government to spend our money or the productive sector of our economy to spend it? Estonia—even though they haven’t been perfect—came up with the right answer.”

Like the United States, Estonia experienced a brutal recession in 2008, as its economy shrank nearly 20 percent—a number that took Greece five years to achieve. Rather than devaluing its currency or pumping money into inefficient government institutions, the small nation went the other direction: instituting genuine austerity– unlike the phantom cutbacks of many nations across the continent, or, worse, proposals to raise taxes. Public-sector wages were cut by 10 percent, the retirement age is being raised gradually from 61 to 65 by 2026 and other free-market reforms were instituted.

Estonians didn’t riot, but they did reelect the reform government and watched their economy grow at five times the euro-zone average.

Although every nation has its own set of problems, Mitchell points to comparable success stories over the past few decades in Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. By constraining government growth, the United States could also reduce the burden of government on its ailing economy and allow hundreds of billions of dollars to be reallocated from wasteful enterprises to productive industry.

Then, we can start seriously talking about the debt crisis, allowing the American people to regain some of the confidence they’ve lost in their government.

2. Simplify the tax code

The IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service recently estimated that paperwork associated with the federal tax code costs Americans $160 billion a year. Paperwork! The code is comprised of 25 volumes, over 76,000 pages, or about nine feet of soul-crushing paper. Two companies publish daily newsletters to keep everyone abreast of the ever-complex changes. We can fix it. Broaden the tax base, close loopholes and flatten the tax rates—all of which would bring more revenue stability and certitude to projections as well as make filing a comparable breeze.

We already have some basis for negotiations. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a group established and then promptly ignored by the president, have come up with a plan that would eliminate most deductions, exclusions and credit in the tax code. It would reduce tax rates and put them into three brackets of 8, 14 and 23 percent.

Is the plan perfect? Hardly. But it’s a start.

With the recent Supreme Court decision finding Obamacare constitutional, congressional taxing authority has been expanded and now, Washington can use taxation to do just about anything. Simplification of the tax code would not only unlock dormant economic potential, but, in the process, it would blunt the preferred weapon of social engineers, who reward favored industries, punish success and distort economic incentives.

3. Best stimulus? Cheap energy

When looking at the states boasting the fastest rate of job creation during this long downturn—Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Utah—you will surely notice that they share one characteristic in common: they produce fossil fuels.

The price of energy is embedded into all of the economy. As a fungible commodity, government has only so much power to affect the cost of energy—and the Obama administration has done nearly all it can to make it more expensive. With less government interference, however, experts estimate that oil and gas industry would create hundreds of thousands of jobs by even modestly expanding on the domestic resources.

Consequently, the Environmental Protection Agency should be regarded as one of the nation’s leading job killing institutions. It has not only made oil and natural gas exploration more difficult, but it has instituted draconian rules regarding pollutant limits on coal plants—the same plants that provide us with most of our power. Let energy be, and let the economy grow.

4. No more easy money

The prevailing notion among many high-profile economists and financial journalists is that the Federal Reserve should do more to help the economy. By “help” they mean devalue the dollar.

We have not seen much inflation—not yet. But make no mistake: what these experts are advocating with an array of euphemisms is a devaluing of your home, your bank account and your retirement fund. In the past few years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has used quantitative easing (expanding the money supply by increasing the quantity of reserves in the banking system) and other means to try and kick-start the economy. Yet it has done little to help.

And because the economy remains sluggish, Wall Street’s welfare queens still eagerly await more easy money and rely on negligible interest rates. Economists at major banks like Goldman Sachs are predicting that we’ll soon see a third round of quantitative easing.

But is the problem liquidity? Many banks and companies have vast cash reserves, but they’re not lending and they’re not hiring.

So why pump more? As economist and scholar Thomas Sowell says, “in the old-time Keynesian economic religion will always say that the only reason creating more money hasn’t worked is because there has not yet been enough money created.”

