Obama and the Destruction of America's Economy
The most preventable financial disaster in history

President Obama is the stock market's worst nightmare.  A few weeks before the November 2008 election, when it became evident that Obama might win, big money began to leave the stock market in search of safer homes — such as gold or silver.  Or Switzerland.  The Dow lost 1,342 points between the November 4th election and November 13.*  The investors on Wall Street know what socialism can do to large companies, and they expressed their disapproval.

Obama's grandiose plans to spend trillions of dollars on laundry list of liberal politicians' projects has made the situation far worse.  (See Pork products in the bailout bill and in the stimulus bill.)

If Mr. Obama was in fact an enemy saboteur, trying to do everything possible to wreck America's economy, what would he be doing differently?  Not much.  This is even more disturbing because we know the Barack Obama is a man with a mysterious past, he used to be an anti-capitalist troublemaker, he apparently hates America, and he is gradually weakening America's defenses.

Subsections on this page include:

A few words about Obama's latest budget proposal

Obama's self-inflicted economic collapse

Nationalizing the banks

Obama opposes capitalism

Massive spending and the fast track to socialism

Tea parties and other organized rejection of Obama's plans

    ... including town hall meetings

    ... where we are getting a taste of the Obama thugocracy.

    Which side is using "astroturf?"

    Town hall meetings by phone

A few words about FDR's New Deal

The use of AIG as a scapegoat


On other nearby pages:

Lies about job creation and stimulus money

Nationalizing General Motors and Chrysler

Cash for Clunkers

Obama was seen as a big spender long before the presidential election.

Obama spends our money on himself.

Obama's proposed 2012 budget.

New:  Calls for Obama's impeachment.



Obama's self-inflicted economic collapse

President Obama appears (to me anyway) to be trying to arrange for American capitalism to fail, so that he can revolutionize the country.  That's what "community organizers" do — although not usually on such a massive scale.

Clean-energy hostages.  After failing to crush the coal industry with the ill-fated Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, Mr. Obama has since loosed his regulatory agencies, especially the thuggish Environmental Protection Agency.  The EPA is on the verge of proposing its greenhouse gas emission rules for power plants — the "cap" part of cap-and-trade — despite ongoing litigation over their legality.  One concern is that the rules as implemented will block the construction of new coal-fired power plants — the very same sort of power that safely provides about 45 percent of U.S. electricity.

CBO: Obama's Policies to Increase National Debt 47 Percent to $21.7 Trillion by 2022.  The Congressional Budget Office projects that the national debt under President Obama's policies will rise to $21.665 trillion by 2022, according to its updated budget outlook.  The updated outlook, released Tuesday [1/31/2012], found that current Obama administration policies will result in a 50 percent increase in debt held by the public and a 40 percent increase in intra-governmental debt held in the trust funds of entitlement programs.

$5 Trillion and Change.  The political strategy behind Obamanomics was always simple:  Call for "stimulus" to rescue the economy, run up the debt with the biggest spending blitz in 60 years, and then when the deficit explodes call for higher taxes.  The Congressional Budget Office annual review released yesterday [1/31/2012] shows this is all on track.

Our "Interesting" President.  Americans need jobs, but Obama is just out to save his.  This detachment is nothing new.  We saw it in the State of the Union — when the president repeated old, broken promises but gave no mention to the millions of unemployed Americans he's ignored or the trillions of dollars in debt he's created.  We saw it also with the Keystone energy pipeline.  America had an opportunity for a source of affordable, secure energy, but the president blocked it.

Juan Williams plays dumb.  [Scroll down]  I am not saying that no conservatives are racist.  What I am saying is that the trumped up charge of racism is a diversion from the real issue:  President Obama is bankrupting the country.  He expanded the welfare state to the point where you get 2 years of unemployment, not simply the 6 months your employer's insurance purchased.  Spending on entitlements skyrocketed on his watch.  So have false charges of racism from the Left.

President Obama's Civilian Soldiers.  To me, everything about President Obama makes sense. ... He is doing exactly what his liberal base wants him to do.  He is doing Keynesian stimulus, taking care that most of it goes to Democrats.  He is doing clean energy, regulating the environment, canceling pipelines, carrying water for unions, cutting defense.  He has held off Republicans that want to cut and slash spending.  He is a liberal dream.

Let's Honor, Not Stretch, the Buckley Rule.  As we march inexorably toward socialism by incremental steps, the need to elect political leaders to take steps to reverse it increases on a linear plane.  But with President Obama, we're advancing not by incremental steps, but by giant leaps, hurtling toward statism with alarming alacrity.  Every day that passes before we implement entitlement reform, for example, the geometric accumulation of vested benefits makes reform more imperative — and more difficult. ... Based on the cavalier manner with which Obama is lawlessly thwarting the Constitution and the people's will, it is hard to imagine what kind of tyrannical executive power grabs he'd try (and accomplish) if re-elected, even with an opposing Congress.

Rejection of Keystone XL a Hammer Blow to Economy.  Obama has blocked a project that would have given the United States a secure and safe pipeline that would have fed our economy with 700,000 barrels of oil every day — and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.  And this from our most trusted and closest trading partner, Canada.  That's nearly half of what the United States receives from the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, which is shaping up to be the next global flashpoint for military conflict.  If that does happen, Obama will learn just how it feels to be "rushed" into a decision about energy policy.

Destroying America by Denying Access to Energy.  It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world's greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.  It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue.

Obama loves oil! Not!  Without his nose growing visibly, the President claimed the government was behind the technological advances that led to the current shale gas boom, and even suggested that he might take credit for the rise in domestic oil production.  In fact, Mr. Obama's administration has hampered and castigated oil companies at every turn.  In the light of the hysterical grandstanding over the BP Gulf spill (whose impact proved to be greatly exaggerated), it was ironic indeed to hear the President now declare a great opening up of offshore exploration.

Natural gas sector set up by Obama to be sabotaged?  President Obama spoke of the role natural gas must play in America's energy future during his State of the Union address last week, but industry insiders fear it's merely lip service designed to distract from what they consider the administration's behind-the-scenes plan to sabotage the sector. ... At the same time the president boasts of the nation's vast shale gas deposits, his EPA is poised to make extracting that fuel much more difficult.  The agency will this year release a widely anticipated study on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the use of water, sand and chemical mixtures to crack underground rock and release huge quantities of gas.

Obama's Social Justice Capitalism.  Certainly the Obama administration will stoop to anything to get votes for the next election.  The latest outrageous example is using the U.S. Export-Import bank (taxpayer-funded) to channel funds to attract business to the swing states of North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia.  So, yes, from crony capitalism to vote-buying capitalism, the Obama administration will use any siphoning of taxpayer funds to pump capital where it sees political advantage.  But to leave it at that — self-interest — is to miss the narcissistic sense of moral superiority.

Obama's next bailout.  The fraudulent practices of the mortgage servicers have injected an untold number of forged documents into the legal system, jeopardizing the clean titles to millions of homes around the country.  The costs of cleaning up this legal mess will most likely be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, yet this settlement would let Wall Street settle up with the state AGs for just $25 billion.  Worse yet, most of this money would come from the pockets of investors who now own the mortgages, not from the perpetrators of fraud, and the rest would come out of the pockets of bank shareholders rather than from the miscreants who perpetrated the fraud.

Keystone XL and Obama's Subjugation Economics.  What needs to be appreciated is that, concerning Keystone, Mr. Obama and the left aren't just blinkered ideologues with good intentions.  Seriously, how can the president not know that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline will cost thousands of jobs along with many collateral economic benefits to the nation?  Doesn't Keystone equal improved energy independence and doesn't that consideration cross Mr. Obama's radar?  On both counts, yes.  Mr. Obama isn't a useful idiot; he's a user of idiots.

Obama chooses American decline.  Which nation will be the world's leading superpower a few decades from now?  I fervently hope it is the United States, and I have great faith in American ingenuity.  But the Obama administration's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline is a reminder of why our No. 1 position is in jeopardy.

A pipeline gift to China.  Disappoint our closest geographic ally (and biggest trading partner), maintain dependence on OPEC oil — and give America's biggest global rival a boost in its quest for precious oil resources?  Not a bad day's work, Mr. President.

Obama the Job-Killer.  Republicans shouldn't let a single day go by without reminding voters of the Keystone pipeline, the most visible symbol of the Obama administration's hostility to economic growth and job creation.

Who is the Real Barack Obama?  According to our President's new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has "never worked."  He argues that its appeal can't be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans' preference for an economic ideology that "fits well on a bumper sticker."  He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government.  He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.  But Obama's knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter.

Obama rejects the Keystone XL pipeline and blames Congress.
 The Anti-Jobs President.  The central conflict of the Obama Presidency has been between the jobs and growth crisis he inherited and the President's [eager] pursuit of his larger social-policy ambitions.  The tragedy is that the economic recovery has been so lackluster because the second impulse keeps winning.  Yesterday came proof positive with the White House's repudiation of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada's $7 billion shovel-ready project that would support tens of thousands of jobs if only it could get the requisite U.S. permits.  Those jobs, apparently, can wait.

Obama 'End of America-Ism": Sad Variant of Global Warming Alarmism.  Obama's presidency has been very unfortunate for his embrace of nearly every fallacious economic argument under the sun.  Obama believes we're made better off economically when the most productive around us have their wealth redistributed away from them, he believes a cheap dollar that erodes our savings/paychecks in concert with reducing company-creating investment is a positive, and perhaps scariest of all, he believes that productivity (think computers, factory automation) is the source of our nosebleed levels of unemployment.  Obama is an embarrassment (as was his dollar-cheapening, bailout loving predecessor in the White House) to this great nation...

Dems propose 'Reasonable Profits Board' to regulate oil company profits.  Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a "Reasonable Profits Board" to control gas profits.  The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation.  The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

Inside the latest debt limit fracas:  Well, that didn't take long.  We've run out of money again as a country and need to borrow another trillion or so.  Remember that end-of-the-world scuffle last summer over the debt ceiling ...?

Obama's War on U.S. Energy.  If a foreign nation had launched an attack on America to destroy its coal-fired plants, to shut down its coal mines, and to thwart its ability to drill for oil and natural gas, we would be at war with it.  Obama is at war with America.  Between the waste of billions squandered on "Green" energy and the attacks on all aspects of the energy industries in America, the one reason to defeat Obama is your ability to turn on the lights, turn on your computer, and ensure that American business and industry has the energy necessary to exist and compete.

Obama asks Congress for $1.2 trillion increase in nation's borrowing limit.  President Obama formally notified Congress on Thursday [1/12/2012] of his intent to raise the nation's debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion, two weeks after he had postponed the request to give lawmakers more time to consider the action.  Congress will have had 15 days to say no before the nation's debt ceiling automatically is raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion.

Expert: Obama 'spending us into poor house'.  President Barack Obama is seeking another $1.2-trillion increase in the debt ceiling, and one expert on the subject isn't surprised.  Brian Darling, senior fellow for government studies at The Heritage Foundation, says the request for a debt ceiling increase is something his organization has expected from the White House for quite some time.

Our Trojan Horse president.  I was thinking about writing a novel about what might happen if a man who hates America and wants to bring it down is somehow elected president.  What would he do? ... First, the Trojan Horse president would initiate unprecedented spending, driving the debt up by more than $4 trillion just in the first three years.  Much of the money would go into the pockets of political supporters and people who donate heavily to his campaigns.  He would ram through an unreadable law allowing the federal government to seize the health care system, which would transform citizens into beholden subjects.

Obama's Poverty Politics.  Americans should have comprehended Obama's redistribution agenda back in 2008.  As is so often true of Barack Obama, one hears only rare flashes of truth from him when his teleprompter is Missing in Action.  He has slipped more than once.  There was his "spread the wealth" comment to Joe the Plumber.  Before that widely noted revelation, there was his 2008 declaration that he would hike capital gain taxes even if it failed to raise revenues because of "fairness."  He was — and is — willing to trade losses in jobs and wages to advance his leveling ideology.

Obama's Job-Killing Machine Rolls On.  President Obama tells anyone who'll listen that from dawn until dusk he's focused on job creation.  Apparently, no one in his administration listens, since day after day they keep making job-killing decisions.

Running the USA into the Ground.  Why are we holding our breath hoping that Congress will let us purchase Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulbs, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era?  Little wonder that the polls demonstrate the record-setting low esteem in which Congress is held.  It is running the nation into the ground.  To the belated astonishment of everyone, the nation is led by the President whose greatest achievements have been to destroy jobs and plunge the nation into unimaginable debt.

Obama is achieving his goal of higher energy costs.  As CNBC reported earlier this week, the typical American family will spend the largest portion ever of its budget — 8.4 percent — on gasoline this year.  Economists expect the average price of a gallon of gas to be $3.53, a 76-cent increase over 2010.  Growing world demand for gas caused by economic expansion in China and India only partially explains this increase.  Obama's environmental and energy policies are also a key reason why prices are constantly heading higher.

Obamacare Abominations.  President Obama says his health care "reform" will be good for business.  Business has learned the truth.  Three successful businessmen explained to me how Obamacare is a reason that unemployment stays high.  Its length and complexity make businessmen wary of expanding.

Obama's Regulatory Burden.  In the next few days, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue another final regulation directed at electricity utilities.  This rule, known as the Utility MACT, will impose an estimated $11 billion each year in new costs on our economy.  It will threaten electricity-generating capacity in many parts of the country.  And it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this administration's runaway rulemaking.

More about the EPA.

Incompetence and downgrade.  [Scroll down]  Thanks to Obama, chronic unemployment is now worse than it was during the Great Depression.  Only one President since 1890 has a worse record on unemployment than Barack Obama — and that is because the first two and a half years of Herbert Hoover's term in office was during the Great Depression.  President Obama promised "fundamental transformation," and he has certainly delivered on that score.

This was written in January, 2009:
 Markets and Marxists Don't Mix.  Investors have taken massive amounts of money out of the markets in a very short period, resulting in a worldwide markets crash in the range of $30 trillion and counting.  Given the extremely poor performance of all socialist governments, no investor is willing to leave his assets exposed to leftist incompetence, corruption, or confiscation.  Obama may have thought it a good idea to spread Joe the Plumber's wealth around, but millions of investors with trillions of dollars at stake pointedly declined to share Joe's fate, and unlike Joe, they had a choice in the matter.  When these investors and their money departed, pension and retirement funds were left holding a hugely reduced bag.

The Corporate Psychopaths Among Us.  A return to a culture of corporate stability and long term employment would help.  We certainly cannot continue in the direction the Democratic Party is taking us without becoming as broke as Greece, or the Soviet Union.  All tools, including the ballot box, should be used to correct the financial disaster that threatens.

Obama's Regulatory Burden.  In the next few days, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue another final regulation directed at electricity utilities.  This rule, known as the Utility MACT, will impose an estimated $11 billion each year in new costs on our economy.  It will threaten electricity-generating capacity in many parts of the country.  And it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this administration's runaway rulemaking.

The destroyer of the American Nation.  From the beginning of his Administration, Obama has had one primary goal:  the willful and deliberate destruction of the American nation as it was founded.  Sounds incredible?  When one considers his words and actions, it is the only conclusion one can reach.

Obama is the Jobs Grinch.  Labor Department numbers came out recently showing soft job-creation for the month of November.  This is nothing new, of course.  Job-creation has been weaker than expected ever since Obama began his attack on capitalism.

Obama's Keystone cop-out.  President Obama has done everything in his power to keep oil from flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline.  TransCanada says this $13 billion project would put 20,000 to work immediately, but the Obama administration wants none of it.

Obama's Tax Policies Have A Depression-Era Look.  Pushing his agenda for higher taxes on "the rich," President Obama kicked off his Dec. 6 speech in Kansas by saying his Kansas grandparents "shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression."  In fact, the 1929 stock market crash turned into the long-running Great Depression because the counterproductive soak-the-rich policies of the federal government hadn't "triumphed" in reversing the downturn.

A Country Music Star's Take on Obama's Budget Plan.  My song, "The Obama Budget Plan" (which you can see here on YouTube), explains that President Obama's budget plan is to spend as much of our money as he wants, on anything he wants and pay for it by just printing more money.  The fact is, President Obama doesn't really seem to have a plan at all.  His administration has been working without a budget for almost three years now.  Not only that but the president seems to view having to consult with Congress as an inconvenience and he tries to go around them at every turn.

Obama Blocks The Biggest Shovel-Ready Project Ever.  The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada.  There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree.

Americans Have Endured Enough.  The Republican argument, it seems to me, goes something like this:  virtually every economic indicator is worse since Obama took office.  That's true whether we're talking about unemployment, the deficit, the debt, America's credit rating, consumer confidence, the housing market, health care costs, poverty, food stamps, and more.  We're setting records we haven't seen since the Great Depression, and in some instances records worse than the Great Depression.  But if you don't feel like America has suffered enough — if you are thirsting for more stagnation, less growth, higher unemployment, and more misery — then Barack Obama is your man.

Obama's Design for Defeat.  Obama has assembled a re-election track record that only Hugo Chávez could envy.  Casually presiding over the nation's deepest economic catastrophe since the 1930s.  Twenty million hopelessly unemployed.  Blithely deconstructing the nation's health care system, while bankrupting providers and consumers.  Relentlessly enabling the assault on energy production and industrial competitiveness through a suffocating regulatory autocracy.  Gleefully declaring war on private property, trumpeting his alliance with the OSW anarchists.

Obama's Job-Killing Global-Warming Agenda Continues Under the Radar.  With little attention and fanfare, the United Nations kicked off its latest global-warming conference — this time in Durban, South Africa.  Their mission:  to extend the Kyoto Protocol.  But as Bloomberg reports, Japan, Russia and Canada will not renew their commitments, and, of course, the United States will never sign on without commitments from China and India.  The Kyoto process is essentially dead — and even President Obama is acknowledging it, much to the chagrin of his left-wing environmental base.

FATCA: A Ticking Time Bomb for the Economy.  Buried in an ostensible jobs bill signed by President Obama last year is a little-noticed job-destroying government regulation that threatens to trigger a massive outflow of capital from the American economy.

Fast Trains and Slow, Puny, Expensive Cars.  Because the Obama EPA has declared carbon dioxide a 'pollutant,' and because cars emit CO2, [EPA administrator Lisa] Jackson is citing the Clean Air Act in her bid to commandeer Detroit."  The Journal reports that even the EPA's own (no doubt low-ball) estimates show that the rule will cost $157 billion and raise the price of cars by $3,100 per vehicle.

Bye Bye Biden?  The declining economy has hit people on both ends of the economic spectrum, with the number of taxpayers with more than $1 million of income declining from from 400,000 back in 2007 to just 235,000 in 2009, and the number of people 16 older who have been unemployed over a year going from an average of 1.3 million in the last three recessions to 4.3 million in 2010.  The Obama economy is the worst America has seen in four decades, with payroll employment today 5% lower than it was 41 months ago.  Over the past three years, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has been higher than at any time since World War II, adding $4 trillion to our national debt.

Obama's Disastrous Energy Record:  The U.S. State Department recently delayed approval of the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline until at least early 2013.  This pipeline was to have run from Western Canada's Alberta province all the way down to the U.S. Gulf Coast.  It would have provided for 500,000-700,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada, one of our closest allies.  But the Obama administration cowered to some protests of extremist environmentalists in Nebraska and thus decided to punt the decision until after the 2012 elections.  It's been estimated that the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline would have produced 20,000 jobs across the Midwest and South as well as 118,000 spin-off jobs.

