Reflections From a Murky Pond

Obama, best and most kindly described as feckless and factless, is really working hard on his shucking and jiving. The boy’s gone from carefully “nuanced” misinformation to outright lies in his bid to keep his job and to keep his wife in the style she believes that she deserves.

There’s no real surprise at all in his lying; that’s the only real talent or skill this pathetic, narcissistic, snake oil huckster has. What is surprising is the rapidity and severity of his decompensation and reversion to his roots and his handlers allowing it to be publicly displayed.

The boy, his handlers, and his proxies are actually claiming that the Obama Regime has created more private sector job than either President Bush Jr. or President Reagan. And they actually seem to think that Americans will buy this steaming, reeking load of bullshit!

Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around. And over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery.

— Stephanie Cutter
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (August 22, 2012)

Of course MSNBC and the rest of lamestream media just let this baldfaced lie slide, as they were expected to do, so there’s some basis for Obama belief that his lies, if big enough and repeated often enough, will be believed by enough people to make a difference.

Tags: 2012 Elections | America | Bush | Economy | Employment | Jobs | Lies | Narcissism | Obama | Politics | Reagan | Stephanie Cutter | Unemployment

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 12:23 pm and is filed under 2012 Election. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Attempts to curb America’s federal government’s spending addiction go back to the days of President Reagan. He was the first POTUS to make a considered and concerted effort to starve the beast that was, and is even more today, the gluttonous animal that our government had become.

Sadly for us, it didn’t work – not at all.

This is not to say that President Reagan’s attempt rein in government spending was wrong or misguided. He approached the situation quite correctly.

Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.

The only problem was that approaching Congress as parent approaches their recalcitrant and spoiled children, while a perfect analogy, has the same flaws as it would with one’s real children. It only works if they can’t go running to their mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, or the neighbor down the street to get a handout.

While it was already proven in Reagan’s day that it was impossible to curb spending before reducing the government’s revenues – i.e., cutting taxes – the mistake was thinking in terms of Starve The Beast. We weren’t trying to starve a ravening beast, we were trying to starve Wimpy and Wimpy never starved.

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Reagan’s idea was economically and logically sound if America’s government was running on any normal and sensical form of economics. He just didn’t understand or was powerless to change the fact that the government runs on Wimpynomics and that whenever it grows hungry it will cheerfully borrow money for its next snack and stick we, the People with the tab.

Worse even, one of the underlying postulates of Wimpynomics is that, as long as the government can keep raising its debt ceiling and as long as they can coerce people, institutions, and nations to loan them money, Tuesday never comes.

Wimpy never starved but we, the People will in order to pay for our government’s excesses if things don’t change. Tuesday is just around the proverbial corner.

Tags: America | Cartoons | Debt | Debt Ceiling | Deficit | Economics | Economy | Politics | Reagan | Wimpy

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 9:31 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

On Tuesday, September 8, 2009, President Obama gave his much anticipated – and dreaded by many American parents – speech to many of America’s school-aged children during what was for many of them the first day of their new school year.

Many Conservatives, fueled by the Obama campaign’s previous use of children (here and here), were terrified that President Obama would use his address to America’s children as a means of indoctrination and of furthering his Leftist agenda. It certainly didn’t help that the event included “lesson plans” for teachers to use in conjunction with contained exercises that instructed to the students to write “how they could help President Obama.”

President Obama’s actual speech though was utterly unalarming, surprising only in a Liberal’s repeated use of the word, “responsibility,” and focused tightly on admonishing students to stay in school and to study hard in order to succeed later in life.

President Obama’s Message for America’s Students

In fact President Obama’s speech was quite similar in content and tone to President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 televised speech to America’s students. It was actually less politically charged that President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 address to school children.

It should be noted, however, that President Reagan’s and President Bush, Sr.’s speeches drew complaints from Liberals and that Congressional Democrats, unsatisfied with merely complaining, launched a fruitless investigation into the address’ funding sources.

My Quick Synopsis of President Obama’s Speech

The government may fail you. Your schools and teachers may fail you. Your parents may fail you. None of that matters; you kids need to stay in school, study hard, and get an education. If you don’t, you’ll fail in life, you’ll fail the country, and you’ll fail yourselves.

