What is to come is epilogue.
Posted on August 19, 2010 - Filed Under Barack Obama, Featured Articles
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Look up the word “epilogue” and one of the definitions you will find says, “the final scene of a play or story that comments on or summarizes the main action.” The word epilogue, thus defined, now applies to the Barack Obama administration.
Of the seven presidents that have come since I have been voting, three have suffered terms with long, unpleasant epilogues. By that I mean that after a certain point, everything that happened in the remainders of their terms constituted little more than unhappy commentary.
For Richard Nixon, the epilogue began when the Watergate story completely took over the daily narrative of his presidency. Once the 18-minute gap in the White House tapes was revealed, everything that happened in Nixon’s remaining months in office was nothing but commentary on his malfeasance with respect to the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Nothing that Nixon tried or accomplished mattered after the Watergate story reached critical mass.
For the next elected president, Jimmy Carter, the epilogue began on November 4, 1979, a year to the day before he would be voted out of office. The event was the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Iran by a group of so-called “students” and the taking of 66 embassy personnel as hostages. For 444 days, the entire narrative on the Carter presidency revolved around the fact that the United States was apparently impotent in the face of what amounted to an act of war by the extremist regime that had taken over Iran. Fifty two of the 66 original hostages were held until minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981. Nothing Carter did from November 4, 1979 on, including a botched rescue attempt, mattered.
Our current president now finds his administration in epilogue. When historians write the text, the epilogue of the Obama administration will begin with the ‘Summer of Recovery’ that wasn’t. The narrative will report the fact that the American people woke up and angrily noticed that a mind-wrenching increase in federal spending and a hitherto unimaginable explosion in federal debt accomplished nothing, save for the impoverishment of generations yet unborn.
The summer of 2010 marks the turning point for President Obama. Henceforth, nothing he does will matter. Everything will revolve around the fact that the post-partisan, bridge-building pragmatist that millions of Americans thought they were voting for was finally and irrevocably revealed to be nothing but a tone-deaf, left-wing ideologue who is incapable of changing course in the face of terrible results.
Epilogue presidencies are not pleasant and this epilogue will be a particularly long one. The last months of the Nixon and Carter administrations were chaotic and unsettling. Such will be the case, I fear, with the Obama presidency.
We here at street level, the men and women who make the economy work, are thus left to run out the clock on this prince of fools, all the while hoping that the fools who made him their prince have learned a hard lesson.
Ideology is one thing. Results are another.
Posted on August 19, 2010 - Filed Under Barack Obama, Debt & Deficits, Economics Print This
I read a staggering statistic yesterday. According to former Reagan budget director David Stockman, since the third quarter of 2008, the nation’s gross domestic product has grown at the rate of only $4 billion per month while the federal debt has at the same time grown by $100 billion per month.
In other words, federal debt is growing at a rate 25 times greater than the American economy. Much of this debt has been taken on in the name of stimulating the economy yet little stimulation has taken place. Unemployment remains near ten percent and the economy is growing so slowly that the growth is barely perceptible.
Yet Obama and the Democrats cling to the idea that their economic policies, born of left-wing ideology, are working. This illustrates the biggest difference between business and government. Business is driven by results. Government can be, at least for a while, driven by ideology.
Lacking sovereign borrowing power and the ability to expand the money supply, when faced with poor results, business must quickly change course in order to survive. No business can afford to borrow at 25 times its rate of growth. No government can either. But nobody in our government has ever been in business.
And that’s the critical difference.
Obama’s Unforced Error
Posted on August 17, 2010 - Filed Under Featured Articles, Ground Zero Mosque Print This
When President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit,” he meant it in the most positive sense. He believed that the presidency was an excellent platform from which to articulate a belief or a position. How unfortunate it is, then, that our current president just wasted a fabulous opportunity to use the bully pulpit to accomplish something good, both for his presidency and for the country.
The recent kerfuffle over the proposed mosque at ground zero constitutes an unforced error for Obama. He came out in favor of the mosque at a Ramadan dinner on Friday and then had to walk it all back on Saturday. This in face of the fact that over two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of a mosque at ground zero for no other reason that a mosque at ground zero is in horrible taste.
Yes, the proponents of the mosque have the right to build it there but that doesn’t mean that they should. All President Obama had to do to win on this issue was simply say just that. In November 2008 most of us in East Texas voted against Obama because he is too liberal. Today, if we had to vote again, based on episodes like this one, we’d vote against him because he is tone deaf to the point of incompetence.
Mr. President, less will be more.
Posted on July 29, 2010 - Filed Under Barack Obama, Economics, Featured Articles, Jobs Print This
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, July 30, 2010.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll just released reveals that an overwhelming 67 percent of Americans believe that President Obama hasn’t devoted enough of his time to creating jobs.
Look at the numbers and you can understand why. The most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate at 9.5 percent, down from 9.7 percent. But that slight decline in unemployment is misleading. The reason the rate came down is because a large number of workers have been unemployed for so long that they are no longer counted as being in the labor force. The percentage of workers unemployed six months or longer is at the highest level since 1948 when we started keeping score.
The real unemployment rate, which counts workers who have been unemployed so long that they have quit looking and workers who are working part time but prefer fulltime work, is closer to 17 percent.
One of every two households in the U.S. is said to be “employment sensitive,” meaning that the household is either living with an unemployed worker in the house or has reason to fear that unemployment is imminent.
Thus, when asked by pollsters, two out of three respondents say that President Obama isn’t devoting enough of his energy to creating jobs.
But I think the poll is wrong.
President Obama’s failure arises not from doing too little but from doing too much. It is Obama’s over-intervention in the economy that lies at the root of the problem.
Don’t push a huge health care mandate on employers Mr. President, and business owners won’t be frightened of the future costs attendant to having employees and therefore might be less reticent to hire some.
Don’t raise the tax rates on investment and capital, Mr. President and the investment that will be necessary to bring about employment growth might happen more quickly.
Promise to get out of the auto and banking businesses as quickly as possible and vow to never go into private business again.
Above all, stop borrowing and spending money, Mr. President. You’re scaring us all to death.
An amazingly concise 288 words in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution sets forth the powers and duties of the president.
He is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He appoints ambassadors and judges. He negotiates treaties. He grants pardons. He convenes the Congress if he feels it necessary. He approves or disapproves legislation.
But he doesn’t manage the economy.
It’s not that the president hasn’t done enough to create jobs. The problem is that so many people believe that the president has any such power in the first place.
Widespread belief that the government is what drives America, instead of the other way around, is why we find ourselves drowning in debt while unable to find work for willing people to do.
The poll is wrong. President Obama hasn’t done too little. He has done too much.
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