And the Fed’s game of footsie with Wall Street is only creating more uncertainty. Saying no more will allow the economy to move forward on its own.

5. Repeal — then must replace

Health care in America, despite all you hear, still offers us citizens one of the most efficient and highest quality systems in the world. But it’s expensive, and it’s only getting worse.

Last year, the average cost of health care for a family of four increased nearly 7 percent to $20,728 annually. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that overall national health spending would increase an average of 6.1 percent a year over the next decade. Health care spending will reach about $4.6 trillion by 2019, according to a report in the journal Health Affairs, accounting for one of every five dollars we spend.

Republicans need a comprehensive free-market plan that will create more competition, more choices and lower costs.

Yes, first Washington must repeal — because not only does Obamacare add tremendous new administrative burdens and cost onto businesses but it bends the cost curve up — but then it needs a plan in place that allows individuals and businesses to come up with their own cost-effective solutions. Right now, no one knows what the future will bring, or what the costs will entail. Again, certainty in health care will go a long way in allowing the economy to move forward.

 

It’s the Economy, Stupid. Again.
by Editor, Conservative Intelligence Briefings

Back in 1992, the Clinton campaign successfully distracted voters from his incredibly shady personal history, not too mention his very liberal policies (and a lack of private sector experience), by focusing their impressive messaging on one very simple theme: the floundering economy under then-President George H.W. Bush. Their internal mantra was a very simple theme: “It’s the Economy, Stupid”. It worked extremely well.

Fast-forward some 20 years and we have something simillar developing: an incumbent president who is overseeing a poor economy (admittedly, a much-worse economy than 20 years ago) who is facing an ambitious challenger (one with an impressive record in the private sector), with two very interesting things
happening:

1) The incumbent president is doing everything in his power to distract voters from his dismal economic record, using tricks like phony claims of “voter suppression” as well as demonizing the very private sector which is the source of his opponent’s credibility, to the point of lying about the economic record of his predecessor.

2) After a late start, the Romney campaign recently began focusing on the economy with impressive results. Obama’s absurd attacks on the private sector have drawn a very clear and decisive line between the two competing visions.

This is important because recent polling is suggesting what most people already knew: that the economy is the main focus for most voters. Even better for the Romney campaign is that a majority have begun to realize that President Obama is mostly to blame:

Two-thirds of likely voters say the weak economy is Washington’s fault, and more blame President Obama than anybody else, according to a new poll for The Hill.

It found that 66 percent believe paltry job growth and slow economic recovery is the result of bad policy. Thirty-four percent say Obama is the most to blame, followed by 23 percent who say Congress is the culprit. Twenty percent point the finger at Wall Street, and 18 percent cite former President George W. Bush.

The results highlight the reelection challenge Obama faces amid dissatisfaction with his first-term performance on the economy.

There’s no question about it: It’s all about the economy, stupid. Again.

 

Some good and mostly valid points Yannis. The problem that I have is still that there has been very little, I won't say zero, but very little put forward by the conservatives to actually help. First they say the Office of President can't really help, but then they try to blame Obama. The lefties blame Obama, well, you can't have it both ways IMO.

This election is about hatred, every bit as much as the economy, and that's the really sad part.

If you notice, when a conservative broadcaster and liberal broadcaster speak of the exact same set of number, like jobs or consumer confidence, their rhetoric is greatly different. So, IMO, what happens, is that the side who hears what they want to hear just magnify their feelings, rather than give credit when due, and blame when earned.

 

Agree.

However, many Independents are still unsure who they will vote for, and that's the purpose of the struggle, to get those votes.

I have gone through several elections and this one is no different, emotions rise into the summer and peak late October, it's normal. Read ancient Greek history about the first elections in Athens in the 5th century BC, first few decades after they invented this stupid system, it was the same back then, ugly, unfair and quarrelsome. Democracy, as they say, is the worst system of governance, except for all the others. Oh well