Obama's Job-Destroying Machine Grinds On.  I can't figure out whether it is due to malice or incompetence; all I know is, if you wanted to hurt America's economy, you would do pretty much everything the Obama administration does.  Energy policy is the absolute worst. ... In the unlikely event that Obama is re-elected, the only constraint on his economically destructive policies will be gone, and we can expect him to do everything possible to kill energy production and destroy job creation.

Obama's Energy Plan: Chevy Volt.  We hear much these days about all the jobs "saved or created" but hear little about jobs slashed or destroyed.  In many ways, the Obama administration has become a job-wrecking machine.  According to Forbes in the same Politico op-ed piece, the six-month gulf drilling moratorium alone cost 8,169 jobs and $487 million in wages, not to mention the sweeping effects on the trucking and agriculture industries.

'Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone'.  A west Georgia business owner is stirring up controversy with signs he posted on his company's trucks, for all to see as the trucks roll up and down roads, highways and interstates:  "New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone."  "Can't afford it," explained the employer, Bill Looman, Tuesday evening.  "I've got people that I want to hire now, but I just can't afford it.  And I don't foresee that I'll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C."

If you cross Obama, expect a visit from the secret police.
 Secret Service visits Ga. man "not hiring until Obama gone".  A Waco, Ga., businessman has stirred up a load of controversy due to signs he posted on his company's trucks that say:  "New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone," reports Atlanta Business Chronicle broadcast partner WXIA-TV.

Georgia Businessman Refuses to Hire Until Obama Is Fired.  A Georgia businessman has an ultimatum for America:  Fire President Obama, or he will not hire any more workers.  Bill Looman, owner of U.S. Cranes LLC, said he is fed up with the bad economy and D.C. politicians who do nothing to solve the problem.  So until there is a change of leadership, his company trucks will bear the message:  "New Company Policy: We Are Not Hiring Until Obama Is Gone."  "The message that I tried to put in there is that I cannot afford it," Looman told ABC News.  "I just cannot afford to hire anybody right now."

What Change Looks Like Under Obama.  Since the president raised the issue himself, why don't we sketch out what "change looks like" under the stewardship of Obama.  Some of the highlights:
  •   A misery index that is at a 28-year high.
  •   America's credit rating downgraded for the first time in American history.
  •   A standard of living for Americans that has fallen further and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the government began recording it five decades ago.
  •   An unemployment rate that now stands at 9.0 percent.

There Are No Longer Any Excuses For Obamanomics.  Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.  Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.  Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression.  Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well.  Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.

'Lazy' Isn't America's problem.  President Obama was wrong to say at the Asia-Pacific economic summit that America has gotten "lazy" in the last few decades at attracting foreign investment.  What he should have said, in light of his administration's handling of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, is that America has become quite adept at blocking it.

Powering Down: Federal regulation is killing energy development.  American energy policy is increasingly defined in terms of what is prohibited, not what is promoted.  Coal, nuclear, and natural "shale" gas all have been hampered by the current administration.

Stop the spending.  President Obama is burning a hole in Uncle Sam's pocket.  Since he won the White House in 2009, the public debt has swelled by $4.3 trillion.  Instead of trying to stem this flow of red ink, Mr. Obama is campaigning for more spending with a $467 billion stimulus bill.  He doesn't get it.

The Editor says...
 Or maybe he understands exactly what he's doing, and is intentionally crushing the U.S. economy.

President blames America while running economy into the ground.  President Obama is overseas on a nine-day Blame America First tour.  He's ostensibly spending time on the other side of the Pacific to explore ways the United States can work better with Asian economies.  Instead, he's using his time in the spotlight to criticize the nation he's supposed to be leading.

Obama's New Job Plan: Kill 400,000 Jobs Immediately.  The decision by the Obama administration to delay any action on the XL Keystone pipeline until after the election is a fitting development for an administration that has pursued a bankrupt energy policy, a bankrupt jobs policy and is quite literally bankrupting the country with politics thinly veiled as policy.

Obama delays oil pipeline plan, discards 20,000 jobs.  Roughly 20,000 oil industry construction jobs are being thrown under Obama's 2012 campaign bus, largely because the president needs to pump up his sagging support among the environmentalists.

Sticking Our Head In Tar Sands.  The administration plans to study rerouting the Keystone XL pipeline until after next year's election, delaying needed jobs and energy.  By that time, Canada's oil will be on its way to China.

Canada Looks to Asia after Oil Pipeline Delay.  Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is disappointed with the Obama administration's decision to delay construction of TransCanada Corp.'s $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.  The delay is designed not to ruffle environmentalists feathers before next year's election.  Harper says Canada won't wait and will start selling more of its energy products to Asia.

Purposeful inaction is a form of passive-aggressive behavior.*
 Obama declares war on mousepads and coffee mugs in bid to trim government's excessive spending.  The President has begun a war against mousepads, coffee mugs and other commemorative items in a bid to curb unnecessary government spending and tackle America's $14 trillion deficit.  This week he signed an executive order directing government agencies to cut back on 'extraneous promotional items', which the White House says cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year.

The Editor says...
 In the time it took President Obama to sign this executive order, the US government spent more money on welfare entitlements and bureaucracies than it has ever spent on mouse pads, coffee mugs and trinkets.

The very same day...
 No swag rule in diplomacy.  First lady Michelle Obama presented sterling silver orchid brooches and sterling silver cufflinks with Hawaiian Koa Wood to the leaders and spouses who gathered for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

1,000 Days Of Economic Destruction.  So, how are we doing economically in the 1,000 days since Obama took office?  Here's the Scorecard:  The government has spent more than $9.6 trillion in 1,000 days, which is about 60% more than the revenues it took in.  GNP (the Gross National Product has fallen 9%.  Industrial production has plunged 30%. ... The National Debt sits at $15 trillion, up $4.2 trillion just since Obama took office.  The national debt is now at 98.2% of GNP.  And for the last three years we have spent $4.2 billion more than we take in — every day!  Over 2.2 million jobs have been lost.  4.5 million people have been unemployed for more than one year; the jobless are now out of work an average of 40 weeks — twice as long as they were before Obama took office.  The only real jobs gain had been in the government sector — 140,000 jobs that add nothing to the economy.  12 million more people are on food stamps, and 3 million more Americans live in poverty than when Obama took office.  There've been 4 million bankruptcies and 2.4 million foreclosed homes. ... Seventeen of Obama's most senior economic advisers have quit.

President Obama Promotes Plan to Raise College Tuitions.  By limiting student obligations to repay, and by passing more of the repayment burden onto taxpayers, colleges and universities will be able to continue to raise tuitions at a rate that outpaces nearly every other cost center in the American economy.

Does America Deserve Obama?  Ronald Reagan used to say that liberals know only how to tax and spend.  If there was ever a man who embodies that aphorism, it is Barack Obama.  He has no clue as to how a free-market economy works or why it produces economic prosperity.  Obama continues to insist that government should determine what energy technologies we're going to have.  Thus the debacle of Solyndra.  Five hundred million dollars went down the drain needlessly.  Government can't pick winners because it doesn't know how to do so.  If a centrally planned socialist system worked, it would have produced prosperity in China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea.  It didn't.  Only a free-market system knows how to efficiently distribute resources.

Obama's Economic Record: The Worst Since Hoover.  It's reasonable to assume that Mr. Obama will face re-election with the highest unemployment rate of any post-war president.  If the current rate of hiring continues, under Mr. Obama's stewardship the nation will have actually lost jobs, a stunning achievement in its own way.  Indeed, Obama is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.  The unemployment rate will be significantly higher than when he took office.  Chronic unemployment is worse than it was during the Great Depression.  And during the Obama presidency the United States saw its bond rating downgraded for the first time in history.  There's more.

Professor Obama's Investing 101.  Here's a great business model.  Start your company with the idea that it's going to go bankrupt.  Then, when it folds, inform your investors that the business was a success because it did exactly what you expected.  That's more or less what Obama has done with every "investment" government has made over [the] past three years. ... Obama's socialism has produced nothing, in fact, except the prospect of permanent unemployment for 25 million Americans and declining incomes for the rest.  This is what happens when we have a president who thinks that profit is a dirty word and capitalism is evil.

Obamaland: American Mules Must Eat Certified Weed-Free Hay.  In Montana's Finley Basin there are known tungsten deposits.  An Australian company wanted to bring revenue and jobs to the state by developing the resource.  While the property was successfully drilled and recognized by Union Carbide in the seventies, it is now about 200 yards inside a roadless study area.  The Forest Service was willing to offer a conditional drilling permit.  Among the conditions were these requirements:
  •   The drill sites must be cleared using hand tools,
  •   The drilling equipment and fuel must be transported to the site by a team of pack mules,
  •   The mules must be fed certified weed-free hay, and
  •   Drill site and trail reclamation must be done using hand tools.
The company gave up.  How can America remain competitive in a global marketplace when we are required to use pick axes and mules?  How does this help America's heavy equipment manufacturers like Caterpillar?  No wonder we are in trouble.

Monster Prediction From BofA: Another US Debt Downgrade Is Coming In Just A Few Weeks.  In an analyst note, Bofa/ML Ethan S. Harris drops a bit of a bombshell prediction:  ["]We expect a moderate slowdown in the beginning of next year, as two small policy shocks — another debt downgrade and fiscal tightening — hit the economy.  The "not-so-super" Deficit Commission is very unlikely to come up with a credible deficit-reduction plan.["]

Obama promised to bankrupt coal in 2008.  Imagine if John McCain had whispered somewhere that he was willing to bankrupt a major industry?  Would this declaration not immediately be front page news?  Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview.  The result?  Nothing.  This audio interview has been hidden from the public... until now.

Obama Is Occupying America.  The scope of Obama's undertaking has been breathtaking, as has been his level of deceit in promoting and implementing it. ... He loaded his omnibus spending bill with earmarks after promising he'd radically reduce them, took over auto companies, crammed through socialized medicine and pushed through a staggeringly problematic financial reform bill that further empowered the government to engage in the same types of tyranny that led to all this.  Though he failed to pass his cap-and-trade measure, his Environmental Protection Agency has engaged in a systematic pattern of circumventing Congress to impose further smothering regulations on American businesses.

Liberal Conceit And The Havoc It Has Wrought On Our Nation.  Obama and the Democrats stand atop a growing, potentially permanent pile of economic and political rubble for which they must account to their own consciences.  Risking the nation and messing up the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of people for generations to come is a moral outrage.  There is nothing smart or compassionate about running up government debt to record levels at record speed and having nothing to show for it except an impaired credit rating, chronic 9% unemployment, the home ownership rate at its lowest point since 1965 and the smallest portion of the population actually working at jobs since 1983.

OSHA is another Obama agency gone rogue.  [Scroll down]  OSHA has issued this directive under the assumption that a vague clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act gives OSHA the power to cite employers for something as specific and unpredictable as workplace violence.  Known as the "General Duty Clause," this provision requires employers to keep their workplaces "free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm" to employees.  Congress intended for this clause to be used only as a temporary measure, until OSHA could draft rules regarding specific hazards that had the agency had not yet addressed.  It was not intended to be used as a means for OSHA to issue citations for anything under the sun.

Obama versus Alinsky.  Rep. Allen West said the other day that he believes Barack Obama is intentionally destroying our economy.  He said, "It's intentional because that's who this President is.  The President is a Marxist who believes in the separation of classes."  Let's talk about this idea that Obama may actually be engaged in a conscious attempt to damage the American economy.  If so, there's actually a manual for that!  Complete step-by-step instructions on how to wreck a private capitalist economy.  It was written by a Marxist named Sul Alinsky, and it's titled "Rules for Radicals."

The Demander-in-Chief Bus Tour.  Obama proposed a tax on business jets earlier this year — has he ever really backed off that demand? — showing that he doesn't understand what business jets are used for.  Business jets are used to increase productivity in a global world.  The ability to get to and from somewhere across the globe quickly is often the difference between doing business and losing business.  This is why businesses order jets.  They help increase sales.

A Disastrous Presidency.  Barack Obama is a perfect storm.  If he had intended to destroy the economy and trash employment while exploding the deficit and the national debt, he couldn't have done a better job.

The Editor says...
 I believe that was exactly his intention, and still is.

Obama's premeditated murder of America.  It is now crystal clear that Obama is pushing America into the certainty of a socialist state.  Pretending it isn't happening is not doing anything to stop the greatest nation ever paid for in blood and sacrifice from disappearing forever from a predator weary world.  It is patently clear that Obama is as much "your agent of change" as Raila Odinga, the despot he actively campaigned for one year before he ran for his own presidential election in 2008.

How much is too much profit? Ask Obama.  Barack Obama believes he should decide how much we should earn. ... Only in a government-controlled economy does the leader get to decide how much someone can earn.  We are not there yet despite our President's seeming agenda to take us there.  But this is not the first time he expressed his belief that he can decide how much someone should earn.

Obama Might Be a Socialist.  [Recently], Howard Dean gave a speech where he insinuated that anyone who says "Obama is a Socialist" is crazy, ignorant, racist, or extreme.  Funny, a recent national poll shows that a majority (55%) of Americans believe "Socialist" best describes Obama.  Another poll shows the Democrat Party is filled with people who identify with Socialism.  I say, it's time for them to come out of the closet.  I ought to know.  I was Obama's college classmate at Columbia University Class of '83.  Our college was dominated by Socialists and Marxists who hated capitalism and America.

Obama: Banks Don't Have 'Inherent Right' to 'Certain Amount of Profit'.  President Obama suggested on Monday [10/3/2011] that the nation's banks should "take a little bit less of a profit" rather than raise fees on customers.  In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama was asked if the government can stop banks from imposing a new debit card fee on their customers.

Sen. Inhofe: Obama's EPA Waging War on Fossil Fuels.  "The President of the United States wants to destroy American energy," said Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee.  "His intention is to kill fossil fuels, which we rely on for 99% of the energy in America.  "All of this killing of our energy supply is not by accident.  It's on purpose."

Let Them Eat Windmills.  The White House recently announced a "jobs plan" that will cost American taxpayers about $500 billion starting in 2013 for a government spending spree today.  We knew what to expect:  green-energy subsidies, tax breaks for people who already pay no income tax, further stimulus for non-shovel-ready projects, increased taxes on the wealthy — in short, most anything except what would actually create jobs, namely lifting the prohibitive regulatory and tax burdens on the nation's job creators.  Obama's policies — particularly his heartless energy policies — promise to eliminate many more jobs than they create.

5 Major Ways The Obama Administration Is Killing American Jobs.  [#4] Spending:  Even though Barack Obama promised to "cut the deficit in half by the end of his term," he's gone on the single biggest wasteful spending spree in recorded human history.  Obama didn't start the bailouts, but he continued them, he pushed through a trillion dollar stimulus that did almost nothing for the economy, and he created a new entitlement program that, despite phony budget projections, everyone knows will add trillions to the debt.

Now the government is recommending against the use of concrete and steel.
 USDA Sees Wood, Even From Diseased Trees, As 'Preferred Green Building Material'.  A new study by the U.S. Forest Service says wood — including that from diseased trees — should be considered a "primary" material in green building because it is more environmentally friendly than materials such as concrete and steel.

Barack Obama, Democratic Wrecking Ball.  It may be that Barack Obama will do to the Democratic Party what no one, not even Ronald Reagan, could achieve — which is to bring it to its knees.

Obama's Fascist Economy.  Barack Obama and his minions in the administration as well as many Democrats in the Congress are often described as Socialists, or in the extreme as Marxists.  However, their actions and strategy are straight out of the fascist economic playbook. ... Socialism/Marxism seeks the total control of a society's economy through complete state control of the means of production and income.  Fascism seeks that same control, indirectly by the state domination of private ownership, as well as controlling individual income and wealth through taxation and regulation.

CEA president Gary Shapiro calls Obama admin 'most anti-business' in his lifetime.  [Gary] Shapiro, who is the president and CEO of the Consumers Electronics Association, told The Daily Caller in a recent interview that President Obama is presiding over an administration that is the most hostile to business in his memory.  "You have investigations and breakdowns of companies like Gibson.  You have monopoly investigations of great American companies like Google.  You have an attack on American business which is unprecedented by this administration at different levels.  This is the most anti-business administration in my lifetime," he said.

Trucking Industry Collapsing Under Regulation.  One of the most regulated industries in the United States is over-the-road trucking.  Nearly anything you have in your house, from light bulbs, to toilet paper, to your flat-screen television, was delivered to where you bought it by truck — indeed, 70 percent of all goods travel by truck.  And every year, more regulations are piled on top of one of the key industries for the American economy.

Green Twilight.  It's often been said that Obama is a closet Marxist out to transform the U.S. into something resembling a people's republic.  I've never completely agreed with this contention.  For one thing, he's not precisely a Marxist; he's a Marxisant, a useful French word denoting someone who has memorized all the slogans while not bothering his head with any of the theory.  "Spread the wealth around" is a pure Marxisant statement, just as his attempts to stir up class hatred against private jet-owning billionaires is pure Marxisant behavior.  An actual Marxist would be far more subtle and convoluted, thanks to his grasp of theory and revolutionary tradition.  Obama has neither.

Obama's Anti-Rich Crusade.  Apparently, politicians around the world now want to tax the rich, because they believe, or say they do, that's where the money is.  They're wrong.  The simple fact is that there aren't enough of the "millionaires and billionaires" who are now the target of President Barack Obama's campaign trail scorn to make the tiniest dent in America's deficit.

Recipe for disaster: Ayers, Alinsky, Cloward & Piven.  In their own words from the "Weatherman" manifesto, they explained that drawing the U.S. into multiple costly overseas wars would go "hand in hand" with a domestic strategy also intended to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury.  That strategy saw an opportunity to take advantage of what it called "the urban crisis around welfare, the hospitals, the schools, housing, air and water pollution."  These social services and social protections were a much easier sell to the American public than either bombs at home or wars abroad, but they had just as dangerous an impact on the viability of the American government.

Our Overregulated Economy: Murder By 1,000 Paper Cuts.  Overregulation by President Obama and his administration is crippling our nation's economy.  By the government's own estimation, the annual cost of regulations is $1.75 trillion.  Since taking office, the Obama administration has instituted 75 new major regulations, meaning that each has an expected economic impact of at least $100 million per year.  Over a 10-year period, these regulations will cost the private-sector over $400 billion.  Keep in mind these are government cost estimates, and we all know how actual costs are often much higher.

CEO: 'A Modern Industrial Revolution' and its Enemies.  "The understanding of business is not there.  The president has no business people around him.  The fundamental understanding is not there."  So said J.J. Mulva, CEO of Conoco-Phillips, to the Detroit News editorial board this week — another warm body in an extraordinary parade of American CEOs who are complaining that a major obstacle to their business today is Washington and our anti-business president.

Why Gold Is So High and President Obama So Low.  Since President Obama took office, the price of gold has more than doubled to about $1800 an ounce, and public approval of his handling of the economy has more than halved.

We're Sinking Under Obama's Policies.  Hardly a day goes by without some bit of bad news the media calls "unexpected."  But investors have noticed.  After selling off 2.9% on Wednesday, the S&P 500 dived another 3.2% Thursday [9/22/2011].  Wednesday's drop came after the Fed unveiled its new plan for reviving the economy and as President Obama hit the road to sell his new but unimproved $447 billion stimulus.

President Obama and the EPA's War on Jobs.  For some time now, I and others have been documenting the relentless assault on economic growth by the EPA under President Barack Obama.  I feel like a broken record at times trying to beat this drum and get people to realize that while Obama doesn't keep all of his campaign promises, destroying the coal industry is one that he has done everything he can to stay true to.  For anyone that paid attention during the 2008 presidential cycle, Obama made it clear that it was his intention to bankrupt the coal industry through regulation and legislation.

