The Unaware, Undecided and Indifferent will Choose Our President

If you've been closely following the current events of the past few years because you are concerned about the massive unemployment, trade deficits, increased government spending, the galloping herd of Obama Administration scandals and Obamacare then I am about to make you angry. If these issues are your concerns, as they are mine, then make yourself a stiff drink and sit down.

Obamanomics
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The Gallop Poll conducts a daily Presidential Approval Poll. They now have president Obama's approval rating at 47% - above his disapproval rating of 46%. Scott Rasmussen's daily Presidential Approval Poll has President Obama's approval rating at 45% and his disapproval rating is 53%. Rasmussen also measures strongly approve and strongly disapprove, which reveals that 20% more Americans strongly disapprove of President Obama's performance than strongly approve.

What does this tell us? First of all, a poll is a snapshot of people's beliefs at a given time. Second, a poll is not necessarily a predictor of the future. Third, polls can often disappoint you in your fellow human beings.

Why 2012 Is Even More Important Than You Think 2

- Neither a Healthy Populace, Nor a Healthy Economy -

While we can't help but recognize that the United States is struggling financially in both public and private sectors, it's time to point out that Europe is struggling even more. The fact that a European-style economy appears to be President Barack Obama's model for the fundamentally changed United States is seldom mentioned.

Like the act of socializing medicine in Europe, the goal was not about medicine; it was about socialism. In the United States, Obamacare is not the end; it is a means to an end. The purpose of Obamacare is to squeeze out private insurers and then private medical providers. In the end, the quality of medical care must decrease as surely as the costs must increase when efficient competition ends and healthcare by bureaucrat begins. If there is a second Obama term, then this will be the future. 

Look at Europe where decades of promises are dying with the whimper of occasional street riots. It's as though a lie, that everyone knew to be a convenient fiction, was finally exposed. There is little real outrage, but many will go through the motions because it is expected.

Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts
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Europe is simply another example of socialist economies failing to live up to socialist promises. The ability to pay for early retirements, universal "free" healthcare, stringent regulation of everything but workers' behavior and opulent employee benefits are dependent upon an eternally growing population and a constantly growing economy or payment by future, currently voiceless, generations. 

The problem is that socialist and mythical "third way" economies stifle themselves with burdensome costs and regulations that guarantee a sluggish economy that cannot compete on the world market. What makes socialism appealing to the uneducated and gullible is what makes it always fail.

Ignorance, Arrogance and Government Meddling

Ignorance and arrogance: two characteristics that do not mix well. As a combination, it’s right up there with Saturday Night Specials and unlimited $1 beer night. You just know that something will go horribly wrong. And there can be added factors to make it even worse.

Add one attractive woman of questionable moral character and her large, highly jealous husband to a room full of men with Saturday Night Specials on unlimited $1 dollar beer night and it’s a certain tragedy and likely inspiration for at least three good country songs. Take the ignorance and arrogance combination and throw in political power and the presidency and you have tragedy on a completely different scale and perhaps a generation lost to stifling poverty and depression, though there will be a lot more country songs. Guess which scenario you get to vote on in 2012?

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Retired
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While I could list all of the scandals that occurred when government meddles in business, that’s not what this is about. It does not matter which party is in power, when politicians get involved in business and let businessmen get involved in politics, there will be a huge bill to pay. Hey, I’m looking at you, fellow taxpayer, because we will pay that massive tab.

When Angelo Mozilo got caught up in the subprime mortgage scandal, he had to pay a fine of $47.5 million and his company Countrywide Credit paid another $20 million. We got him, didn’t we? Forty-seven million five hundred-thousand dollars! Poor Angelo had to retire with his paltry estimated $550 million in wealth. He could have still bought Solyndra! And don’t we just wish he had.

The Recipe for Government Soup

The way to make America prosperous again is to produce more than we consume. It's that simple. There is no Secret Recipe DF8GVEXEW35G that awaits discovery by some government economist; no production function that will right our economy by adjusting the inflection points and certainly no gimmick from the Federal Reserve Chairman that will fool the market.

We simply have to produce more than we consume. It's what we capitalists call "creating wealth". It's something the current administration has forgotten: Before one can redistribute wealth, wealth must be created. Progressives often forget that simple fact.

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The problem for the Obama Administration is that government cannot create wealth. Individuals create wealth. Government can confiscate the wealth of individuals through taxes and fees, but it cannot make wealth.

Some of you may object and point out that with the assistance of the Federal Reserve System, the federal government prints money. You would be correct; it does print money, but money is not wealth.

Money can do many things such as act as a medium of exchange, and it can even be a tool for storing value, but printing money only reduces the value of each individual piece of money in existence. It does not create wealth. In fact, if you use money as a store of value and the government prints more money, then your money lost value.