When all is said and done, getting and using an education is each individual student’s responsibility and hardships, irrespective of their nature, source, or difficulty, are no excuse for failing to excel.

As far as can see, as long the content of the speeches is not indoctrination, such speeches are an acceptable outlet for President who wants to bolster his image or salve his ego. Who knows? They might even do a small bit of good and saving even one child from throwing away their education is worth at least the cost of such a broadcast.

The devil of course is in the details – the content of the speech’s message both spoken and implied.

Tags: America | Bush | Children | Conservatives | Education | Elitism | Liberals | Obama | Politics | Reagan | Socialism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

“Trickle-down economics” and “trickle-down theory” are terms of political rhetoric that refer to the policy of providing tax cuts or other benefits to businesses and rich individuals, in the belief that this will indirectly benefit the broad population. Strangely it is believed that Will Rogers of western movie fame first coined the phrase during the Great Depression.

Money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy

— Will Rogers

First there was President Ronald Reagan with his supply-side economic which were labeled Reaganomics. This was the first example of the now classic, post-Keynesian Trickle-Down Economics.

President Ronald Reagan was a strong proponent of Trickle-Down economics, and it was he who brought the term to the notice of the general population.

He believed that reducing taxes on capital gains, corporate income, and higher individual incomes, along with the reduction or elimination of various excise taxes would increase gross domestic product (GD) and that this would benefit the poor.

Despite the clear economics benefits of Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics, it is generally considered to have been a failed experiment in in macro-economics. While median family income grew and interest rates, inflation, and unemployment fell faster under Reagan than they did immediately before or after his presidency, the income gap between the wealthy and the poor grew and the perceived benefits to the lower income quintiles was far less than expected.

President Reagan forgot to take greed into account.

The wealthy used their new tax breaks and deregulation to increase their wealth greatly, but only caused a tiny fraction of that increase in wealth to trickle down to the average American family. Greed won out.

–~*~–

Now we presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, who wants to increase income taxes on capital gains, corporate income, and higher individual incomes, along with increasing the payroll taxes on both employers and employees in the upper economic quintiles.

He believes this is necessary to provide immediate relief to the poor and middle-class.

Some might choose to describe this as Trickle-Up Economics, others would choose to describe this as Socialism – an intermediate step between Capitalism and Communism. In point of fact – and without the weighted rhetoric of politics – it is Demand-Side Economics as espoused by 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Sen. Obama’s economic plan is a return to the economic theories of Pres. Jimmy Carter’s administration.

Sen. Obama’s Trickle-Up Economics or Demand-Side Economics is based on the theory that by directly increasing the capital available to the lower income quintiles greater demand will be  generated for goods and services across all sectors of the economy. This is turn would generate greater supply and increase gross domestic product (GD) and that this in turn would benefit the poor even more.

Sen. Obama is forgetting to to take greed into account.

The wealthy will do what they can to protect their wealth.  Increasing their costs through taxation will lead them to take measures to offset the depredations of their wealth though a variety of methods. None of those methods will benefit America’s poor or middle-class.

1. Corporations will likely reduce or adjust domestic workforces by either increased automation or adjustments in full-time to part-time employee number
2. Corporations will likely move as much of their business and production facilities overseas as they can manage. In this world of Globalism a dramatic increase in domestic production costs will inevitably lead to an equally dramatic increase in “off shoring” of jobs and production.
3. Available capital in the lending markets will likely be reduced since increased income and capital gains taxes will make such business models less lucrative
4. General investments – including 401Ks and pension funds – will taper down do to the increased capital gains taxes. Fund administrators would have a much harder time maximizing the growth of such investment portfolios in  the wake of greater taxation.
5. Corporations will likely increase the basic costs of most goods and services, both to offset their increased tax burdens and to take full advantage of the greater buying power of the poor and middle-class. Inflation never benefits the poor.

Once again, as it did under Pres. Reagan, greed will have one out.

Reagan was an idealist and Obama is an idealist. Both men failed to fully take into account the level of greed in people when they put together their economic policies. The difference between the two lies in the effects of their disparate plans.

Tags: 2008 Elections | Capitalism | Democrats | Economy | Ethics & Morality | Obama | Politics | Reagan | Republicans | Socialism | Society | Taxes

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under 2008 Election, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.