Obama's Bizarre Tax Attack.  It could almost make your head spin.  With an economy on the front end of another recession, President Obama's tax attack on the folks who are most likely to succeed, invest, start new businesses, and create jobs is nothing short of staggering.  Only liberal-left class-warfare ideology can explain this.

Enough With The Deficit-Fueled Stimulus.  In his speech Thursday, the president is expected to announce a stimulus 2.0 package said to cost $300 billion.  But why should anyone expect this to work any better than the $4 trillion in stimulus already in the economy? ... So far, Obama has run deficits that are more than twice as large as any president since Truman.  And by the end of his first term, he will have borrowed more money than the federal government spent over the nation's first 200 years.

Obama's Deficit Plan is All Tax Hikes, No Cuts.  Today [9/19/2011] President Obama's released a deficit-reduction proposal that was actually written down on paper, the first time he has done so since introducing his laughable 2012 budget back in February (the Senate voted it down 97 to 0).  The White House claims that the president's plan represents a "balanced approach" that, relative to its current policy baseline, will increase the federal deficit initially by $300 billion in fiscal year 2012 (to pay for his "jobs plan"), but will reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.  The claim is outrageously misleading.

Obama's employment policy alter egos.  When it comes to putting Americans back to work, President Obama has two distinct alter egos.  One acts to systematically dismantle one of the most productive sectors in the economy while the other speaks passionately in favor of job creation.

Business-Killing Obama Is No Candyman.  Sustained growth cannot transpire under the Obama administration.  The big-government "help" that the president offers won't spur the economy, entice entrepreneurship, or engender consumer confidence.  Obama's ridiculous "tax incentives" for hiring new employees, for which only a tiny fraction of businesses qualify, could have been dreamed up only by someone who has never made a payroll and whose only associates are leftist ideologues.  Obamaesque socialism has a deadening effect on innovation, entrepreneurism, and the economy.

Is Obama Insane?  A frank assessment of Obama's fiscal stewardship of our country would conclude the following:  1) He is committed to long discredited economic theories, in spite of their utter and repeated failures, and  2) he is unwilling — or unable — to consider any other course of action.  Having tried the only thing he knows — spend, spend, spend — Obama is now at a complete loss.  His flawed theory is now our failing economy.

I'm exactly what's wrong with Barack Obama's America.  Barack Obama would prefer we all be wards of the state rather than active producers.  How else can you explain the incentives he champions:  endless jobless benefits, cradle-to-grave welfare handouts, "tax cuts" for non-taxpayers, and on and on.  Thus proclaims the president who himself raked in a cool $7.2 million over the past two years, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."  The key word there is "you."

A New Obama Milestone: ZERO Jobs Growth.  President Barack Obama made history again today, as today's new Labor Department report shows zero net jobs created for August.  CNBC notes this makes "the first time since World War II that the economy had net zero jobs created for a month."  Thank you, Obama voters!  We couldn't have done this without you.

The Zero Growth Economy.  Zero growth is a good thing for socialists.  This means the actualization of two things they cherish:  Equalization and dependence on government handouts.

Labor Day 2011 Has Bad Case Of The Blues.  There was no job growth in August, and the overall numbers are stupefying:  14 million unemployed; nearly 9 million part-time workers wanting full-time jobs; 6.5 million who want jobs but are so discouraged that they've given up looking and are, therefore, not counted in the official labor force.

Obama's dirty job.  The president will deliver a major speech on the employment situation only days after his government reported that no jobs — that's none, nada, zilch, zero — were created last month.  For the first time since 1945, when World War II came to an end, not a single new job was created in the United States.

No New Jobs Means No New Growth.  Zero net new jobs last month and a downward revision of 58,000 jobs in the preceding two months are bad enough.  So is the 9.1% unemployment rate, unchanged from July.  But perhaps most worrisome, the data suggest an economy sputtering beyond its ability to create enough jobs.  Two numbers from the Labor Department's report now show that GDP may well be taking a dive.

Obama Lays a Goose Egg.  "The U.S. economy added no [net] new jobs in August — the worst showing in a year — as employers cut back hiring and trimmed work hours of existing employees," the Los Angeles Times reports.  "The nation's unemployment rate in August stayed at 9.1%, as more people reported that they found part-time work, many of them because that's all that was available."

Read his lips: No new jobs.  For President Obama, with job growth stuck near zero, the simplest question is a domestic one.  How do you think jobs are created?  This has never been asked of Obama and never answered, so far as I know.

Obama's anti-jobs agenda.  The president will present that jobs agenda to a joint congressional session, but meanwhile, his policies — such as tolerating the National Labor Relations Board's dictating where a firm can build a plant — actively rip jobs away.  Sadly, the primary job-planning happening now in the private sector is planning to cancel job creation and to de-employ.

The Job Wrecker in Chief.  President Obama often tells us that his No. 1 focus is creating jobs, but his record makes you wonder what he might have done differently if his goal were to destroy jobs.

Answering Jonathan Alter's Challenge.  It's the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent.  It's Obama who joked there weren't as many "shovel-ready" jobs as he thought.  It's Obama who promised to cut the deficit in half.  It's Obama who said if we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care cost curve would go down rather than up.  It's Obama who promised us recovery and prosperity, hope and change.  What we've gotten instead is the opposite.

My reply.  [Obama's] biggest blunders:  1.  The $787 billion stimulus.  The premise itself was ridiculous.  He said it would save or create 4 million jobs.  In short, we would spend nearly $200,000 for every job saved or created. ... As bad as the policy was, the execution was worse.  We had a net loss of 2 million jobs.  To quote the president's own chart in January 2009, had we done nothing, unemployment would be 8% today.  It is 9.1%.  That alone dooms Barack Obama to one term.

Obama is a Bad President.  Despite having big majorities for the first two years of his presidency, Obama has failed to get any budget passed.  Ever.  His last budget didn't even get one vote in the Senate.  Not one.  Obama's Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt said in 2006 "If you can't budget, you can't govern."

An Economics Lesson Even a Liberal Can Grasp.  [Scroll down]  Why did the world's largest and most powerful economy create zero jobs in August?  It's because our country's entrepreneurs lack confidence in the future.  They cannot calculate what taxes they'll pay, they cannot calculate their costs for health care, they have no idea what new regulations may suddenly appear that will cripple their investments, and they don't believe the customers they'll need to buy their products and services will be there.  Most of all — and this is anecdotal rather than statistical — many of our country's entrepreneurs have come to believe that the president and his liberal allies in Congress are out to get them — that their ultimate objective is to turn our free-market economy into a command economy.

Three NLRB decisions 'will kill jobs and force business closures,' critics say.  On Tuesday [8/30/2011] the National Labor Relations Board announced three new decisions that industry experts say will likely hurt the economy and cost American jobs.

Obama's proposed regs would cost billions annually.  All told, the seven proposed rules on the environment and transportation cited by Mr. Obama would cost U.S. companies at least $38 billion per year and could cost as much as $100 billion annually in compliance costs.

The hope and change hangover.  This is an Obama-made becalming of the economic waters, an inevitability when Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, an out-of-control federal regulatory blob consisting of the Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Interior and more, combined with massive deficits to create the perfect storm for the private sector.

National debt has increased $4 trillion under Obama.  The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama's watch.  The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office.  The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.

We The Stupid.  Obama is going to be handed something in excess of $2 Trillion — and he has made it perfectly clear that he will spend every penny of it before the November 2012 election.  That's why he kept saying, "...so we don't have to do this again", meaning raise the debt ceiling again.  The debt ceiling would only need to be raised if all of the money had been spent.  Therefore, he has stated very clearly that he will spend every penny of any debt ceiling increase.  He is going to burn through $2 Trillion-plus in the next sixteen months.  This was the Obama regime's plan from day one.

Cantor calls for repeal of Obama administration's 'job-destroying regulations'.  In a memo to GOP members on Monday morning [8/29/2011], House Majority Leader Eric Cantor outlined what he and other Republican leaders consider the "top 10 most harmful" Obama administration regulations.  Citing recommendations from committee chairmen, Cantor called for the repeal of those regulations and offered a "selective calendar" timeframe for doing so.

Memo On Upcoming Jobs Agenda.  On April 20, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against The Boeing Company for the alleged transfer of an assembly line from Washington to South Carolina.  Yet, not one union employee at Boeing's Puget Sound facility has lost his or her job as a result of the proposed South Carolina plant.  Still, the NLRB is pursuing a "restoration order" against Boeing that would cost South Carolina thousands of jobs and deter future investment in the United States.

Regulation Booming Under Obama.  If the federal government's regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald's, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.

He's destroying America, but I respect him.  Huh?
 Inhofe lays long list of nation's ills at Obama's feet.  "We now have a president, and I don't mean this disrespectfully, who is destroying these very institutions that made America great," Inhofe, R-Okla., said.  Inhofe went on to say the Obama administration has "disarmed America," is solely responsible for the federal budget deficit, mostly responsible for the nation's dependence on imported oil and suffocating business with regulations.

Obama's Real Energy Policy.  [Scroll down]  The real battle is being fought under the radar.  The administration is using regulatory power and permitting to choke off conventional power.  Last year, I sat in a packed conference center at China's largest solar power conference as I listened to one of Europe's leading solar power executives state that the industry needed to work to make conventional power so expensive that alternative energy sources can compete.  This has been a part of the plan all along and the current administration seems to be working along those lines.

Obamanomics: The Gift that Keeps on Giving.  In just barely two years [President Obama] has driven the economy into a ditch yet has the gall to blame our economic troubles on President Bush, who has been out of office for two years.  Moreover, during the last four years of the Bush presidency, Congress, which controls the purse strings and thus the economy, was controlled by the Democrats.  It wasn't George Bush who overspent; it was the Democrats on Capitol Hill who did their best to imitate the most drunken of the legendary drunken sailors.

A Leaderless Nation.  The disastrous and nationally humiliating downgrade of our country's credit rating was not an inevitable consequence of uncontrollable misfortune.  It wasn't the result of gridlock or political wrangling between two parties that have bickered over our national debt and credit since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.  It was a remarkable failure of leadership by the man chosen to be the country's economic caretaker.

Eric Holder's Newest Witch Hunt.  According to IBD, the DOJ has ordered banks to advertise that minorities cannot be turned down for a loan "because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps."  No job; no problem!  In other words, the DOJ is forcing banks to make loans to people that they know don't qualify for them and likely won't be able to afford to repay them, which is precisely the kind of failed public policy that precipitated the financial collapse and recession in 2008.

Playing the Obama Death-to-the-USA Game.  Are you as exhausted as am I from hearing 'journalists' and supposed expert talking heads telling us "If only Obama would 'X' (you fill in your own solution) he would put us back on the right track toward beginning to save our economy" or asking "Why doesn't Obama do 'Y' to help the economy?"  The problem with these comments and questions is the presupposition that the dictator-in-chief actually wants to save the United States of America.  That assumption is false.

Obama is using every federal agency to choke the life out of the country.
 DOT targets farm tractors.  One of the rites of passage in rural life comes when parents decide a child is old enough to help out by driving the tractor.  If the Obama administration has its way that will be a thing of the past.  The Federal government now proposes to require that motorized farm equipment carry DOT ID numbers and that all users have a commercial drivers license.  Most of these vehicle never travel on public roads unless it is a short trip to another field or a neighbor's farm.

Bam's great PR bus-t.  The bad news for President Obama is, he's lost his mojo:  The rock star of 2008 has become just another workaday politician.  The worse news is, this is all he's got.  So fasten your seat belts, America — it's going to be a bumpy ride.  Especially if you're unemployed — because help is most definitely not on the way.

Obama's Vacation from Economic Reality.  Two and a half years after the election, after the imposition of a heathcare plan, a Fin Reg bill, two rounds of quantitative easing, and one gargantuan stimulus plan, President Barack Obama is once again promising to "pivot" towards job creation.

A Crushing Political Blow.  Standard & Poor's downgrade of America's credit rating is a crushing political blow to President Obama.  It reinforces, perhaps like nothing else has, the impression Obama is overseeing, and in some respects engineering, the decline of the American republic. ... The downgrading of our credit rating isn't an isolated event; for many people it will be seen as the nearly inevitable outcome of an extraordinarily reckless set of policies, implemented by a man of unusual incompetence.

Obama's downgraded America.  The Obama administration has made history by presiding over the first-ever downgrade in the U.S. credit rating.  President Obama has outdone all his predecessors in wrecking America's good name.  His answer to this problem:  Spend even more.

Flirting with the Great Depression 2.0.  When a nation's debt equals its entire annual gross domestic product, it is bankrupt.  It can still produce goods and services, but it will likely encounter fewer customers worldwide as they too are drawn deeper into their own debt crises.

Dow Down 500: Should Obama Resign?  The worldwide market plunge since the signing of the U.S. debt agreement tells us one thing above all:  Almost no one on the planet has confidence in the leadership of Barack Obama.  A CEO with such a disastrous first three years as our president has had probably would already have been called upon to resign or been pushed out by his company's board of directors -- more than likely for some time.  Obama has failed in virtually every direction, foreign and domestic.  His policies indeed are almost non-existent.  He is completely rudderless, unless you accept the view that he is following the prescription of Cloward-Piven and has set out to destroy American capitalism from within.

Obama loses our AAA credit rating.  S&P held the bad news until Friday evening [8/5/2011] so the president would have 3 days to prepare his excuse.  But no matter what his excuse is, Barack Obama did this to the nation.  Make no mistake.  He borrowed $3 trillion-plus.  His call.  His failure.

How Stupid is Obama?  Events of recent days have called even the "average" rating into question.  Consider the "debt crisis," so-called.  It was actually no such thing.  In Obama's own words, it was an "unnecessary crisis" — that is to say, not a crisis at all.  He should know, having triggered and shepherded it every step of the way.  What kind of mentality deliberately arranges a brawl over government finances in the midst of a sensitive and fragile recovery?  Obama was obviously out to steal an issue from the GOP and wreck their 2012 campaign plans.  But at what cost?  Wrecking the national economy?

The U.S. unemployment rate, measured several ways.  Here's a hockey-stick graph, if ever there was one.  There are the unemployed, then there are discouraged and "marginally attached" workers, and those "employed part time for economic reasons," meaning that a part-time job is all they can find.  Each and every category of unemployment took off like a rocket when Socialist Democrat Barack Obama took office.

Presidential master of economic disaster.  President Obama still doesn't get it. ... It isn't political rancor that is killing the American economy; it's the president's economic policies and beliefs.  The United States of America is clearly much too big a community for the community organizer to organize.  The president knows that.  It's also becoming abundantly clear to the producers of this country that Mr. Obama is not on their side, which is why the free market has never trusted him.  Speak with any small-business person, and he or she will say the same:  Mr. Obama is bad for business.

Obama is Determined to Destroy America.  At this writing, it looks as if Obama intends to deliberately implode the nation's ability to meet its obligations and he has used the most raw fear tactics to achieve his goal, falsely claiming that Social Security checks would not be sent, that the military would not be paid.  If ever a President was begging for impeachment the time for such action has arrived. ... Impeach Obama.  America must be set free.

Jacking up your electric bill.  America faces a European-style debt crisis, but you wouldn't know it from observing what's happening on Capitol Hill.  At a Senate committee's request, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday [7/26/2011] issued an analysis of proposed renewable (RES) and clean-energy standards (CES).  The federal government has grown so large that it's actually studying how to spend money to make electricity more expensive.  In fact, it's a White House priority.

Alinsky Is Winning.  By handing Obama a crisis on a silver platter, with the conservatives now in the position of being the ones who caused it, the 25 hold-outs against the Boehner plan are playing right into Obama's Alinskyite playbook.  Read Rules for Radicals and you see that this is exactly what Obama wants.  In fact, it might be too late to reverse the damage.  Obama may have already won.

The Man Without A Plan.  President Obama's been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. ... The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up.  No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny.  There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society.  The welfare state is kaput.  It's gone — probably for generations to come.

It's Obama's Economy.  This is what policy failure looks like.  And no matter how hard the White House and its allies try to convince us other-wise in the coming months, there is no escaping the central fact of the 2012 election.  It's Barack Obama's economy.

More Obama Spending Won't Help the Economy.  There he goes again.  Out on the campaign trail, President Obama is proposing more federal spending as his answer to sluggish growth and jobs.  That won't do it, Mr. President.  He wants more infrastructure spending, undoubtedly in the form of an infrastructure bank.  That's a terrible idea.  It's borrowed from Latin America, where bloated and corrupt bureaucratic construction agencies have helped bankrupt any number of countries in the past.

Obama's economic collapse.  Smack in the middle of the debt-ceiling crisis comes word that the economic situation is worse than everyone thought.  New Commerce Department figures show the gross domestic product (GDP) growing at an anemic 1.3 percent rate in the second quarter of 2011.

Obama to blame for S and P downgrade, former Cabinet nominee says.  The man President Obama once wanted as his Commerce secretary blames Obama the most for the nation's loss of its AAA bond rating (in the eyes of Standard & Poor's, at least).  While the White House and Treasury Department blast away at what they claim was S&P's faulty math and logic, former Republican senator Judd Gregg says they should look inward instead.

Obama's downgraded America.  The Obama administration has made history by presiding over the first-ever downgrade in the U.S. credit rating.  President Obama has outdone all his predecessors in wrecking America's good name.  His answer to this problem:  Spend even more.

The Democratic Wrecking Machine.  After 2¾ years in office, President Obama's policies have failed to revive the U.S. economy, and have actually made things worse.  Reckless actual deficit spending for the first 2¾ fiscal years plus estimated spending for the final year of 2011 will aggregate to $4.864 trillion.

The President Is Actually Trying to Talk the Markets Into a Panic.  An enraged Barack Obama just took to the nation's airwaves to announce his effort to strike a deal with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has fallen apart.  Perhaps for the first time in American history, this president is literally using this press conference [7/22/2011] to create a financial panic over the weekend about the opening of the markets on Monday.

Is Obama deliberately trying to cause a financial panic?  Frankly, I'm not sure that Obama thinks about it one way or another.  His depthless knowledge of economics point to a sublime ignorance of how his words are heard by the markets.  His only purpose is political — to make Republicans look bad.

Congress Reminds Obama He's President, Not King.  [Obama's] vanity and naivete — a dangerous amalgam — are causing the modern presidency to buckle beneath the weight of its pretenses. ... The faux deadline, reportedly invoked at a Saturday White House meeting by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who should resign, inevitably seeped into the media and invited overseas panic, thereby risking the nation's currency, for brief tactical advantage.

The Worst Steward of the Economy in American History.  While the debt ceiling dance continues in Washington D.C. and the Republicans in the Senate are going wobbly, they need to understand they are dealing not only with an intransigent party in the White House but also someone that is the most incompetent president in modern history, and the worst steward of the American economy since the nation's founding.

Obama's Intent to Gut the Military.  President Obama continues to push the notion that he wants a "balanced approach" to budget cuts, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the only spending cuts he is willing to contemplate are cuts in defense spending.  The vast entitlement system that now eats the majority of tax dollars is, by contrast, not only on his list of programs to be sustained, but expanded.

The Tea Party, Right About Everything.  This jobless recovery is not some mystery.  It is very clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats.  At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip while healthy and carve up and eat when not.  As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views corporations not yet in Chapter 11.

Rep. Allen West Says 'Marxist,' Now Who Else Will Tell the Truth?  Lost in the blow-up between Representatives West and Wasserman Schultz is that only two days earlier, Allen West said something much more significant and more massively belligerent — about Barack Obama — something the left would prefer drowned out.

Home Depot Co-Founder: Obama Is Choking Recovery.  Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years.  The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.  But Marcus says Home Depot "would never have succeeded" if it launched today due to onerous regulation.