GOP: White House Or (We All Go) Bust

GOP: White House or We All Go Bust
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The 2012 federal elections will be an extended IQ test for the American voters. If we, as a nation, focus on personalities and political advantage then we absolutely deserve to have an economy that crashes, burns and explodes violently. We are not looking at economic Armageddon in the future, the armies are joined at Mt. Megeddo now and we are losing.

I honestly cannot determine if the left is tabula rasa ignorant, hide bound to the addiction of spending and the power it brings or if they simply do not care if the politics of envy and redistribution destroy the economy. Either way, the left has earned the scorn of, not just the right but also, the reasonable center.

This election will not be solely about the economy, but a powerful combination of high unemployment, looming inflation, energy costs and sickly economic growth are the chief concerns of most Americans. Huge

Governor Perry and the Great Economics Debate

Last night’s debate on Bloomberg TV focused on the US economy. This was a good choice by debate sponsors, because the American people are focused on the economy out of self-defense. The abject failure of President Obama and his gaggle of academic charlatans and Wall Street Wonderboys to grasp even the basics of business, is no surprise to economic conservatives. If one is overly kind, one could call the state of our current economy “iffy”. For that reason alone, people are ready to hear Republican ideas to repair the economy.

The debate was an opportunity for Republican presidential candidates to discuss their thoughts on the economy in more detail than other formats have allowed. Many of them, including Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney made good use of the format. Others did not do as well.

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Texas Governor Rick Perry didn’t lose the economics debate last night, but it may eventually cost him the nomination anyway. Perry needed a reversal in direction for his campaign and his lackluster performance did not do that. He will continue to slide in the polls because he gave no reason for the slide to stop.

Perry is right, of course, on his statements about the necessity to utilize our natural resources to save the economy. He mentioned it several times but never ventured beyond the painfully obvious. Simply put, Perry never connected the dots. There was no analysis; no linking of job production outside of the energy sector; and most importantly to his campaign, no burning reason why voters should stick with the Perry bandwagon.

Perry could have easily pointed out that we need relatively inexpensive energy to increase production of both goods and jobs. Less expensive goods - and lower transportation costs - means more exports in all sectors, which means more jobs. Less expensive products are more affordable to America’s middle class. Common

Be Courageous, Mr. President: An Open Letter

Dear Mr. President,

There are times in our lives when our vision for how the world should be is in direct conflict with the reality. When this happens our choices are between altering our world view to match reality and pretending that reality has changed. The first choice can be unsettling; it's not easy to admit that we are wrong. The second choice corrupts our view of the world and is dangerous, perhaps even deadly.

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I'm requesting, Mr. President, that you stand back and reassess your understanding of the world. At age 50 this will not be easy, but reality is knocking with a heavy fist. Many of us have noticed that the predictions of your economic advisors have been flawed and some, including me, would say that those predictions were radically incorrect. There is a single reason those predictions were so wrong. The models used by your advisors are based upon flawed assumptions of how the economy works and how people react to regulatory changes.

You Might Be President Obama If . . .

With apologies to fellow Georgian Jeff Foxworthy, who had absolutely nothing to do with this.

You might be President Obama . . .

If the ten year-old with the neighborhood lemonade stand has more business experience than you, you might be President Obama.

If you have more communists in your cabinet than Vladimir Putin, you might be President Obama.

If you try to look more macho by taking part in a military operation – run by France, you might be President Obama.

If the only campaign promise you have ever kept was to "make energy costs skyrocket", you might be President Obama.

If you got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing – and you’re following the same strategy to win a second, you might be President Obama.

If your OCD problem is that you compulsively bow to foreign thugs and dictators, you might be President Obama.

If you actually apologize for our behavior toward countries whose idea of a good time is to practice genocide on their own citizens, you might be President Obama.

If you’ve started a war and you don’t know why, you might be President Obama.

If you’ve never met privately with some of your own cabinet members, but average seeing your golf pro once a week, you might be President Obama.

If you’ve ever put Joe Biden in charge of anything bigger than setting up a Parcheesi board, you might be President Obama.

If your idea of fixing the economy is to go shopping – in another country, you might be President Obama.

Of course, more will probably be added. So many gaffes, so little time.

The Strategy to Begin Balancing the Budget

Entitlements are the 800-pound, beer-chugging, Angel Dust-snorting, psychotic gorilla in the room. It may be too late, but people are beginning to get a little nervous. Because of their size, we all know that entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be addressed if we are to balance the budget. The question is: Will Congress do so?

Even minor changes in Social Security, though, have met with surprising resistance from politicians on the left and from recipients. Some sensible suggestions phase in minor changes and don’t affect anyone within 10 years of retirement and affects no current recipients. The overblown reaction to such suggestions are emotional rather than logical, and this must be taken into account.

I am convinced that Americans will accept changes to entitlement programs if – and only if – they are convinced that all other measures have been undertaken. So while entitlement benefit payouts must be reduced, but only after other programs have taken their hits.

