Obama is Digging the Grave of the USA
“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging,” suggested Will Rogers. President Obama keeps digging.
To be fair, he inherited a recession caused by programs he had voted for while Senator; for example, the bank bailout. Also an overheated housing boom was caused largely by a combination of the Federal Reserve’s keeping interest rates so low that a lot of people bought homes that they could not afford and quasi government agencies like Fannie Mae facilitating those loans to poor credit risks, who promptly defaulted.
Further, during George Bush’s first 6 years as President, our national debt increased by $3.2 Trillion. The next four years the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for the last two. During those 4 years that the Democrats controlled Congress (2006-2010) our national debt increased another $6 trillion, almost twice as much debt as Bush, but in half the time! (LINK) That summarizes President Obama’s record since he took office.
His major political victory was ramming though a national health program that clearly is unworkable and will put huge financial burdens on employers. As a result, most employers are afraid to expand hiring.
Obama’s second major political victory was the $800 billion stimulus spending package. It resulted in more debt, a huge deficit and more unemployment as it sucked resources from the private sector.
Also the bailout of GM & Chrysler gave his union backers a major portion of GM stock in clear violation of legal precedent. Not allowing GM & Chrysler to file for bankruptcy guaranteed that they will continue to have an uncompetitive cost structure.
Cash for Clunkers cost $3 billion. It boosted sales artificially for a couple months, then crashed.
Loan guarantee preferences to friends and industries that the President favored have resulted in massive losses, like Solyndra. Long term unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression.
We have all heard that the definition of a moron is someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. We saw that President Obama’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress last week was exactly that. It was a campaign speech demanding more taxpayer money to give to his political friends, but he is no moron.
Our country has serious structural problems beyond the out of control spending of Congress and the President. Our electrical grids are in serious need of upgrades. We have been having rolling blackouts in the Western states all summer. We still have areas without electric power from Hurricane Irene.
We have a growing mismatch of labor skills verses labor needs. Our schools have become indoctrination centers rather than providers of skills needed to develop productive members of society.
Most of our US educated foreign born students are forced to leave the country upon graduation and take their skills with them. Obama’s immigration policy appears to be to give amnesty to illegal uneducated people because they most likely will vote Democrat.
We used to encourage the best and brightest to stay in the USA because they provided the innovation – the driver of economic growth and job creation. The USA became the largest most prosperous economy of the world because we were the best at developing new and better products. Our service sector cannot thrive without it.
Because the USA has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, many of our major companies now have the majority of their revenues and profits overseas, not to mention employees. With them go the most innovative talent.
Unless our politicians stop the deficit spending and undo our onerous tax structure and regulations that keep US companies from being competitive in world markets, we will continue to see our standard of living decrease. Our real per capita net worth is back at its 1999 level (Dr. E. J. Seifried, “Black Friday GDP Revisions,” 7-29-11).
The USA fiscal gap is $211 trillion – 15 times larger than the official debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term Alternative Scenario. That means our government has promised entitlements greater than the entire production of the USA for 15 years(www.ncpa.org). It is not possible.
Unfortunately, as the French economist Frederic Bastiat said over 160 years ago, “Government is the great fiction, through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
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James F. Davis is the President of Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a Washington, DC non-profit.
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