America's Financial Restoration vs. Obama's Ideology. Alinskyite revolutionaries feed on crises, real and perceived.  Obama fundamentally rejects the American ideals of economic liberty and equality of opportunity.  He's determined to use government to redistribute and equalize incomes (and wealth, truth be told), and neither the Constitution nor catastrophic debt consequences will deter him.  He doesn't even appear worried about the debt itself, only the hassle he's getting from Republicans who are getting in the way of his spending and tax hikes.

President What's-His-Name.  There's a millstone hanging around the neck of the US economy.  And his name is Barack Obama.

Our Ten-Trillion-Dollar Man.  The Congressional Budget Office not long ago forecast that Barack Obama's $1 trillion-plus annual deficits — scheduled over the next decade — would result in almost another $10 trillion in aggregate debt.  Going back to the pre-Bush tax rates this time won't balance the budget.  Slashing discretionary spending will not.  So large has the splurge become, and so hooked are the constituencies of federal money, that massive cuts to entitlements necessary to stave off financial implosion may well prompt Greek-like protests.

Barack's bumbling breakdown.  President Obama is on the verge of a crackup.  The debt-limit talks are beginning to take their toll. ... Mr. Obama is to blame for the current political crisis.  He refused to engage in discussions about lifting the debt ceiling until very late in the process.  He has not been serious about controlling runaway deficits.  In fact, the budget he proposed earlier this year dramatically boosted federal spending.  It was voted down in the Senate 97-0.  Even Democrats considered it irresponsible and reckless.

Obama: Unneeded Income Belongs to the Government.  President Obama's press conference yesterday [7/11/2011]  — in which he only took questions from left-leaning reporters apparently — contained an amazing statement. ... Where does Obama think new capital comes from, the tooth fairy?  It's nothing more than the excess of income over outgo.  Take away the income the rich "don't need" and spend it on social programs, and capital formation in this country drops to zero.

Nobody Should Believe A Single Thing Obama Says About the Budget.  Granted, nobody should believe a single thing Obama says about anything — (including his denials that he knew anything about Fast and Furious), but in light of his press conference today, ahead of his budget negotiations with John Boehner and the Republicans, I thought it would be good to count the ways Obama has been duplicitous and disingenuous in his actions re the economy, (which he really and truly seems hellbent on destroying.)  As always with him — you have to look at what he does — not what he says.

Obama's Petulant, Passive Aggressive Leadership Reveals a Fixed Adolescent Mindset.  More than any other problem, America is suffering a crisis of a loss of revenue over jobs that have disappeared because of inept decisions, or purposeful government sabotage of the economy.  Yet, Barack refuses to acknowledge, in his typically adolescent manner, that any decision he has ever made could even possibly damage the marketplace.  Further, Barack has seemed to put literally zero effort into actually helping create jobs.  In this sense, his passive-aggressive hatred of capitalism may be strategically aiding his adolescent sense of irresponsibility in breaking the back of the US economy to usher in a golden-age of American socialism.

Rep. West: Obama 'Needs to Admit' His Economic Policies 'Have Failed' America.  Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said President Barack Obama "needs to admit" his economic policies "have failed" America.  To back up his assertion, West cited the national debt increase under Obama's watch.

An Industry Maligned.  The president won't let go of his obsession with the corporate jet tax break.  Eliminating the tax break is fine.  But there's no excuse for using the bully pulpit to beat up an industry struggling to recover.

Obama and the Left's Not-So-Hidden Agenda.  [Scroll down]  The concept of social justice (government making everyone's life equal) is insane, absurd, and evil.  It completely nullifies the human spirit, ambition, freedom to be all one can be, and American exceptionalism — all the things which have made America great. ... As I said, the concept of social justice, government attempting to manufacture equal overcomes, is totally un-American and just plain nuts.  And yet, this is obviously Obama's agenda.

Remembering Pre-Obama America.  It is pretty much common knowledge by this time — except to his diehard supporters — that President Barack Obama is ill-equipped to occupy the highest office in the country.  The only campaign promise he has not broken is the pledge to "fundamentally transform" America, which he has done in record time, at great cost to both America's solvency and its standing in the world.

Feeling depressed?  I have been a keen student of American history and politics for well over 50 years and I have never seen the country in such poor shape or been this discouraged.  President Obama is to blame for this.  In trying to fundamentally change America and remake it in his own image he has, among other things, ruined the economy, flouted and ignored the rule of law (especially as it pertains to him and the office of President), allowed an Islamic fifth column to take root which wants to change our way of life and make America into a country ruled by Islam, practiced politics of sleaze and division, failed to defend our civil liberties and basic values and run roughshod over our institutions, denigrated us on the world stage, turned us into an international laughingstock...

Debt Increased More Under Geithner Than Under Any Treasury Secretary.  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner oversaw the largest increase in the national debt of any Treasury secretary in American history, presiding over a $3.7 trillion increase in the debt.  According to data from the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt, the national debt has increased $3,723,575,990,130.10 from Jan. 26, 2009 until June 30, 2011, Geithner's entire tenure to date as Treasury secretary.

We Can Do This Unless We Don't.  President Obama is eminently beatable. ... His religious adherence to the Cloward-Piven Plan to collapse the economy as a means to fundamentally transform America has brought us to the brink of financial disaster.  And his in-your-face golf-while-Washington-burns party at the end of the age lifestyle has made him vulnerable to any candidate who will actually stand for everything the President is against.

Less Regulation = More Hiring.  The unemployment rate ticked up again in June and has been above 8% for a record 29 straight months.  Cutting tax rates is one way to put America back to work.  Lifting the regulatory burden is another.

Residing In Speechworld Lets Obama Fake Reality.  The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets.  Hey, who can blame them?  They've got a ballpark figure:  Let's raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion.  That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print?

President Quixote's Legacy: Confused, Ill-Educated and Not Too Bright.  In Obama's world, success and failure are moral rather than economic outcomes.  Success is a marker for evil.  Failure is due to someone else's success rather than personal shortcomings. ... For Obama, economics itself is inconsistent with morality.  Hence economics itself must be evil.  This view of the world is both simple and ignorant.  No, it is beyond that.  It is a sign of stupidity!  Recognition of this stupidity is the key to understanding Obama's behavior and policies.

CBO: Stimulus almost doubled U.S. debt.  The 2011 Long-Term Budget Outlook, released Wednesday morning 6/22/2011], reports that the "the combination of automatic budgetary responses" and Obama's stimulus "had a profound impact on the federal budget."  According to CBO projections, before Obama's stimulus became law, federal debt equaled 36 percent of GDP and was projected to decline slightly over the next few years.  Instead, thanks in large part to the stimulus, debt reached 62 percent of GDP by 2010.

Our Reactionary President.  Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of the United States.  Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy, not an open mind, guided government. ... Almost every key indicator of the current economy — unemployment, deficits, housing, energy — argues that Obama's reactionary, all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.

Ayn Rand Was Right: Wealthy Are on Strike Against Obama.  [Ayn] Rand prophesized a country dominated by socialists, Marxists and statists, where looters, free loaders and poverty promoters live off the productive class.  To rationalize the fleecing of innovative business owners and job creators, the looter class demonized the wealthy, just as Obama and his socialist cabal are doing in real life today.

Obama's America: Prosperity Lost.  President Obama, the fellow leftists in his administration, and the Congress, nearly none of whom have ever made a viable contribution to the Gross Domestic Product, are hell-bent on seizing complete control of the economy.  They are making the same foolish and arrogant mistake Marxists and Socialists have made since the mid-1800s, and the citizens of the United States will pay an overwhelming price for their folly unless the people begin to grasp the true cost to themselves and the country.

Spending your way out of a recession is not such a great idea.  Worst.  President.  Ever. ... Team Obama promised that US GDP growth would be 4.0% in 2011.  The Fed announced last week that they see GDP at 2.7% to 2.9% this year.

Obama Backs EPA War on Coal, While Networks Ignore Harm to Industry.  It is no longer a secret that President Obama's administration is willing to allow electricity prices to "necessarily skyrocket," in order to accomplish his green energy agenda.

Is It Incompetence or Ideology?  [Scroll down]  Just as the Democrats were rejoicing in the fruits of their cynicism, in came the latest economic numbers.  They were awful.  Housing-price declines were the worst since the 1930s.  Unemployment rising again.  Underemployment disastrously high.  And as for chronic unemployment, the average time for finding a new job is now 40 weeks, the highest ever recorded.  These numbers gravely undermine Obama's story line that we're in a recovery, just a bit slow and bumpy.  Suddenly, the election theme has changed.  The Republican line in 2010 was:  He's a leftist.  Now it is:  He's a failure.

How Obama is Creating a Great Depression of His Own.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt ... was more destructive to the economy in his own time than Obama has been in his... thus far.  Roosevelt responded to the recession he inherited with a combination of massive spending on new government programs and sweeping controls over private industry, (sound familiar?).  His thinking was that government spending would get people back to work, and controls over private industry would end deflation.  Rules and regulations over private industry were put in place designed, incredibly, to increase the prices of goods.  The President and his advisors thought deflation was a cause of the recession.  But of course it wasn't a cause; it was a result.

2012 Obama Victory: Reaching Socialism's Tipping Point.  In a recent meeting with a leading Republican presidential hopeful, I asked the candidate why he's running for the nation's highest office.  He looked me in the eye and stated flatly his belief that America may not survive a second Obama term -- that President Obama's policy agenda is so radical, and his willingness to circumvent congressional authority so flagrant, that America might never recover.

Obama's Jobs Plan Takes a Page From Marx.  The president has unveiled a plan to cut joblessness with an industrial policy from the 19th century.  In this "new" economy, government will pick winners and losers for industry.  It didn't work then, it won't work now.  Taking a cue from classical Marxist theory as well as vintage union organizing doctrine, both discounting the value of service work over manufacturing, we now see President Obama touting training for factory jobs over all others, pushing government spending in that area and calling it a jobs recovery plan.

To Retire Our National Debt, We Must Retire Obama.  Obama's ever-changing proposals, allegedly designed to tackle the problem, simply could not work.  One of the following must be true:  He doesn't agree that the crisis is grave, doesn't understand that his policies can't work, doesn't have the same vision about America as most of us, or doesn't intend for his policies to work.  Some people believe he's intentionally damaging America, because they believe he's too smart not to know that we face a crisis and that his policies can't work.

600 More Days of Obama.  He is the 44th President and, while we have had incompetent Presidents in the past, we have never had one determined to destroy the nation.  It has taken more than two years for most sentient Americans to grasp this extraordinary threat.  He has not solved problems.  He has exacerbated them.

Huge increase in electric bills seen in the next few years.  [A recent] Chicago Tribune article pretty much confirms what President Obama promised; that our electric bills would "necessarily skyrocket" as a result of new environmental regulations that will make coal-fired electric plants virtually a thing of the past. ... Has there ever been a great nation that committed economic suicide for no real reason?

Salazar's War On Jobs.  The plight of the prairie chickens, smelt fish and dunes sagebrush lizards is not just a policy cause for environmentalists anymore, but the weapon of choice in a war on jobs by the Obama Administration, say critics in Congress.  The policies in effect at the Interior Department, now led by Secretary Ken Salazar, are supposed to protect endangered species against certain annihilation.  But they're also turning farmlands into dust bowls and running oil and gas development off the land, out of the water and out of the country.

Obama's Job-Killing Jobs Council.  President Obama says he's 100% focused these days on creating jobs.  So why is he taking advice from a bunch of CEOs whose companies have been shedding jobs for years?

Read this article:
 Obama's Road to Nowhere.  In May the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs.  For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.  So what kind of jobs were those 54,000?  Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley?  Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs?  That sort of thing?  No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald's.

Democrats' Tax-And-Spend Insanity.  You have to wonder who's advising Democrats these days.  With the economy stuck in a two-year, Obama-dug rut, their only new economic growth idea is to raise taxes and hike federal spending.

Obama's Plan To Make Your Electric Bills Jump 60 Percent.  Obama campaigned on forcing us to pay that 60% more on our electric bills.  Obama wants to bankrupt the electric industry, he wants us to lose jobs, he wants us to be soaked to pay more for our energy.  He wants this because he feels America should be taken down a notch or two.  He wants to hobble this country.  It's what he's said since day one.  Obama promised to bankrupt our energy producers, he wants us to pay through the nose, he insists that our nation be burdened with multiple layers of regulations, and he wants us to be hurting.

Obama's New EPA Rules Would Destroy Our Energy Sector.  Half of America's energy comes from coal-fired power plants but Obama's new EPA rules would about destroy the coal industry driving our energy costs through the roof.  That's not all they would do, either.

Obama's Egghead Economic Saboteurs.  White House aides have lamented that the economic team is "exhausted."  Apparently, Obama is tired of hearing from them, too.  The Hill newspaper reports that he has stopped receiving daily economic briefings that were once treated with the same emergency status as national security briefings.  So, the central planners continue to be paid to fail — while their boss looks the other way at the destruction, whistling into what he calls America's temporary "head winds."

It's Obama's economy, stupid.  No president 'runs' the U.S. economy, but President Obama talks like he does more than any in recent memory — yet none of his economic promises or job predictions have panned out.

The Energy Disaster Continues.  The Obama administration's energy policies have been a disaster, assuming that American decline is not your objective.  We have written many times about the administration's efforts to suppress development of our oil resources, but coal is equally important.  The United States is blessed with extraordinary deposits of coal, but Obama is determined to prevent us from using it to generate cheap and plentiful electricity.

Obama's Undeclared War on America.  Apart from James Buchanan, no president has been so ill-prepared and willfully ignorant as Obama when presented with an unprecedented national crisis.  We are now mired in the 21st century Great Gloom, our nation's 2nd Great Depression, having identical features with the first one:  millions of Americans are out of work with few prospects for any; millions more Americans have lost their homes with even more facing foreclosure and owing more on their mortgages than the homes are worth; the private sector is calcified; high taxes and regulations frustrate capital formation and job creation.  Obama's inability or unwillingness to read history, compounded by his stubborn big government ideology, has led him to adopt or advocate for the single most devastating tactic that doomed Herbert Hoover when the Great Depression began and plagued FDR as the wretchedness of the 1930s persisted for nearly another decade:  higher taxes.

Government Doesn't Create Jobs.  In a joint op-ed with the British prime minister, President Obama admits that jobs are created by an innovative private sector.  So why is he strangling ours with regulations, rules and taxes?

Some Jobs To Save.  A Gulf Coast governor tells Congress that the administration's inept response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has done more damage to the local and national economy than the crude itself.

Alfred E. Obama: What, me worry?  Blaming Americans for being "skittish" and "nervous" with a subtle implication that its still all Bush's fault, Obama tries to tell Americans that their task is to "not panic, not overreact".  Meanwhile his promised anti-energy policies, job killing Obamacare, ever increasing debt, failed stimulus, payoffs to union supporters and Utopian "green" revolution are collapsing the US economy.  But as Alfred E. Newman said "What, me worry?"

Obama's Economic Experiment Has Failed.  The president clearly inherited a difficult fiscal and economic situation when he took office.  But his response to the crisis has been woefully inadequate.  The president and his party's leaders have made it their mission to test the hypothesis that more government spending and greater government control over the economy can jump-start a recovery better than the private sector can.

Professor disaster:  Bam's theories killing economy.  No billions or trillions needed — here's the simplest number to describe the dismal state of the US economy:  One.  With the departure of chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, that's the number of members from the original Obama economic team still working for the administration, not quite three years into the first term.

Government: No. 1 job destroyer.  Taken as a whole, the Small Business Administration estimates that total federal regulatory costs in America amount to $1.75 trillion annually — a number that dwarfs the federal government's entire discretionary budget for 2011 and exceeds Canada's gross domestic product.  The cost of compliance is stunning, and it speaks to the heart of the employment issue in manufacturing and every sector of our economy.  It's clear that to create more jobs, government at the federal and state levels must change course and embrace policies that drive down the cost of doing business in America.

Ben Bernanke is the Chief Architect of Dollar Destruction.  It seems that everyone in America understands this except the Chairman.  Even the European Central Bank has expressed its deep concern at America's weak dollar policy.  In the private sector, the University of Texas has invested $1 billion in physical gold.  This represents an unprecedented vote of no confidence in this Administration's stewardship of fiscal and monetary policy.

Fed Chairman's grand scheme, QE2, has failed miserably.  In short, the Fed's plan to buy $600 billion in Treasury securities was an attempt to speed up the slow (perhaps nonexistent) economic recovery and make investors happy again.  So, in light of the ever deteriorating economic conditions we are still experiencing, the obvious question would be, how'd it work?

Dems Blame Business For Own Bad Policies.  President Obama says he wants businesses to "step up" and hire more.  If he's really sincere about wanting more jobs, he should stop demonizing and punishing American corporations for their success.

Putting principle ahead of popularity.  You remember how, during the last presidential campaign, it was Sarah Palin who unflinchingly drove home the point that Barack Obama was a socialist.  "Senator Obama said he wants to quote 'spread the wealth.'  What that means is he wants government to take your money and dole it out however a politician sees fit," Palin said in October 2008.  "But Joe the Plumber and Ed the Dairy Man, I believe that they think that it sounds more like socialism.  Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism.  To me, our opponent's plans sounds more like big government, which is the problem.  Bigger government is not the solution."  Of course, the left-wing media (oops, I mean the mainstream media) said Palin was an extremist for such views — despite the fact that Barack Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate, and thus was essentially a self-avowed... (drum roll, please!) ... socialist.

Gas Prices Are High Because the Liberals Want It that Way.  [Scroll down]  Increasing domestic exploration, drilling, and production is the simple solution to what we are paying at the pump.  Yet our president has repeatedly misled us by alleging that there is no "silver bullet" for lowering gas prices.  What the Obama administration and his liberal machine have been doing is just the opposite — and it is beginning to look intentional.  President Obama follows the liberal playbook about energy independence — code for wind and solar energy which won't fuel our automobiles, jets, ships, or the war machines he has sent into Libya.  He misleads the American people about ethanol leading to energy independence.

Green Energy Fantasy.  The hope is that these government sticks and carrots will turn today's pitiful "green energy" industry, which produces an insignificant fraction of American energy, into a source of abundant, affordable energy that can replace today's fossil-fuel-dominated industry.  This view is a fantasy — one that could devastate America's economy.  The reality is that "green energy" is at best a sophisticated make-work program.

Holder's Anti-Bank Witch Hunt.  Before the mortgage crisis, Attorney General Janet Reno accused banks of racism for failing to market mortgages to poor minorities with weak credit.  Fear of prosecution set off a stampede of risky inner-city lending that led, in part, to today's record home foreclosures.  Now Reno's deputy — current Attorney General Eric Holder — is prosecuting banks for doing too well what he and Reno ordered them to do before the crisis:  "targeting of minority communities" for subprime and other high-cost loans.

Killing Manufacturing:  One of the greatest threats facing our country today doesn't come from outside our borders.  It's not the possibility of a terrorist attack.  It is not the continually increasing illegal immigration across our southern border.  It's not even the likelihood of a disrupted oil supply.  The greatest problem we face is the self-imposed cost and regulatory burden placed on the development of manufacturing businesses.

Obama policies choking growth.  Obama, with no shortage of audacity, is betting he can blur the connection between the decisions of his administration and the still wheezy performance of the economy and convince voters that soaring prices for essential goods and anemic job creation are not his fault.

Punishing the producers.  Our president is oblivious to the fundamentals of business.  He wouldn't know how to handle a business risk if it knocked on the door of 1600 Pennsylvania and introduced itself. ... My gut says the president doesn't really care about growing the private sector and improving the economy.  His goal is to expand the entitlement class because he knows the most effective way to con people into voting for him and the Democratic Party is to buy their votes with the tax dollars provided by the hard work of others.  That's standard operating political procedure for the Democrats.