Before taking on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; Republicans in Congress should work to eliminate the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and that’s just a beginning. Funding can be eliminated or reduced, for Obamacare, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and others.

If the GOP-led House fails to accomplish this, then the burden shifts to the Democrats. Republicans can even, somewhat believably, claim that transfer payments might have taken a lighter hit if the other cuts had not be stone-walled by Democrat legislators in the US Senate.

If these cuts or eliminations are made, then the recipients of transfer payments will know that the task of balancing the budget won’t be completely on their backs. They will also understand that the current fiscal problems are, indeed, serious. For that reason, these other programs must go first, even if they are a lesser part of the deficit.

Interestingly, it has mostly been the Democrats that have accused Republicans of making “meaningless cuts” – small cuts that the Democrats could have made when they controlled both bodies of the legislative branch and the executive branch. Democrats are challenging Republicans to take on transfer payments by minimizing other GOP-suggested cuts. These accusations also go along with a strategy that some have openly accused the Democrats of undertaking.

President Obama’s suggested budget was described in newspapers as everything from “not serious” to “a joke” partly because it failed to address entitlement spending at all. Obama has been accused of playing political games with the deficit; almost daring Republicans to address transfer payments. The theory is that whatever changes the Republicans suggest, Democrats will accuse Republicans of “putting Grandma on a 9 Lives diet”.

My belief is that if Republicans follow my suggestion and eliminate money-pit federal programs first, the Democrats' high-level hypocrisy on the budget will stand starkly highlighted against a background of self-serving demagoguery. If that happens then the corrections to entitlement spending has a chance to be made law.

The 800-pound gorilla won’t go away until he is dealt with properly, but the political game of “Economic Chicken” needs to be made meaningless first. The only way to do that is to address other spending cuts first and to do so brutally.

The Economy Strikes Back

When it comes to running the country, left wing politicos have more morally corrupt ideas than an imaginative college freshman stranded on a desert island with nothing but Angelina Jolie, Katy Perry and an industrial-size barrel of Wesson Oil. There are two differences though. First, the three castaways won’t spend your retirement funds and your kids’ college tuition money while telling you to “go along or go to jail.” Second, the college freshman won’t spend his spare time trying to run an economy he doesn’t understand while taking some citizens’ money and giving it to other citizens.

I’m not the first to say it, but Congress has a spending problem. I’ve seen cats in a field of catnip who display more self-control. It’s time to free the economy: reduce regulations, reduce spending and get out of the way.

The ugly truth is that no matter how ridiculous or specialized a Congressional spending item is, there is someone who will scream bloody murder if that item is cut from the budget. Understand that someone was influential enough to get that silly item put in the budget to begin with, so chances are someone in Congress will listen when the wailing begins. There is no such thing as a painless reduction in federal spending and that’s what Congress is hoping for. Guess what, Washington? The Great Pumpkin ain’t comin’ this year, either.

To reduce the federal budget is going to be painful, but it must be done. Freezing our spending levels, as President Obama suggested, will not work and neither will timid reductions of spending. Put down the paring knife and pick up the cleaver.

The argument is going to be that it took years to raise federal spending to this level so it will take years to reduce it. That is wrong and a non-starter. The more quickly we reduce spending, the less painful the overall result will be.

It’s not a matter of trimming programs. It’s a matter of cutting entire programs. Programs which are outside the scope of the federal budget need to be completely scrapped. Hello and goodbye to the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, a whole bunch of subsidies and regulatory restrictions that benefit some special interest groups at the expense of taxpayers. And that is the beginning of the beginning.

One thing that can be done that will have an effect within 18 months: “Drill here, Drill now, Pay less.” Directional drilling from existing oil platforms can be used and we can see a domestic oil production increase that soon. In the meantime, drop ethanol subsidies.

Subsidies for ethanol can be immediately scrapped and I’m sure Archer-Daniels-Midland will recover nicely. Less expensive cereals, milk and beef will be the result of canning that failed experiment and American families can use that reduction in food prices. Corn was never, ever the best source of ethanol, but even if we used better sources, such as sugar cane, the government would still have to subsidize ethanol and that’s an expense we can drop. As Thomas Jefferson said, “If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should all want bread.”

This is no time for sacred cows. Fire up the grill and let the slaughter begin – with absolutely no apologies to the PC Police. It’s time to be honest. This is a real crisis. Not the namby-pamby “crises” that liberals evoke every few years. The economy is now our enemy. We abused it in such dire fashion, that I can’t blame it. Debt is about to lay waste to our country and the federal government has been encouraging it to do so for over 70 years.

There are many other federal programs and subsidies that can be terminated immediately. While Congress is at it, they should also look at regulations which are unnecessary and negatively impact businesses. I wonder if the country is ready for “Free the Economy” bumper stickers. I think it’s about time.