Failed Honeymoon?

Traditionally, an incoming president is awarded a six-month “honeymoon,” during which, with virtually no opposition, he is supposed to completely shake-up government, especially if he has a Congress dominated by his party. For President Obama, that six-month period ended on 20 July, at which time the health-care system in this country was supposed to be completely revamped...for starters, although the loony-tunes “cap-and-trade” so-called energy bill had been passed in the House long before that. Nobody in the Congress had read the bill before it was passed, but that’s neither here nor there. The president wanted a bill, so the House obliged in the certain knowledge that Obama had never read the bill, either.

The most urgent problem the president faces is that the unemployment rate is edging toward 10%, but there seems to be no panic in the White House, not even any excitement about this matter. The president makes his daily appearances, delivers his speeches, flies all over the country (and much of the world) but doesn’t seem to get anything of substance done. Okay...be fair. The Congress not only is on dead center, even though its democrat majority can do anything it likes, but its approval rating languishes somewhere around 21%, which is to indicate that the citizenry would just as soon it do nothing, i.e., do no harm.

The president makes much of the “stimulus” ripoff passed by Congress months ago ($787 billion worth of pork) that was supposed to save/create jobs, but stagnation has set in and the Congress periodically passes legislation extending the time that unemployment benefits can be doled out. Meanwhile, multitudes of people continue to lose their homes and the banks that are not “big enough” to save continue to close, with the government (FIDC) taking up the slack, using borrowed/printed money (who knows?).

So...the obvious question: Is the administration actually interested in turning things around? The president promised CHANGE on a massive scale...he would be the non-Bush, in other words. Or...he would completely change the capitalistic system that has made the country great into a system more to his liking. After all, President Roosevelt got 15 major bills through Congress in his first 100 days in 1933 during a financial crisis unlike the present one only by its intensity, not its similarity. Things are not quite as bad now as they were then, but they also seem not to be improving.

Under Obama and the democrat Congress, the government owns General Motors and a huge segment of Chrysler, meaning that it could engineer a back-to-work program just in those entities alone that would help decrease unemployment. Since the people provided the money needed for Obama to buy these companies (and bankrupt them), why not make and sell cars at a significant discount...a sort of non-profit auto agency? It would do two things – put people in the “green” cars of the government’s choosing and create jobs so those drawing unemployment compensation could again pay taxes. The third, and to this administration most important, thing this would do is put Ford and Toyota out of business or drive them, also, under the government’s thumb, probably by way of bankruptcy.

Under Obama and the democrats, the government essentially controls the huge banks that the people saved from destruction – or so the citizens were told. Obama could sign an executive order mandating that the banks lend all the money he indicates is needed to pay off mortgages and/or put buyers in new houses. The banks have paid back a lot of those “loans” made by the government, but the bankers predictably snookered the bureaucrats, salvaged their humongous bonuses, and are sitting on solid bottom-lines, with not a worry about those losing everything.

All this seems elemental enough, so why don’t the pooh-bahs in Washington get on the ball? Consider: As people become more and more dependent upon government (extended unemployment compensation ad infinitum, stimulus handouts, for instance) they subconsciously cede to the government more and more of their possessions and liberty. Carried to its logical conclusion, the current state of affairs leads to socialism, which is what this administration has been about since it took office. This is no better demonstrated than in the current health-care brouhaha, since this legislation involves life and death, the last resort.

In a speech to a Hillsdale College audience this past August, Dr. Walter Williams, highly respected economist at George Mason University, indicated that the average American now works from 01 January until 05 May to pay federal, state and local taxes...more than a third of a year’s income. Yet, the president and the Congress seem hell-bent upon increasing those taxes at a time when the nation is doing what citizens can’t do – spend money they don’t have. In other words, they mean to tax the nation into socialism, since private entrepreneurs cannot compete with the deep pockets lined with money confiscated by Congress from the citizens.

This is reprehensible. The Obama presidency, hardly begun, is in shambles...but, hey...isn’t that what it wants in order to carry out the agenda?

And so it goes.

Jim Clark