What Professor Obama Doesn't Understand.  President Obama does not understand the basics of economics.  What he says repeatedly is that increased government spending is the foundation of economic recovery and growth.  But the economic reality is that incentives for increased production are the foundation for recovery and booming growth.  As a result, what we are witnessing is a historical reenactment of the 1970s, if not the 1930s, with the same throwback economic policies that caused the dismal economic downward spiral of those years.

Obama's Hockey Stick: The Federal Debt.  The national debt is calculated in two ways:  gross debt and net debt.  Net debt is primarily gross debt net of the various government "trust funds" the largest of which is Social Security.

Exactly the opposite is true.
 Obama official: Reduced gov't spending to blame for slowdown.  A top economic aide to President Obama blamed reductions in government spending for a slowdown in U.S. economic growth in the first quarter.

Admit it, Obamanomics has failed.  The only thing dropping faster than President Obama's poll numbers is America's economic future.  Only one in five believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey released Thursday [4/28/2011].  More than half of those responding to Gallup's queries believe we are either in a recession or depression.  The grim mood reflects growing disenchantment with administration policies that have sucked the life out of the economy.

You Call This a Recovery?  Obama Offers More Excuses Than Solutions.  President Obama and his administration have been warning for the last week that the just announced first quarter GDP growth rate of 1.8 percent would be weak, and they have been quick to blame it on the recent spike prices in oil.  The problem is that this whole recovery has been anemic, not just one or two slow quarters of economic growth.

The Editor says...
 "The recent spike prices in oil" is almost entirely Obama's fault.

The Gas Price Freakout.  Mr. Obama usually begins his gas price narrative, now a campaign trail staple, by explaining that there aren't easy solutions.  That's true — there's not a lot the political class can do to change gas prices in the short run — but then the President goes on to mention that there happens to be one easy solution:  raising taxes on the oil and gas industry.  This is also his stock answer on the budget deficit, world hunger and everything else.

Who is running Boeing?  Imagine you own a company and a five unelected appointees of a government board, among them two unconfirmed appointees, tell you where must open your new manufacturing plant.  Would you ever consider opening another manufacturing facility in the United States?  Is this the tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned us of?

Can Boeing Really Fight The US Government?.  When Boeing announced that it would be moving part of its 787 manufacturing capability from Washington State to South Carolina, it was only a matter of time before the Obama Administration would retaliate.  It wasn't a long wait.  The National Labor Relations Board last week filed a complaint against Boeing, saying that its decision to build a manufacturing facility in South Carolina amounted to unfair bargaining with its labor unions.  Everyone denied that politics were involved, an assertion believed by exactly no one.

Ex-Labor Board Chairman: Union-Backed Case Against Boeing 'Unprecedented'.  The former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board told FoxNews.com that a board attorney's bid to stop Boeing from opening a production line at a non-union site in South Carolina is "unprecedented" and could have serious implications for companies looking to expand.

NOAA Fisheries Management — Masters of Mendacity.  The 2011 Annual Catch Limits (ACLs) for the New England fisheries go into effect on 1 May 2011.  They are essentially unchanged from the extremely low ACLs that virtually crippled the fleet in 2010. ... The catch limits for haddock, a major contributor to fishing revenues, are decreasing 25%.

Obama's Regulatory Tsunami More Destructive than Taxes.  As Obama travels about the country, speaking of the need for "shared sacrifice" and the need to increase taxes, he doesn't say a word about the tsunami of new Obama regulations ranging from light bulbs to ozone pollution to painkillers to foreign travel to vending machines that is about to hit America.  Their impact will be huge and do serious damage to our economy.  Obama's regulatory tsunami began during his first month in office and has continued relentlessly since.

We have a committee for that.  The President has a great deal of faith in committees, except when he doesn't.  For example, last year he created, by executive order, the debt commission — a committee designed to provide recommendations on how the country can balance its books.  The commission's report came out in December of 2010, and was promptly ignored by the White House.  Instead the Obama administration offered a budget that still spent more than a trillion dollars of deficit spending.  The rhetoric was that Obama was cutting a trillion over 10 years.  The debt commission was all but forgotten.

Obama publicly declares war on capitalism.  It's official.  President Obama has declared war on capitalism, which is funny because he never officially declared war on Libya.  But our fearless Marxist-in-chief reserves a special brand of hatred for capitalism, entrepreneurship and rich people.  Just days ago, Mr. Obama publicly blamed "speculators" for the rising price of gas.  Mr. Obama publicly announced a war on speculators and speculation, imposing the Justice Department, government lawyers, Cabinet heads and the whole Big Brother kitchen sink on this "evil" bunch of capitalists.

What's Behind The Donald Trump For President Campaign?  [Scroll down]  Given Barack Obama's less than enthusiastic support of this nation's history is it any wonder that there are questions arising about his past?  What we know for a fact is that Marxists were present there and thus must have had some influence on his political positions.  His longtime mentor and father figure was Frank Marshal Davis who was an active member of the Communist Party.  His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was a Marxist.  Obama attended the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright who is an ardent advocate of Black Liberation Theology, a movement drawn heavily from Marxism. ... If Obama isn't a Marxist, he's nevertheless done an excellent job completing their goal which is the demise of our capitalist system.

Did someone mention Frank Marshall Davis?

Obama's Third World America.  President Obama warns Republican policies will turn America into a Third World country.  Look who's talking.  On a campaign fundraising trip to Chicago, Mr. Obama quipped that under the proposed Republican budget plan, "we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought — that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure."  He failed to elaborate on which developing countries he thinks should be models for the United States, but his policies have secured America's status as part of the declining world.

Obama Links America's Greatness With Government Spending — Again.  President Barack Obama said that federal government spending makes America great — a claim he has made before — while speaking to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) gathering in San Francisco.

Moocher Society.  This growing trend can only lead to one thing:  crippling our society.  There comes a point when the few producers can no longer support the growing masses of moochers.  We are rapidly approaching this point.  As Paul Ryan says, this is the most predictable crisis in our history that we are facing. ... Congratulations Barack Obama for achieving a majority moocher society on your watch!  A society where households are receiving more income from the government than they are paying in taxes.  A liberal hack Community Organizer wouldn't have it any other way.

Will consumers revolt against the Volt?  [Scroll down]  Whether the economic damage already wrought through action and inaction by Mr. Obama can be undone remains an open question.  With his political wings clipped by a Republican House, Mr. Obama plainly intends to do by executive mandate what the law and legislature will not allow, and this end run around free enterprise is but a single recent example.  With projects like this vehicular "advanced technology" boondoggle, it seems ever more likely that economic ruin is the future — a future into which Mr. Obama is plunging the nation with advanced technology, at warp speed.

EPA's train wreck could leave many in the dark.  Even with 14 million Americans out of work and an economy still searching for light at the end of the tunnel, the EPA is poised to enact a series of back-door mandates that will stifle economic growth.  And with the speed that this runaway train is traveling, people in states like Ohio should be scared of the "train wreck" headed towards a town near you.  Unfortunately, everyday Americans may not realize the impact of the EPA's "train wreck" of new regulations on jobs, the economy and the price of essential energy until it's too late.

Exactly the opposite is true.
 Obama says spending cuts could trigger second recession.  President Barack Obama said on Wednesday [4/20/2011] he believes the U.S. economy could lapse back into recession if government spending is cut too deeply.  Obama made the comment at a Facebook town hall, which he used to promote his proposals for reducing U.S. deficits.  He said Republicans are too narrowly focused on spending cuts.

Did We Hitch Our Wagon to a (Death) Star?  No reputable economist believes that raising the tax rates will either improve the economy or make a substantial dent in the shortfall.  To the contrary, many credibly believe a rise in taxes will further stifle growth and, relying on experience, argue it will result in a revenue reduction.  When this was posed to Obama some time ago he responded that even if higher taxes result in lower revenue, the rich nevertheless had to pay more taxes for "fairness" sake alone.

Obama is a Quantifiable Disaster.  Let's take a look at the numbers.
Unemployment rate:
January 2009:  7.8%
March 2011:  8.8%
Unemployment rate among blacks:
December 2008:  11.9%
March 2011:  15%
Price of a barrel of crude oil:
January 2009:  $45
April 2011:  $106
Price of a gallon of regular-grade gasoline:
January 2009:  $1.84
April 13, 2011:  $4.10
Federal budget deficit:
2007:  $163 billion
2011:  $1.5 trillion

Obama: Incorrigible Statist and Debt Menace.  Hindsight confirms what many of us predicted:  The stimulus did not stimulate.  Unemployment became much worse, and the debt continued to explode.  Obama's solution was to ignore the entitlements issue and devise new ways to bankrupt the nation, from cap and trade to Obamacare to reversing welfare reform.  Finally, everyone started to recognize our impending national financial crisis, thanks to the alternative media and the tea party.

How we will end up paying $6 a gallon for gas:  Someday, you will be pumping gas, staring at the digital numbers racing by, and you'll wonder:  "How could I possibly be paying $6 a gallon for gasoline?"  You also will be wondering why so many of your friends and relatives are still looking for work.  Or why America is more dependent on foreign oil than ever before.  If you look back to today, you'll remember why:  President Obama's de facto moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama and the Debt Limit.  As America rides the great glass elevator of irresponsible spending toward the ceiling of its national debt, many have noted Barack Obama used to be adamantly opposed to raising the debt ceiling.  That was back in 2006, when some other guy from some other party was President.  The hot new excuse for this change of heart, trotted out by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, is that President Obama "now believes it was a mistake" to stand against limitless debt.

It is impossible to "soak the rich" enough to pay for Obama's level of spending.
 100 Percent Tax on Those Earning $500K or More Leaves U.S. With $839B Deficit.  When he presented his plan for dealing with the national debt last week, President Barack Obama suggested a number of ways he would like to increase taxes on people he referred to as "millionaires and billionaires."  However, recently released statistics from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that taxing away 100 percent of the income of every American who earned $500,000 or more in 2009 would still have left the United States with a massive annual deficit.

Obama Continues Fight to End American Prosperity — while he golfs and vacations.  When something consummately horrific happens to the United States of America, its people or a US ally, Obama celebrates by going golfing. ... When an unprecedented number of tornadoes hit six US States and killed at least 45 people, Obama went golfing.  When his misadventure (aka "war" without any Congressional approvals) against Libya was in full swing, Obama went golfing.  While the Japanese people were dying from a massive earthquake, tsunami and radiation Obama went on vacation to Brazil with his family and hangers-on.  Michele Obama took her daughters to Spain for another lavish trip and the Obama's trip to India (although the Obama regime still refuses to disclose the actual figures) is said to have topped the scales at $200 million/day.

Is Obama Intentionally Damaging Our Economy?  What I think emerges here is President Obama's astonishing ignorance of economics, which is to say, how the world works.  I don't think he is intentionally trying to damage our economy, simply because he knows that he has no chance of being re-elected unless the economy rebounds.

The Editor says...
 Obama doesn't care if he is re-elected or not, just as a determined saboteur doesn't care if he's arrested.

Obama's 'Let them eat cake' moment deep sixed by media.  As gasoline prices soar, while domestic oil production struggles under regulatory and permitting burdens imposed by the Obama administration, the American public is suffering, and so are Obama's reelection prospects.  The sad fact is that Obama wants high energy prices. ... When do suppose the last time was that Obama filled the tank on his own car?

Red tape recession.  On Monday [4/18/2011], the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released its analysis of the federal regulatory burden, which noted that the $160 billion annual cost of complying with the tax code represents less than a 10th of the $1.75 trillion burden of complying with the rest of Washington's red tape.  About 12 percent of the nation's entire productive output is devoted solely to appeasing bureaucratic fiat.  For a small company, meeting all of the various environmental, economic and workplace-related regulations takes an estimated $10,585 out of the pocket of each employee.

Obama's vision of a redistributive America.  Higher taxes historically have not always yielded more in tax revenue to government.  The opposite is true.  As economist Thomas Sowell noted this week, "Cuts in very high taxes ended up bringing in more revenue to government in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations."  President Obama's approach is not a vision consistent with our nation's founding.  Perhaps, as foreseen by Benjamin Franklin, "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."  President Obama is correct that there are two competing visions for the future of the nation; one born of our nation's founders and that honors individual achievement and prosperity, or one that extorts from it.

And the Beat-Down Goes On.  Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his policies would cause electricity rates to "skyrocket" and "bankrupt" any company trying to build a coal-fired generating plant.  This is one promise he and his über-regulators are keeping.  President Obama energetically promotes wind and solar projects that require millions of acres of land and billions of dollars in subsidies, to generate expensive, intermittent electricity and create jobs that cost taxpayers upwards of $220,000 apiece — most of them in China.  His Interior Department is locking up more coal and petroleum prospects, via "wild lands" and other designations, and dragging its feet on issuing leases and drilling permits. ... Oil, gas and coal provide 85% of the energy that keeps America humming, but the administration is doing all it can to take it out of our mix.

Barack the Barbarian.  The Obama administration has been able to inflict a great deal of damage to the nation and, if it was an invading army, Americans would have taken up arms long ago against it.

Obama's Dreamland.  Barack Obama just gave a belated but stern warning about escalating debt — a few weeks after he presented a 2011 budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit, the largest shortfall in American history.

Obamacare is crony-care.  From energy mismanagement to refusal to be fiscally accountable to blatant job-destroying policies, the president has gone off in a gung-ho leftist direction that leaves many Americans shaking their heads in confusion.  A recent poll found that more than 60 percent of Americans believe the country is heading off a cliff.

The President's New Energy Plan:  If you want to lower the price of something, the best solution is to produce more of it.  This is basic Econ 101 stuff.  But nowhere in the administration's new energy proposals, presented by the president this Wedesday in a speech at Georgetown University, is the idea of pumping more oil in the United States addressed, except to say it is impossible.

5 Things That Will Happen To You When America Goes Bankrupt.  People have to realize that this country is on pace to go bankrupt — and it could happen relatively soon if we don't start taking serious steps to control our spending.  Mike Pence thinks we could just be ten to fifteen years away.  Tom Coburn is less optimistic and thinks it could happen in as little as five years.  If that happens, we're not a tiny country like Greece — we're the biggest economy in the world.  That means there's no cavalry coming to pay our bills for us because we ARE the cavalry.  What happens then?

Revenge of the Deficit Commission?  By rights, Obama's deficit commission should be dead and gone.  Next month will mark the one-year anniversary of the first meeting of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, chaired by former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former senator Alan Simpson (R., Wyo.).  The deficit commission released a final report in December of last year, but failed to garner the 14-of-18 supermajority vote needed to mandate congressional action.  Since then, President Obama, who created the commission by executive order, has been content to proceed as if it never existed...

An Emperor With No Clothes.  It pains me to write this article, as our country's highest representative is making our country a laughing stock to the world and what is even worse, to our most deadly enemies.  Our community organizer President may have been able to fire up a few union thugs, sign a few hundred new ACORN members, and act as a lawyer in his home neighborhood of Chicago, but his leadership of our nation has become an embarrassment, whether you are a far left Democrat, or a far right Republican, and everyone in between.  I cannot even mention our president's name anymore...

America's Accelerating Downward Spiral.  In the past four decades in the U.S., every substantial increase in the real price of oil (meaning in excess of general inflation) has been followed within a couple of years by a sharp rise in unemployment.  So with oil now surging past $100 a barrel, what does that suggest about unemployment over the next two years?  And what does it say about President Obama's economic IQ that the goal of his energy policy has been precisely to raise the price of oil, through cap and trade and restrictions on supply?  The man can be well-spoken, as President Obama undoubtedly is, and still not have the slightest idea what he is talking about.

The incoherence of Obama's energy policies:  As Americans watch skyrocketing gasoline prices (up an average of nearly 80 cents a gallon from this time last year) frustrate their hopes for economic recovery, they should be outraged by a new report on America's energy resources from the Congressional Research Service.  The report shows that the United States is sitting on the largest batch of energy resources on the planet.  In fact, these vital fuel sources add up to more than the resources of energy-rich Saudi Arabia, China and Canada combined.

Time to Expel the Flunking Education Department.  The Wall Street Journal recently uncovered "billions in bloat," confirming what we all suspected:  There are hundreds of overlapping, duplicative, and wasteful federal programs.  We could probably eliminate half of them and no one would notice.  But President Obama nonetheless is piling on the pile, adding more waste.  His 38.5% proposed increase in education spending is just one example of how Obama is proving he is no Ronald Reagan.  His bloated budget for the federal Education Department was $49.1 billion in 2011.  He wants to hike that to $68 billion in 2012.

What is Obama trying to hide?  Small businesses are responsible for over 90 percent of net new jobs, half of GDP, over 90 percent of U.S. exports, and over 90 percent of all innovations.  It's irrefutable.  Small businesses are America's economic backbone, and its chief job creators.  Despite these facts, the Obama administration has given virtually none of the stimulus funds to small businesses and continues to give an estimated $100 million an hour in small business funds to some of the biggest companies in the world.  Since President Obama moved into the White House, some of the firms that have received small business contracts include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Dell Computer, Xerox, SAIC, General Dynamics, Bechtel and John Deere.

Blue Over Green Energy Promises.  We know Democrats are philosophically comfortable with using their power to artificially skew demand in favor of their preferred sources of energy.  During the presidential campaign, Obama boasted that opening a coal-fired plant would be a bankrupting proposition, and he has otherwise allowed as how he has no problem with gas prices increasing (so people will be forced to consume less).  His transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, has said he wants to coerce us out of our cars, and the administration is prepared to bludgeon this society into some high-speed rail system.  We also know that they intend to foist their environmental edicts on us irrespective of the damage they would almost certainly cause to our economy and standard of living.

The Energy Choke.  Jobs and economic growth are being deliberately strangled.  Our economy is just beginning to feel the choking grasp of soaring fuel prices around its throat.

Obama Boldly Continues his Energy Deception.  President Obama finally held a press conference on the subject of rising gas prices last week that required anyone who has been watching his administration's war on domestic energy to suspend disbelief.  Instead of announcing a reversal of his anti-domestic energy policies, he explained that on his watch, oil production is actually up and imports are down.  What the President failed to explain was that his energy policies have nothing to do with this, and that the U.S. would actually be producing more oil today if his administration had not been doing everything in its power to stop domestic energy production since they walked into office in January of 2009 when gasoline was $1.80 a gallon.

'Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?'  Ronald Reagan's poignant question to then President Jimmy Carter during a debate in 1980 clinched the presidential election.  Carter presided over one of the worst economies.  The economy had tanked and inflation had skyrocketed. ... But that's nothing compared to our nation's economic malaise brought to you courtesy of Obama's presidency.

Obama's War on the Middle Class.  It should be obvious that Obama and the left wing of the Democratic Party are not struggling to defend the middle class.  Most of the time they are struggling to disenfranchise it by ignoring the basic rights of human liberty and of property that are guaranteed under our Constitution.  The 18% real rate of unemployment during Obama's first two years in office has not done much for the middle class.  At the same time, there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the underclass.

More Obama energy moves that will cripple the economy.  Not satisfied with its efforts to regulate carbon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is beginning a two-month comment period on proposed new rules that would tighten emissions restrictions on power plants that burn coal and oil.  If adopted, these new rules will raise power production costs, perhaps forcing the closure of the oldest plants, and making new ones more expensive. ... These rules are projected by EPA to cost $11 billion per year in 2016 to American households, who will eventually pay the higher costs of producing electricity.

Tea Party senator says White House is 'hell-bent' on 'suicidal' energy policy.  Sen. Mike Lee and other Republicans say Obama has placed too many restrictions on oil production as gas prices rise.  Freshman Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who won office with Tea Party backing, is adding his voice to the chorus of Republicans alleging the Obama administration is placing too many restrictions on domestic oil production.

This material came from akdart.com
High Energy Prices Are Obama's 'Explicit Policy Goal,' Inhofe Says.  A prominent GOP senator on energy issues accused President Barack Obama Thursday morning [3/10/2011] of having set an "explicit policy goal" of making energy prices more costly for Americans.  "My message today is simply this:  higher gas prices — indeed, higher prices for the energy we use — are an explicit policy goal of the Obama administration," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.  "Let me put it another way:  the Obama administration is attacking affordable energy."

The counteroffensive to President Obama's war on fossil fuels begins.  At long last, Congress is launching a counteroffensive to President Obama's war on fossil fuels. ... Obama has been undeniably consistent in his unrelenting and unapologetic attack on our nation's traditional forms of energy — coal, oil and natural gas.  While running for president, Obama famously said he sought to make electricity prices "necessarily skyrocket" through cap-and-trade legislation and "bankrupt" power plants committing the progressive crime of using coal as an energy source.

Agenda 21 and the Death Knell of Liberty.  [Scroll down]  What have we seen since the Obama Administration took over?  The brainiacs in charge of America's finances have been ignoring our debts, and eagerly proposing ways to sink us deeper into a financial quagmire.  A lot deeper.  At first I thought that they were simply corrupt, venal, self-serving idiots — all of which is undoubtedly true, but they're also destroying America's financial foundation, cleverly and intentionally.  They want the American dollar replaced by a new global currency.  They want America's middle class to hang in the wind, and then die on the vine.  They are Globalists, and they want America to fail.

19,000 Jobs Lost Nationally Since Offshore Drilling Moratorium Imposed.  At least 13,000 jobs have been lost since last summer's moratorium on offshore oil production, surpassing projected job losses in a 2010 study by thousands, according to the Louisiana State University professor who authored the study.  Joseph Mason, author of "The Economic Cost of a Moratorium on Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration to the Gulf Region," estimated that the new regional job losses due to the moratorium on offshore oil production in the Gulf region is now 13,000 — up from his original estimate of 8,000.

Democrats Refuse to Cut Government Spending.  After months of refusing to cut any spending, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) finally came out with a Democratic offer to cut spending for this current fiscal year by a mere $4.7 billion.  The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is projected to be $1.6 trillion.  So, the Senate Democrats' spending cuts would lower the federal deficit by a mere .004%.

Time for War Against Democrats' Fiscal Sabotage.  It is amazing that the American people would continue to elect Democratic politicians to national office, considering Democrats' cynical disregard for the federal budget crisis.  They aren't even slightly serious about becoming part of the solution.  Consider the Senate Democrats' most recent proposal for budget cuts to avert a government shutdown.  Senate Republicans, following the House plan, proposed $61 billion in cuts for the current year, while Senate Democrats proposed a paltry $6.5 billion.  (The Congressional Budget Office says it's actually only $4.7 billion.)  Though Obama seems to be hiding in the bushes on this one, he is said to support the Democratic plan.

None of the Above on Energy.  In terms of energy policy, as in so much else, the Obama administration is in leaderless disarray.  The only thing it seems capable of doing is delaying and shutting down energy production.  As soon as some promising new supply pops up, like the shale gas capable of fueling America for the next century, the Obama EPA is there launching an environmental study designed to regulate and restrict it.  At the moment when new energy supplies are most needed, there are no plans to increase supplies — only plans to reduce them.  One would almost think that this President wants to bring America to its knees.

Atlas Shrugged 2011: Businesses Buck Obama.  Two years in to the Obama term, American companies are reacting to his anti-free market regime in one (or more) of four ways:  by becoming wards of the federal government, fleeing offshore, fleeing to business-friendly states, or fighting back.  The "too big to fail" banks and insurance giants, and "Government Motors" and Chrysler have become extensions of the regime, playing lap cat Mr. Bigglesworth to Obama's Dr. Evil.

An Energy Policy Designed to Fail.  Gasoline prices are on the rise again, mostly due to a combination of turmoil in the Middle East and increased worldwide demand that has driven crude prices up over $100 per barrel.  When refiners switch to EPA-required summer blends starting on May 1, gasoline prices will increase even more.  The left understands that the harder consumers are hit at the pump, the more sympathetic they are to calls for more domestic oil exploration.  In an attempt to head off the issue, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other leftists have fallen back on a tired, discredited canard:  the "use it or lose it" approach.

Obama's First Two Years a Disaster for America.  As of March 14, the average price of regular unleaded gasoline was $3.57/gallon.  When Obama took office in January 2009, the price was $1.81/gallon.  That represents more than a 90% increase in just over two years. ... The pertinent question we might ask is, "What has President Obama done in the past two years to limit the rise of oil and gasoline prices, if anything?"  The answer is... nothing.  If anything, his policies have contributed towards rising prices.

Obama's Edifice Complex.  [Scroll down]  His election was given a boost by the precipitous slide in the stock market and the economy before the election in 2008.  He truly did not let this "crisis go to waste."  Congress was swamped with Democrats and they gave Barack Obama a platinum American Express card to go wild.  We have yet to see a President — with the possible exception of FDR — who was as determined to create as many monuments to his own presidency as the man who now holds the reins of power in the Oval Office.

Unintended consequences.  Every time Mr. Obama attempts to repair a problem by government intervention, he creates a more serious problem.  An example of the law of unintended consequences is the president's attempt to solve the financial crises by increasing the regulation of the American financial system.  These attempts over time "to fix and regulate" the financial markets have resulted in the loss of U.S. dominance in the financial sector.

While Obama Seeks New Ideas, His Bureaucracy Stifles Them.  Nearly a year ago, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and his healthcare policy team came up with a simple way to save the state's Medicaid program a lot of money.  Why not have Medicaid recipients and applicants handle their paperwork online?  Using e-mail and a special website rather than paper, Herbert calculated, would save Utah about $6.3 million a year.  "It seemed like a no-brainer to us," says the governor.  The problem was, going paperless required a rules waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services.  And that's where the idea ran into a brick wall.

Gas Price Increases Are Intentional.  Gas prices continue to go up.  When George W. Bush was President of the United States, Democrats constantly demanded he open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help lower prices.  Some even wanted a temporary suspension of the gas tax.  With Obama?  Crickets. ... The left could use gas prices as a political wedge issue against George W. Bush because they knew he did not actually want higher gas prices.  Barack Obama, on the other hand, wants higher gas prices.  His Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, wants the same.

Obama Making Us More Dependent on Foreign Oil.  Expectations of political instability in the North Africa and the Middle East are factors which cause the price of crude oil to rise, but the reality is the Obama Administration is doing serious damage to our essential domestic oil industry.  The Administration is making our nation more and more dependent on imported foreign crude oil through increased regulations, taxes, and litigation.

U.S. sets $223B deficit record.  The federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February, a $223 billion shortfall that put a sharp point on the current fight on Capitol Hill about how deeply to cut this year's spending.  That one-month figure, which came in a preliminary report from the Congressional Budget Office, dwarfs even the most robust cuts being talked about on the Hill, and underscores just how much work lawmakers have to do to get the government's finances in balance again.

Liberal group pushes for $382 billion stimulus.  A liberal think tank is calling on Congress to embrace a $382 billion stimulus plan to lower unemployment.  The call from the liberal Demos group comes as the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans argue over how greatly to cut this year's spending.  House Republicans have proposed a total of $61 billion in cuts this year, while the White House has agreed to a total of $10.5 billion in cuts.

Does Obama Want $8 Gasoline?  While we sit on abundant oil and natural gas reserves, prices at both the wellhead and the pump are rising on fears of spreading Mideast turmoil and short domestic supply.  But then, maybe that's the plan.

Time Is Money, Oil Is Time.  Writing at the Politico, Steve Forbes adds up the damage:  "The Interior Department's six-month moratorium on offshore oil production has cost 8,169 jobs, according to a study by one Louisiana State University professor, along with more than $487 million in wages and nearly $98 million in forfeited state tax revenues in the Gulf states alone..."

The Party of Big Government.  Having apparently realized that this country is bankrupt, President Obama recently proposed cutting deficit spending by $1.1 trillion over the next ten years. ... The president's proposal, however, is only symbolic.  It is only meant for show.  During that ten year period the federal government will spend well over $40 trillion.  What Obama is proposing is a drop in the bucket.  But this does not stop him from going in front of the camera and posing as a deficit hawk.  The president should be ashamed of himself.  He is a quack who is taking this country down the road to fiscal doom.

The 'rational' exuberance of spending other people's money.  To sink or swim?  That is the $15 trillion question.  It's now up to the American people to decide whether the American experiment in self-government will stay afloat through reason and sacrifice or else sink into oblivion as a result of self-deception and greed.

Obama Administration Plans Second Front in War on Appalachian Coal.  [Scroll down]  The AP story pertained to a controversial rule derivative of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), known as the "100 feet buffer rule.["]  As its name would suggest, it basically prohibits mining waste from being deposited within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.  According to the AP article, the Obama Administration's preferred interpretation of this rule would cost 7,000 mining jobs, almost exclusively in Appalachia.  And that's the Department of the Interior's own estimate, which is likely a lowball.

Hyperinflation is a Small Price to Pay?  Despite government propaganda every shopper knows inflation is already a serious problem.  The Financial Times presented annual price increases for various items, which included the following:
  •   heating oil +41%
  •   copper +59%
  •   silver +91%
  •   palladium +212%
  •   corn +91%
  •   wheat +79%
  •   cotton +143%
These data indicate that inflation is upon us.  The magnitude of these numbers suggests hyperinflation.

Prepare For The Hyperinflationary Great Depression.  John Williams, who runs the popular counter government data manipulation site Shadowstats, has thrown down the gauntlet to deflationists, and in an extensive report concludes that the probability of a hyperinflationary episode in America over the next year has reached critical levels. While the debate between deflationists and (hyper)inflationists has been a long and painful one, numerous events set off in motion by the Bernanke Fed (as a direct legacy of the Greenspan multi-decade period of cheap and boundless credit) may have well cast America as the unwilling protagonist in the sequel of the failed monetary policy economic experiment better known as Zimbabwe.

Did someone mention Zimbabwe?

Obama Names Top Crony Capitalist to Help Wreck the Economy.  President Barack Obama's choice of Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness demonstrates once again how clueless the president is about the economy.  Having not caused enough damage in the past few years, Obama is doubling down on policies that are slowing the still fragile economic recovery.  If the president really wanted to help the economy and create jobs, he would do the opposite of what Jeffrey Immelt has done at General Electric and has advocated for national policy.

America the Broke.  In this era of hyper-partisanship, it is comforting to know that there is one thing both parties have agreed upon — spending the nation into insolvency.

Time Is Money, Oil Is Time.  Rebel forces are battling the Qaddafi regime for control of Brega, a key oil installation.  The Libyan dictator vows to "fight until the last man and woman."  Worldwide oil prices are shooting up, causing the markets to become jittery.  An American energy industry which has been profoundly sabotaged by the current Administration is not ready to make up for any shortfalls.
[Emphasis added.]

High-speed rail is a fast track to government waste.  There's something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states' already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs.  Worse, the rail proposal casts doubt on the administration's commitment to reducing huge budget deficits.  The president's 2012 budget is due Monday [2/14/2011].  How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big spending programs?

Obama Bails Out More Spendthrifts.  Under an initiative to be attached to the president's budget proposal, our fiscally incontinent states would be further subsidized by the federal government through a moratorium on interest payments owed to Uncle Sam.  These states, having spent all the money they had, borrowed billions from Washington to continue making unemployment-benefit payments.  Of course, lending money to broke parties is a very good way to ensure that you are not repaid, and that is what Washington is headed toward:  delaying interest payments today and, in all likelihood, simply forgiving interest (and probably principal) tomorrow.

Eyes on the Prize: Suez Canal.  I'm not an Egypt watcher, but it appears the Muslim Brotherhood is continuing plans to isolate the Arabian Peninsula. ... The MB's real objective, in my opinion, is closing the Suez Canal.  This, with Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, will effectively put our economy in bottom of the tank thanks to Obama's prior spending sprees.

Obama: Egypt's Hostage.  By failing to back Mubarak, Obama is committing the same sin that Dwight Eisenhower did in Cuba and Jimmy Carter did in Iran.  He needs to understand that the radical Islamists mean us ill and that any effort to appease them is bound to fail.  If Egypt falls, Obama will have permanently damaged America's vital interests.

Obama 2.O: The First Big Lie.  Barack Obama's reign has seen one job killing measure after another, culminating in the greatest job killer of them all, ObamaCare.  David Harsanyi was on point when he wrote in his column "Obama Isn't Fooling Anyone" that "I can't recall a single federal program, piece of legislation or proposal in the past two years that was initiated to ease the burden on business or consumers."  Obama's rhetoric has chilled business activity.  He has let regulators to run amok, whittling away our liberty.

Two Americas.  Barack Hussein (aka Barry Soetoro) Obama's first two years in office have been, shall we say, enlightening.  His policies were disastrous, no question, but enlightening nonetheless because we were clearly shown what the press refused to tell us in advance.  We were clearly shown what the courts won't stand up against.  We were clearly shown that 2009 and 2010 proved, in no uncertain terms, when Barack Hussein (aka Barry Soetoro) Obama promised HOPE AND CHANGE; what he really meant was he would lead us down the dead end path to SOCIALISM.

We Can't Afford the Luxury of High-speed Rail.  This past Tuesday [9/28/2010], Amtrak proposed to spend more than $100 billion increasing the top speeds of trains in its Boston-to-Washington corridor from 150 to 220 miles per hour.  In August, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood estimated that President Obama's proposal to extend high-speed rail to other parts of the country will cost at least $500 billion.  No one knows where this money will come from, but President Obama argues that we need to spend it because high-speed rail will have a "transformative effect" on the American economy.  In fact, all it will do is drag the economy down.

The Editor says...
 Maybe that's exactly the "transformative effect" Obama seeks.

Voodoo economics?  Tote up the jobs from Obama's stimulus.  Democrats have lambasted Republicans for years for believing in "Voodoo economics."  Well, the evidence is mounting that economic superstition is alive and well in the nation's political circles, though it has nothing to do with a fondness for tax cuts.  It's instead the crazy belief that the government can spend its way to prosperity for the rest of us.

'The Problem with Printing Money'.  The Federal Reserve's dramatic new intervention into the U.S. economy — a $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that was immediately branded with the nautical nickname of QE2 — had barely gotten underway in November 2010 before the Fed itself began sending signals that it had a public-relations disaster on its hands.

Obama Moving to the Center? Wanna Buy a Bridge?  For those who argue that Obama deserves a second chance at proving he's not at war with American business and the free market, I ask what he has done to indicate he's changed his philosophy that drives that war.  It's admirable to give people the benefit of the doubt in personal relationships, but we are talking about more than a personal relationship here and have a responsibility not to ignore the evidence.  That evidence tells us that he is still an intractable left-wing ideologue committed to destructive progressive policy prescriptions.

Obama "Invests" America Into Oblivion.  Don't be fooled.  These aren't investments.  These are confiscations of private-sector capital that Obama has neither earned nor knows how to earn, for that matter.  The left uses the word "investment" each time they're after your wallet.  In fact, Obama sold the failed "stimulus" plan as a package of... investments!  Seriously.  Before he signed the inaptly named "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," Obama called it "an investment that will create jobs building 21st-Century classrooms and libraries and labs for millions of children across America."

Obama Isn't Fooling Anyone.  President Barack Obama penned a witty Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, titled "Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System."  In it, he extolled the virtues of a free market system.  And to prove that his admiration of capitalism has nothing to do with naked political expediency, Obama signed an executive order that will "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb."  Sounds rather subjective, though, don't you think?  How do we gauge excessive regulation in the Age of Obama?  I can't recall a single federal program, piece of legislation or proposal in the past two years that was initiated to ease the burden on consumers or businesses.

Obama's sleight of hand on regulation.  In Obama's first two years in office, he showed no signs of concern about the number of costly regulations being issued by federal regulators.  He set new records for both the number of major regulations issued (43) and their added annual net burden on the economy (conservatively estimated by the regulators themselves at $26.5 billion).  None of these will be revisited or revised by Obama's initiative.  James Gattuso and Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation, who analyzed the new regulations in detail, predict that the real costs of Obama's regulations so far are probably much higher than the government estimates.

Is Barack Obama Intentionally Trying to Damage Our Economy and Security?  That may seem like an absurd question, but it's hard to come to any other conclusion when you consider what is happening to our energy industry on the Gulf Coast.  As the Wall Street Journal reports today [1/3/2011], the Obama Administration may have lifted its ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, but there are still long delays in getting other permits approved to drill for oil.  Why?  No one seems to know.

Excuses, Excuses.  Obama understands so little of capitalism that he actually thinks that businesses need more government oversight and "investment."  He simply can't get beyond the idea of statism:  the belief that every aspect of life, from what sort of car the public drives to how much profit a business is allowed to retain, must be decided by government planners in Washington.  Now, at the desperate hour when America needs free-market capitalism above all else, Obama's response is more regulation.

Does Obama Think We Citizens Are All Idiots?  To freeze spending merely means that you will keep it at the same level.  In other words, after two years of wildly insane spending that increased our debt by trillions of dollars, Obama says he won't increase that spending, but freeze it at that same level; and for five years.  Can you imagine how many more trillions will be added to the national debt if he spends at the same level for five more years?

Obama Coal Crackdown Sends Message to Industry.  A move by the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the long-standing permits for a mammoth coal mine in West Virginia sends a strong signal that President Obama plans to implement key parts of his agenda even though newly empowered Republicans can block his plans in Congress.  In the aftermath of the November elections, many political pundits predicted that the once-unchecked Obama legislative machine would turn it's [sic] energies to federal rulemaking as a way to circumvent Republicans on Capitol Hill.  And the EPA's decision last week suggests that those forecasts were spot-on.

Obama Believes American Exceptionalism Begins With Government.  If you listened to the speech and came away believing Obama is receptive to moving to the center, then you didn't hear or understand him.  For the GOP to make headway on restoring fiscal sanity to this nation, it must first understand him.  Then it must oppose and reverse him.

Obamacare is a disincentive to work.
 2010 a Banner Year for MSM's Ministries of Mistruth.  [Scroll down]  ObamaCare's work and marriage disincentives.  Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation has shown that if ObamaCare ever takes full effect, those who wish to advance themselves could face marginal health care subsidy-loss rates of more than 100% (I'm not kidding).  A person's "reward" for earning more income would be having to pay more for the same health care coverage than the additional wages they have earned.  Additionally, couples who marry or wish to stay married would lose thousands of dollars a year by doing so.

Bush Policy on Lands Is Reversed.  The Interior Department reversed a Bush-era policy on wilderness on Thursday [12/23/2010], restoring the authority of its Bureau of Land Management to identify and recommend new areas for protection.

The Editor says...
 The article above is loaded with leftist bias, but what else would you expect from the New York Times?  Here's the rest of the story:  There is only one reason the government wants to "protect" additional areas of land:  It is an effort to prevent oil and gas exploration and production.

The Problem with Printing Money:  The Federal Reserve's dramatic new intervention into the U.S. economy — a $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that was immediately branded with the nautical nickname of QE2 — had barely gotten underway in November 2010 before the Fed itself began sending signals that it had a public-relations disaster on its hands.

Saving America.  The reality of our national condition dictates that we stop mincing words.  A huge challenge awaits our Congress:  do something positive for our economy before America succumbs to more spending and the relentless printing of money.  Our free-enterprise economy is seriously ill and suffering from bad medicine.

Obama's Oil War:  Oil prices are surging to levels that will soon crimp economic growth.  And what's our government doing about it?  Just making it worse. ... It's becoming more and more obvious that Obama's energy policy is meant to raise prices by making fossil fuels harder to produce and use.  Indeed, the White House has followed a deliberate policy of attacking Americans' use of energy, turning it into something of a moral crusade.

We Must Challenge Obama Before He Breaks the United States.  We have all heard how narcissistic Barack Obama really is and how he does not like to take orders from anybody but, presumably, Allah his Muslim deity.  (Christian? Don't make me laugh.) ... Where in our Constitution does it give him permission to steal the money we provide through our taxes for his own personal pleasures?  For that matter, is there any LIMIT to the amount of our tax dollars that he can steal for his whims and wishes, or does he have carte blanche?

111th Congress Added More Debt Than First 100 Congresses Combined.  The federal government has accumulated more new debt — $3.22 trillion ($3,220,103,625,307.29) — during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined, according to official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury.  That equals $10,429.64 in new debt for each and every one of the 308,745,538 people counted in the United States by the 2010 Census.

National Debt Tops $14 Trillion.  The U.S. Treasury website today [1/3/2011] reported that as of last Friday, the last day of 2010, the National Debt stood at $14,025,215,218,708.52.  It took just 7 months for the National Debt to increase from $13 trillion on June 1, 2010 to $14 trillion on Dec. 31.  It also means the debt is fast approaching the statutory ceiling $14.294 trillion set by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last February.

Turning America Around.  Barack Obama promised to change America, and he did.  Federal spending has increased in two years to $3.72 trillion from $2.98 trillion, a 25% increase.  The national debt has swelled to almost $14 trillion from $10 trillion in the same period, and the Office of Management and Budget estimates that it will reach $26 trillion by 2020.  ObamaCare is moving 17% of the U.S economy from individual choice to government management and direction.  Protectionist policies have stopped trade agreements with several countries.

Driving US Families Into Poverty.  The Obama Administration still hasn't gotten the message voters sent Washington on November 2.  The lame duck session and 111th Congress finally ended, without the White House getting key items on its wish list.  So now, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department intend to impose costly, job-killing, economy-strangling new rules for power plants and refineries, and implement more land-grabs that will lock up additional millions of acres and more billions of dollars of American energy.  Their goal is to end the hydrocarbon and nuclear era in America — and force us to convert to "renewable" energy.

The Administration's Administrative Tyranny Marches On.  [Scroll down]  The Heritage Foundation notes that gas prices decreased 9 percent during Dubya's eight-year tenure, but they've been on a steady rise under Obama.  The EPA emission rules will clearly make it more expensive to convert fossil fuels into energy, putting even more upward pressure on gas prices.  That's not all.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has decreed that the Bureau of Land Management will establish new rules to make it more difficult to develop natural resources on government-owned land, which will also drive up the cost of gas and electricity and increase our dependency on foreign energy sources.

It Sure Seems Like We're Done.  History leaves no doubt that civilizations rise and fall, with the fall always beginning when rising ends.  The Classical era passed in under a millennium and a half; ours has already gone longer, but Reagan's Morning in America has become Obama's Closing Time.  Deindustrializing America is an endgame, and if the Obamacrats are saving the planet, it's not for underemployed Americans.

How Not to Help Blacks Find Employment.  Since the 1960s and the War on Poverty, Washington has spent billions, everything from job training programs, to tax incentives, to anti-discrimination laws to eradicate this gap, all to no avail.  Given a half century of failure, efforts to narrow differences have grown increasingly desperate.  The latest is the federal government's attempt to equalize how black and white job candidates appear to prospective employers even if they differ substantially — just ban employers from checking credit and criminal histories so as not to "unreasonably" disadvantage black job applicants.

Voters elected Republicans to end Obamaism, not expand it.  No, Mr. President, voters in 2010 did not demand bipartisan cooperation in 2011 to advance Obamacare, increase out-of-control federal spending that drove the national debt to $13.4 trillion and the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion, add thousands of bureaucrats to the government payroll even as private-sector unemployment remains near 10 percent, create hundreds more wasteful, duplicative federal programs that mainly benefit Democratic-favorite special interests like Big Labor, impose thousands more growth-killing environmental regulations, or erect multitudes of additional obstacles to achieving energy independence here at home.

Obama to regulate carbon from power plants.  US President Barack Obama's administration said Thursday [12/23/2010] it will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, after legislation on climate change died in Congress.

A Faux Compassionate Christmas, Courtesy of the Left.  In mid-2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-candidate Barack Obama, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid began an unprecedented campaign of trash-talking the economy — which, though clearly struggling, was still growing — while promising drastically higher taxes and energy-starving "climate" initiatives.  The record shows that enough entrepreneurs, investors, and other businesspeople to matter began heading for the hills, trimming employment, virtually ceasing new hiring, and canceling growth and expansion plans.

Fight Back Against Obama's Lawless EPA.  On November 15, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency issued a 100-page, highly technical "guidance" document proposing that as of January 2, 2011, large sources of greenhouse gas emissions — such as power plants, steel operations, and petroleum refineries — be required to obtain preconstruction and operating permits limiting their greenhouse gas emissions and to install the "best available" technology to do so. ... Previously, no such permits were needed, and no greenhouse gas limits existed.  It is widely agreed such new rules will drive up the costs of electricity, iron and steel, gasoline, and anything else produced by large operations, with these costs passed along to consumers already staggered by a jobless "recovery" from the recession.

Missing the California of My Youth.  In what seems like a lifetime ago, Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform the nation.  California is what a truly progressive government transformation looks like.  Thus, in a sensible America, the decline of California would be the canary call in a coal mine for the nation.

A Rate Which Lives In Infamy.  President Calvin Coolidge famously said that the chief business of the American people is business.  Now it seems that the chief business of Congress is to make sure American businesses are taxed at a punitive rate.

TSA New Enemies List.  The Obama Administration means to cause as much damage as possible in the two years remaining of its existence.  If that reads like a hubristic prediction, I have no better foundation for making it than the White House's approval — nay, its encouragement — of the Transportation Security Agency's (TSA's) new "enhanced" security measures and procedures.  Those measures and procedures, which violate, as a matter of policy, the Fourth Amendment rights of American travelers, are meeting as much opposition as any of the administration's legislative policies.

Mr. President, Your Helicopter Is Ready!  From out-of-control spending resulting in trillions of dollars added to the deficit, to Marxist programs repulsive to most Americans, to double-digit unemployment, to programs that promote class and racial warfare, to complete abandonment of border security and immigration law enforcement, and to inept and naïve mismanagement of foreign affairs, Barack Obama has done enough damage to America.

Put Uncle Sam on an Allowance.  This country is headed for financial disaster.  Spendthrift government is insolvent, and its behavior threatens the economy and lifestyle of all citizens.  The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform recently provided recommendations for addressing government deficits.  They proposed cuts that fell woefully short of a real solution.  Even so, the committee was unable to reach an agreement.

Democrats' budget bill: $1.1 trillion; 1,900 pages.  Filling more than 1,900 pages, the $1.1 trillion measure represents an increase of less than 2 percent in annual spending but makes for an easy target of ridicule — a last stand by the Senate's old bulls before the tea party takeover.

Memo to House GOP: Get a grip on the EPA.  Getting a grip on the Environmental Protection Agency must be at the top of the upcoming Republican-controlled House's "To Do" list.  Of immediate concern are the EPA rules for regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  Unless stopped by a federal court, the Obama EPA will implement on Jan. 2 a flagrantly illegal scheme to regulate emissions from power plants and other large emitters.  This enactment will kill jobs and raise the prices of energy, and thus of all good and services.

More evidence that economy is stalled because of Washington, Big Green policies.  A new analysis of government data by the Western Energy Alliance shows a 79 percent drop in the number of energy development leases offered by the federal government on public lands in the Rocky Mountain region states of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico and Utah.  The U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the activities of energy firms seeking to find and develop oil and natural gas under public lands, has issued only 531 new leases in 2010, compared to 2,499 in 2005, according to WEA.

Eco-Insanity and ANWR.  The abject desperation and evil intentions of so-called environmentalists can be seen in the call to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into a national monument on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its designation.  This would provide ANWR with the same status as the Statue of Liberty — only there aren't billion of barrels of oil under the Statue, nor at George Washington's birthplace in Virginia.  The idea of conferring national monument status on ANWR is so stupid that it should be laughed out of existence, but unfortunately we have a President who is so intent on denying Americans access to the vast treasure trove of energy resources — oil, coal, and natural gas — that common sense has nothing to do with his decisions.

The 'Unexpected' Consequences of Progressivism:  The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, submitted his final budget in 2000 for the 2001 fiscal year.  It was $1.9 trillion.  The 2011 federal budget submitted by Barack Obama?  $3.8 trillion.  In other words, federal spending has doubled in ten years.  Question for my fellow Americans:  has your income doubled in the last ten years?  Or perhaps more to the point, has everyone who pays taxes doubled their income?

The Left's War on the Economy.  Obama may be losing the War on Terror, but his War on the Economy is headed full speed ahead.  The joblessness, the unemployment rolls and an economic in which the only people still making money are in the government, in public sector unions or on Wall Street is no accident.  It was the intended result all along.

Collective Lunacy:  Obama/Bernanke Can't Learn Econ Lessons.  If what happened in Japan [in the 1990s] is starting to seem familiar, it's because we're living in the midst of Barack Obama's and Ben Bernanke's multitrillion-dollar stimulus.

Is the Federal Reserve Destroying the Dollar?  Every newly installed Socialist government has its first act:  the massive printing of money to pay off all the loyal cohorts and followers and supporters.  This assures support for the future "reelection" of the regime.  The "$800-billion stimulus" bill and its successors have increased our domestic deficit by $3.0 trillion in the first two years, and proposed carbon taxes and government health care are all part of the script of destruction.  If you are a globalist socialist, the most effective way to destroy our economy and everyone's wealth is hyperinflation.

Ideologue-in-Chief Obama Will Continue to Be Bad for Business.  Obama destroys.  Wearing the cape of savior, he destroys the resolve of people seeking to be saved.  Abusing the office of president, Obama destroys American prosperity.  He genuinely believes that government creates wealth.  But Obama's policies and pontifications scare ... the machine that creates all wealth:  private enterprise.  The president makes a show of caring about private enterprise, about people.  But he is in love with big government, with ideas.  Almighty central planning is progressivism's dearest idea.  Barack Obama's idea, too.

The Keynesians Get Their Wish.  The Keynesians finally got their wish.  The Federal Reserve plans to inject $600 billion dollars of the most caustic debt imaginable into the economy.  This is the Agent Orange of monetary policies that has the potential to wreak financial havoc.  In the hope of generating inflation, the central bank is going to enable deficit spending by buying treasury bonds.  You read that correctly; the primary goal is to erode the value of the dollar, and we get to watch our currency and wealth literally dissolve before our eyes.

Ponzi promises and priceless gold.  In August, Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff wrote an article in the Finance and Development Journal of the International Monetary Fund titled "U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It."  In it he warned:  "Let's get real.  The U.S. is bankrupt.["]  He estimated that "Based on the Congressional Budget Office's data ... a fiscal gap of $202 trillion (exists already), which is 15 times the official Treasury debt."  Last week, the Federal Reserve announced its intention to print another $600 billion plus to subsidize further the greatest Ponzi scheme in history called the U.S. Treasury market.  What does it mean for ordinary Americans?

House GOP budget chief calls Fed's $600B plan a 'big mistake'.  Paul Ryan, the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, has called the Federal Reserve's plan to pump $600 billion into the economy a "big mistake." ... "Look, we have Congress doing tax and spend, borrow and spend.  Now we have the Federal Reserve doing print and spend."

Soros Bets on U.S. Financial Collapse.  Another financial expert is expressing his deep disgust with the Federal Reserve's decision to print more money and buy more U.S. debt, saying it is a sign that the U.S. capitalist system is moving closer to collapse.  "This is the type of stuff we accused the communist and socialist governments of doing — interfering in free markets through currency manipulation," declared Zubi Diamond, author of The Wizards of Wall Street.  "What the Fed is doing is not good for free market capitalism and it is not good for America."

Bernanke's Cowardice Has Sealed Our Fate.  The day after the election, the Federal Reserve launched QE2, the second round of Quantitative Easing.  This public relations euphemism attempts to hide the fact that the Fed is "printing money" (the Fed actually does it electronically these days).  "Cheating, debasing, and inflating," as in stealing from the public, is a more accurate description.

The Nuclear Power Solution.  Barack Obama has tirelessly read from the teleprompter about America's urgent need to reduce its reliance on foreign oil and the growing demand for alternative renewable energy sources, green jobs, and such.  Surprisingly, nuclear energy — the one technology that could help the country meet all of his energy objectives — had until recently received only political footnotes in the president's agenda.  Sadly, when he mentions the word "nuclear" it is usually followed by the words "non-proliferation" rather than "clean energy."

Is The President Learning Economics By Trial-And-Error?  During his campaign for the presidency and now nearly two years in the White House, Barack Obama's disdain for America's free market economy has been abundantly clear.  As a candidate, Senator Obama traversed the country preaching his economic doctrines, and the recurrent themes from these messages were quite specific...

Bankruptcy of U.S. is 'Mathematical Certainty,' Says Former Bank CEO.  John Allison, who for two decades served as chairman and CEO of BB&T, the nation's 10th largest bank, told CNSNews.com it is a "mathematical certainty" that the United States government will go bankrupt unless it dramatically changes its fiscal direction.

Truth and Science and Facts vs. Unwashed Hillbillies.  At the very time that we should be reining government in, Obama is using every means at his disposal to expand it as far in every direction that he can.  When we should be trying to avoid the obvious pitfalls of European welfare states, we are doing everything we can to imitate them.

Conservatism's Boll Weevil.  [Obama's] egotism and inexperience, his grounding in the most extreme, ultra-leftist philosophy, his political education at the hands of the Chicago Machine, and the Democrat control of both Houses of Congress persuaded him that he was a creature of destiny.  His mission was no less than to remake the basic construct of the United States government, its institutions, and the private sector within the space of a single term in office.

America Just Checked Into Rehab.  Obama and his Democratic Congress ran up nearly $3 trillion in new debt in just 21 months — after running a disingenuous 2008 campaign that falsely promised to rein in the fiscal irresponsibility that had been rampant during the spendthrift Bush administration.  So the voters intervened and sent America in for rehab treatment.

What President Obama Didn't Learn at Harvard.  If President Obama had gone to Harvard Business School, instead of Harvard Law School, he might have learned this amazing lesson about American enterprise. ... President Obama thinks government produces wealth.  Worse, he thinks government's role is to "spread the wealth around."  Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried.

You Just Might Be a Marxist.  While [these] are intrinsically Marxist notions, many hold them who do not consider themselves Marxists.
  •  If you believe, as the president does, that "it's good for everyone when we spread the wealth around," you might be a Marxist.
  •  If you believe that "the rich" don't "need" tax rate reductions, you might be a Marxist.
  •  If you believe that, at some point, other people have "made enough money," you might be a Marxist.
  •  If you believe that unemployment checks are the surest, fastest way to stimulate the economy, you might be a Marxist.

Don't Fall for Any Postelection Obama Spending Conversion.  How can anyone take Obama seriously when he says he will focus on the deficit in the next two years, seeing as his economic and social philosophies dictate that he continue to spend our money like a drunken floozy?

The Obama Team's Strategy for Changing America.  This transformation — and the President has made it clear that this is just the beginning of what he has in store for the country — may be catastrophic, but it is not accidental.  As his pre-election promise suggest — and as David Horowitz and Liz Blaine document in their trenchant new pamphlet, Breaking the System — what Obama has done to America and what he plans for the future if his power is not curbed, is the product of a calculated strategy by the radical Left to subvert America's free-enterprise system and to turn the country's citizens into wards of an always-growing state whose ultimate objective is to engineer American lives.

Obama Battles Reagan.  Every major Obama initiative from Obamanomics to ObamaCare is inevitably attempting to transform America just as Obama promised:  taking the prosperous America Ronald Reagan saw as The Shining City Upon a Hill and turning it into a Society of Beggars.  Sending Americans begging — literally.  Turning Reagan's "Morning in America" into what Rush Limbaugh has termed Obama's endless Dark Night of the Soup Kitchen.  All of this based on the idea that building the American economy (or for that matter any economy), as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, must be done based on the philosophy that "the biggest bang for the buck [comes] when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance — the biggest bang for the buck."  This is, of course, straight from Marx.

Obama is smarter than you.  The last 22 months have seen a riot of government expansion into every aspect of American life.  The housing crisis has not abated and by some measures has grown worse.  The value of the dollar has plummeted.  Government debt is at record levels and will remain there for the foreseeable future.  The economy is sputtering, the stimulus failed to stimulate, job losses are deeper and will last longer than any economic downturn since World War II.  Mr. Obama blames this continuing mess on the Bush administration, on factors out of his control, or on anyone but himself.  Facts, science and argument disagree.

It's Official:  Obama Has Now Borrowed $3 Trillion.  It's official: The Obama administration has now borrowed $3 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.  It took from 1776, when the United States became an independent country, until 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell signaling victory in the Cold War, for the federal government to accumulate a total of $3 trillion in debt, according to the Treasury Department.

Socialism and Reality.  The images on the television screen emanating from Europe are a sobering reminder that socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and will always do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers. ... Yet within the halls of power in Washington, D.C. there is a socialist/progressive cabal, and its titular leader Barack Obama, oblivious to this reality.  These ideologues continue to cling to the belief that they have a unique ability to succeed where so many others have failed.

How to Turn a Recession into a Depression.  Destroy business confidence, cozy up to socialists abroad, send deficits through the ceiling — that should do it.

National Debt Up $3 Trillion on Obama's Watch.  New numbers posted today [10/18/2010] on the Treasury Department website show the National Debt has increased by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office.  The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated.  The Bureau of Public Debt reported today that the National Debt had hit an all time high of $13.665 trillion.

America, we have a problem.  In a New York Times interview last week, President Obama acknowledged that there's "no such thing as shovel-ready projects."  This was one of his main selling points for the $862 billion stimulus package.  He now admits they don't exist, and the stimulus is clearly not working.  The public was told that unemployment would not go above 8 percent if the stimulus package passed.  They passed it and unemployment went to over 9.6 percent and stayed there.  So now the president and his economic advisors say we might have to just get used to high unemployment.  And they want to spend even more money.

More about President Obama's lies about job creation and stimulus money.

It's official:  Another year, another trillion dollar deficit.  The Treasury Department has officially added up all the zeroes and have proclaimed the FY 2010 budget deficit to be $1.29 trillion. ... That's down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 — the highest deficit on record.

Obama's Takedown of Industrial America.  Obama's industrial policy is designed to make America non-competitive in the world economy, destroy millions of jobs, and devastate our manufacturing and industrial capacities. ... Here is a summary of recent aspects of our industrial policy as proffered by the ruling Democratic Party:
  •   Huge and ineffective stimulus expenditures
  •   A 3.0-trillion-dollar increase in our national debt in two years
  •   Unemployment at 9.6%
  •   A job-killing moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska
  •   Adoption of a tax on energy use called Cap and Trade
  •   The EPA aggressively regulating emissions resulting from the combustion of carbon fuels
  •   The EPA working to regulate fluids used in the production of abundant shale-sourced natural gas
  •   Elimination of the secret ballot (card check) in proposed unionization to increase union power and high-cost labor in our economy
  •   Imposition of costly health mandates on small businesses
  •   Increasing domestic taxes on business earnings made and taxed in foreign countries
This list is sufficiently comprehensive for anyone to get the picture, especially if he or she is in business.

Where Do You Really Think America is Headed?  An old college friend asked me recently where I really think America is headed.  I basically said that our nation is an out-of-control train running top speed with an incompetent and suicidal engineer at the throttle.  To change metaphors, our country is a packed jumbo jet with an unlicensed pilot at the controls.

Obama's war on wealth.  President Obama effectively has declared war on America's wealth creators.  By refusing to extend fully the George W. Bush tax cuts, Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats are hoping their "tax the rich" rhetoric will carry the day.  This sends an unmistakable message to investors and entrepreneurs:  If you risk your capital and succeed, your government will punish you.  It should come as no surprise, then, that this policy has led to a dramatic destruction of wealth.

The Very Dangerous Folly of Obamanomics.  [Scroll down]  From here, then-Senator Obama went on to introduce his new "energy" proposal.  As a remedy for rising gasoline prices, he wanted to raise taxes on oil companies, and use that "extra" tax revenue to give "working Americans" a thousand-dollar voucher that they could use to make gasoline purchases. ... Senator Obama simply portrayed the Exxon Mobil company as a "villain" for earning a "record profit," and he was going to be the "good guy" who would legislate money away from the oil company and give it to "us."

The Economics Of 'Fairness' Have Backfired.  We raise taxes on things we want to discourage, like cigarettes, and we lower taxes on things we want to encourage, like education.  The idea is to manipulate prices by changing costs, via taxation, so that we end up with more expensive Marlboros, smaller hikes in tuition, fewer smokers and more college students — in other words, a smarter and healthier America.  That's straight out of Economics 101. ... The problem with Obama is that he treats jobs and job creators like cigarettes.

The Bank of Central Planning.  The prospect of another big-government program is disheartening to all those who believe the federal government has grown far beyond its originally intended scope of authority.  Fear that the massive growth of the federal government will stifle technological innovation, harm the economy, and limit individual freedom is well-founded.  Every society that has relied on central planning has suffered with a stagnant economy, limited mobility, and a low standard of living.

How Leftists are Killing 'The Jetsons'.  For the first time in American history, today's generation is looking at a future that resembles the Flintstones more than the Jetsons.  President Obama's science adviser, John Holdren, preaches the virtues of "de-development," by which he means the destruction of technological advances; the Obama administration preaches cap and trade policies, which would cripple American standards of living if implemented.  Obama and his cronies have no faith whatsoever in human ingenuity and entrepreneurship:  the best solutions are always proscriptive and prophylactic.  They're wrong.  The best solutions are, almost invariably, created by the private sector.

Obama vs. Reagan.  Vice President Joe Biden recently announced that "there's no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession."  In essence, Biden is admitting that despite all the profligate spending and redistribution of wealth that are the hallmarks of the Obama Administration — with its massive inter-generational deficits — Obamanomics is a failure.  When will liberal Democrats learn that prosperity is created by unleashing the free market, not smothering it?

Obama Kneecaps Airlines.  The Obama administration set Big Labor on the easy road to cannibalize the airline and rail industries and last week Senate Democrats stamped their imprimatur on the deal — at a time when taxpayers are getting full view of the cost of out of control unions bankrupting state and local governments and destroying public education.

New Narcissus.  America is polarizing into a new two-party state — socialists and non-socialists — that will be devoid of the stabilizing checks-and-balances in the former Republican-Democrat two-party system.  Convinced of this, I believe my offspring will not only never enjoy a tenth of the freedoms I've enjoyed, but also will toil their lives away in a futile effort to pay off debts that President Obama is now running up.

Feels like a depression to me.  Between the time that George Washington took the first oath of office as president and when Barack Obama did — 1789 to 2009 — the United States had borrowed nine trillion dollars.  Since Obama took office, it has borrowed or imposed nearly three trillion more debt.  Tell me he is not deliberately seeking to bankrupt the nation.

Fire Geithner before he kills the economy.  If a corporate financial officer in the private sector had overseen the wasteful spending of hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars without producing anything to show for it, he would be summarily fired.  But corporate performance standards don't apply to President Obama's Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner.  He was a guiding hand on the government boondoggles and bailouts that have enraged taxpayers since 2008.

The Biggest Target is Liberalism.  The 2010 election is not simply a campaign against Obama.  It needs to be a campaign against liberalism as a whole.  Obama remains the major target, and he deserves the honor.  No president in my lifetime has been as incompetent, as obtuse, or as polarizing.  There's a particular type of incompetence that involves applying serious energy and diligence to doing the wrong thing.  Obama is the master of this style of governance.

Destroying King Dollar Is Not the Solution.  Fed head Ben Bernanke and the FOMC dropped a new policy bomb at their meeting this week.  Now they say inflation is too low.  That's the real problem.  And the solution?  Punch up the money supply and punch down the dollar — or what I used to call King Dollar.  No more.  In the 24 hours following the Fed announcement, gold rocketed up toward $1,300, a new record high.  And the dollar plunged.  It's a big vote against the central bank and its constant tinkering and fine-tuning.

Obama's New Mandate:  CHANGE It Back!  As the American Dream is systematically destroyed by Barack Obama, a Marxist community organizer with no practical experience except for seizing and wasting other people's wealth, a counterforce of revolution is growing more and more powerful by the day.  That force is determined to counter the anti-free trade policies of the arrogant egomaniac who is occupying the White House.

Does Your Vote Count?  America was at the crossroads two years ago.  Americans voted Obama into office and gave the Democrats solid control of the House and Senate.  That election determined which road we would travel upon.  To my amazement and great disappointment, America chose socialism.  The Liberals took complete control of Washington and began to launch a massive agenda to enlarge government, secure power, destroy capitalism, take over industry, control healthcare, increase dependency, and basically cement our future to a foundation of socialism.

Democrats Drove President Obama's Car into the Ditch.  [Scroll down]  On September 30, 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) bottomed out at 7,528.  Over the next six years, the DJIA soared, reaching 12,653 by the end of January 2007, the same month Democrats retook control of Congress.  Eighteen months later, the stock market was in a free-fall that destroyed the retirement and personal wealth of millions of Americans.

Inhofe Says EPA's New Boiler Rule Could Kill Nearly 800,000 Manufacturing Jobs.  The top Republican on a Senate environmental panel released a scathing report Tuesday [9/28/2010] that he contends shows that the Environmental Protection Agency's new proposed rule on cleaning up boilers nationwide could devastate America's manufacturing base and imperil hundreds of thousands of jobs without providing any real public health or environmental benefits.

More about the EPA.

Obama Endorses Global Taxes on Eve of U.N. Summit.  In a classic case of misdirection, while the media are preoccupied with the fate of the Bush tax cuts, President Obama is preparing to attend a United Nations summit next week to endorse "innovative finance mechanisms" — global taxes — to drain even more wealth out of the U.S. economy.

White House Science Czar:  'De-Develop the United States'.  In a video interview this week, White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren told CNSNews.com that he would use the "free market economy" to implement the "massive campaign" he advocated along with Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich to "de-develop the United States."

The Lies And Distortions Just Keep Coming.  [Scroll down]  If you work for a small business with more than two or three of employees then you had better hope that your employer is a millionaire or your job may be in seriously in jeopardy.  But Obama doesn't think employers should be millionaires.  Perhaps this is because Obama knows nothing about running a business.  Or maybe it's because his Marxist philosophy tells him that any company worth more than a million dollars should be owned by the state.

Reaping the Whirlwind.  There is a sense of foreboding rising in this country. ... Our prosperity, our security, and even our safety are fast fading away.  Our own president and his party are facilitating our demise.  The signs are everywhere.  Every new piece of backroom congressional legislation chips away at a few more freedoms, undermining our republic by preventing open and honest debate.  Behind the scenes, Obama's henchmen wield sledgehammers against free commerce, gun ownership, freedom of speech, and energy.  The billions in taxpayer money going to leftist and socialist organizations cement their toxic influence into the very fabric of our government.

Two Years That Changed the World.  Flight USA went from "all systems nominal" under Captain Bush and his Republican crew to stormy weather, mechanical malfunction, an all-new Democrat crew under Captain Obama, and a dangerous loss of altitude.  All in two years.  The passengers are nervous and restless, to say the least.

Holding the Line.  President Obama has suddenly discovered the virtues of deficit reduction:  Having spent all the money, he now thinks it would be downright irresponsible of taxpayers not to pick up some of his tab.  His defenders would have us believe that every form of fiscal austerity would sink us deeper into the quicksand — except for tax increases on the most productive individuals and profitable small businesses in the country.

Uncertain Business Climate Is Hobbling Employment, Conservative Governor Says.  American businesses are most worried about what Washington's going to do next, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie said on Tuesday [9/7/2010].  In an interview with Fox & Friends, Christie said the Obama administration lacks a "clear, cogent message" for the American people:  "I can tell you that when I talk to business people in New Jersey — the thing they're most concerned about is the uncertainty.  They never know what's going to come out of Washington and how it's going to add to the cost of them doing business."

How Obama Thinks.  Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history.  Thanks to him the era of big government is back.  Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions.  He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy.  The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

Barry Soetoro's Indonesian Expatriate Hell.  Where did Barack Obama acquire the self-evident disdain he has for major corporations, especially oil companies, and for the striving classes who have made America prosperous and strong? ... He has in the past told us that we can't have houses as warm as we want, or cars as big as we prefer.  We must make do with less so that others may enjoy some of the goodies, in effect.

The Student Loan Takeover.  The unilateral seizure of the student loan program by the Obama administration carries extremely serious implications for the future of higher education in America, especially in view of a confluence of market forces that have the potential to effect the greatest changes education has seen in decades.  Outside the liberal academic community, there is general agreement that the traditional university model is broken.  Institutions founded for purposes of education and learning have become bloated and dysfunctional conglomerates with vastly oversized administrative staffs and a voracious appetite for money from students, taxpayers (state schools), and alumni (private schools).

Did student loans ruin the country?  Student loans eclipse credit card debt — by a lot.  More than $100 billion in new student loans were taken out last year and outstanding student loans will top $1 trillion this year.  By comparison, revolving credit, which includes credit cards, is below $800 billion.  Consumer credit borrowing dropped by 19% over the last 3 years.  The rise in student loans is a disaster for retailers, banks, college students and the economy.

Dems Propose Back Door Energy Taxes.  While Harry Reid may have allowed the energy tax hikes to die on the floor of the Senate, liberals nationwide have continued their attacks on the energy industry.  The Gulf oil spill is barely a fond memory of a moratorium and Democrats are already seizing on the incident to push a host of job-killing, industry-kneecapping taxes and regulations designed to do what they failed to do legislatively:  take down the American energy industry.

Jobs Knowingly Killed And Destroyed.  There's a law known as the law of unintended consequences.  It's invoked when you try to do the right thing but overlook other events and occurrences set in motion by your actions.  In the case of the drilling moratorium, the consequences were intended.

Obama, The Nation Killer.  The unemployment rate keeps climbing and the polling results for the President and Congress keep falling.  Conservatives are well aware that the Obama administration has relentlessly pursued legislation harmful to the economy, but just how bad it is and how bad it will become in 2011 may not have sunk in fully for the public in general.

Obama's Beltway Chainsaw Massacre.  When what the bucket has dumped out drains away, what do we have?  9.5% unemployment — at least at an official level — 1.5% higher than what was promised if the "stimulus" wasn't passed.  A stagnant economy.  Businesses neither expanding nor hiring.  Car sales — down.  Housing sales — way down.  Consumer confidence — in the tank.

The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment.  The economic "recovery" has been disappointing, to put it mildly, and it has become increasingly clear that the blame lies with the policies of the Obama administration, not with those of its predecessor.  In general, the current administration has been too focused on expanding government, redistributing more from rich to poor, and stimulating aggregate demand.

Obama knew Gulf drilling ban would cost at least 23,000 jobs.  Interior Department officials knew beforehand that President Obama's six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would cost more than 23,000 jobs and inflict devastating economic damage throughout the region.  Even so, the administration was not deferred from defying a federal judge and doing it anyway.

A year after claiming the economy as his own, Obama points finger.  President Obama this summer has repeatedly blamed George W. Bush for the nation's economic woes, a year after he took ownership of the economy and criticized those who "carp and gripe."

Obama's 'Progressive' Failures.  At a fundraiser Monday [8/16/2010], the president boasted to Hollywood celebrities and deal makers about enacting "the most progressive legislative agenda" in decades.  That may be true, but it's hardly something to be proud of.

Why 'Atlas Shrugged' is flying off the bookshelves.  A record $2 trillion now sits on corporate balance sheets waiting to be invested amid reasonably cheap assets prices.  What holds back investment is uncertainty and fear stemming from an overbearing and free-spending government.  Businessmen and investors would never attempt spending and borrowing their way back to prosperity.  The debt-financed Obama stimulus plan is not only failing to create jobs.  It also ratchets up systemic risk, inviting a currency crisis and bond market collapse — from which recovery might be impossible.

How's That 'Spread the Wealth Around' Going?  Spreading the wealth seems like a good idea, rather like Mom spreading frosting on a cake:  tasty and yummy.  In reality, of course, governments don't ever spread the wealth.  They take money from some people and give it to others.  It's more like leaf-raking.  You rake the leaves together, and then you hand them over to your political pals for disbursement among their supporters.  It's a bit like passing a $26-billion bill to save the jobs and cushy retirements of well-paid teachers and state government workers.

What's Holding Back The Hiring?  Start With Obama's 10 Job Killers.  President Obama claims that he's concerned about "jobs, jobs, jobs," but he has signed laws, issued executive orders and approved regulations that create incentives for private-sector employers to lay off people or delay hiring people.  It's no wonder high unemployment persists.

Obama's creeping crud.  Liberals are shocked and appalled that American businesses are hoarding cash, not hiring and, gasp! — GASP! — posting profits.  And this, they say, is all the evidence needed for government to spend trillions more dollars to prod the recovery that's straightaway.  Could it be, just perhaps, that American businesses are bolstering their cash reserves, deferring hiring and taking profits now because they know that come 2011 their costs to do business will explode because of skyrocketing government imposts and compliance costs?

The Danger of a Government with Unlimited Power.  The fundamental thrust of governments such as that of President Obama is to abrogate the rights of private property, aiming at the holy grail of their secular religion:  redistribution of income and wealth to reduce everyone to an equally low state of economic equality.

Slow Poison.  How do you keep an economy from digging itself out of a major recession?  One surefire method is massively expanding a government whose major programs are already on their way to bankruptcy, then sitting idly by as major tax increases arrive.  The Democratic Congress has spent a trillion dollars on a failed Keynesian stimulus that promised millions of jobs that never materialized.

The Dark at the End of the Tunnel.  Without "the rich" to bash on, squeeze, hammer, and otherwise alternately abuse and neglect, the rest of Obama's economics don't make any sense.  Even then they still don't make much sense, but still, Obama's theories need to rest on something.  And the belief in the general unfairness of every- and anything that hasn't been redistributed through DC is his foundation.

The Fix is In.  Falling like the staccato drumbeat of a pouring rain, the day-by-day assault by the ruling Progressives on the traditions and sensibilities of America has the no-longer-silent majority reeling.  We were warned.  The watchmen on the walls Buchanan, Limbaugh, Beck and others told us what was coming.  They tried to alert those willing to vote for an untried community organizer because they wanted change that the change would change once the organizer got organized, so none of these transformative changes should surprise anyone.

The Big Bamboozler.  On Monday [8/2/2010], at yet another campaign fundraiser, the part-time President, full-time campaigner Barack Obama told Democrat fat cats, with both hands in taxpayer pockets, that Republicans "have not come up with a single, solitary new idea to address the challenges of the American people."  But where are Barack Obama's new ideas?  The Keynesian deficit spending of the 1970s, focused on the make-work jobs programs of the 1930s, is not exactly a new idea.

Obamanomics:  Kneecapping America's Future.  The Obama Administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unloaded its disastrous mid-session budget review in a Friday afternoon dump and run — updating its own budget projections from February.  By the administration's own analysis the forecast is bleak:  10% unemployment this year and a $1.47 trillion deficit next year.  The President's plan is to add crippling tax hikes to the unrestrained spending and unprecedented deficits and debt.

America's Economic Hari-Kari.  Anyone with a lick of common sense will tell you that when you are in a hole, you need to quit digging.  Continuing to dig will only create a larger problem.  Do schools teach this?  Even President Obama's national debt commission recently told him that his continuing spending orgy is digging America into a gigantic fiscal hole.

Regulation in the Obama Era.  Most Americans are painfully aware of the amount of taxes they pay.  Money deducted from their paychecks, charges added at the cash register and to each restaurant bill, and checks written to the IRS serve as a constant reminder of the price of government programs.  Total government revenue and spending is routinely added up and debated.  Yet, explicit taxes and spending are only part of the total burden that government places on Americans.  The rest comes in the form of hidden taxes imposed by government regulations.

Ratcheting to Ruin.  The U.S. government moves closer to a debt death spiral. ... With no spending restraints, the economy moves inexorably toward its date of collapse.  The excesses and imbalances created by the explosion of debt over the last thirty years virtually ensure a depression, regardless of what policy actions the government chooses.  That was determined before Obama took office.  His spending only accelerated the debt spiral, never had any chance of success and sped up our date with economic destiny.

US Government 'hiding true amount of debt'.  The actual figure of the US' national debt is much higher than the official sum of $13.4 trillion given by the Congressional Budget Office, according to analysts cited on Sunday [9/19/2010] by the New York Post.  "The Government is lying about the amount of debt.  It is engaging in Enron accounting," said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University...

No One's Capital Is Safe in Obama's America.  Obama's poorly coded message to investors is to take your money out of America and keep it out.  Whether through excessive taxation, suffocating over-regulation, or thuggish confiscation, the lesson to be drawn by anyone with excess capital is to look for friendlier places to put it to work.  The list of friendlier places excludes North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran for the time being, but almost everywhere else qualifies.

Obama aborted the recovery.  [Scroll down]  All of these job-killing actions are complemented by an assault on private investment and entrepreneurial risk-taking through myriad new and higher taxes, more onerous regulations, Obamacare costs and penalties and other measures that are deterring investment by the private enterprises that should drive a recovery.  Small businesses will fail; new ones will not replace them.  Larger companies are hoarding their cash while looking for opportunities to put it to work in more hospitable places outside the United States.

What Can't the U.S. Afford?  Most know that the country is broke, paying its bills with borrowed or magic money under an overhang of debt nobody's talking about repaying.  The politicians who lead the country while repeating that this is somebody else's fault keep spending without mentioning what will have to be given up for a balanced budget.  In fact, Congressional Democrats have so far refused to even provide a budget for this cycle, likely a response to the coming November elections.  But 2010's plan is known and it's reasonable to expect 2011 to be similar.

Of Course Obama's a Socialist.  Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's quota liberal, is shocked that people are calling President Obama a socialist.  Last week, a poll announced that 55 percent of people think he's just that. ... You can call Obama a socialist, a progressive, a liberal, a black liberationist.  The choice of words doesn't matter.  What matters is that President Obama is a card-carrying member of the ruling class, and every act of this president aims to concentrate more power in the government or distribute favors to his supporters.  America was not founded for this.  The 600,000 did not die in the Civil War for this.  The GIs did not crush Nazism and Communism for this.

How to Regulate America Out of Business.  [Scroll down]  The August 25 vote by the Security and Exchange Commission to allow large shareholders access to proxy nominations for board members is a perfect example.  In effect, the new regulation encourages environmentalist and human rights groups, as well as institutional investors, labor unions, and hedge funds, to nominate their own representatives for corporate boards.  If elected, many of these board members would promote activist agendas that conflict with the interests of the stockholders.  Instead of voting to maximize profits, such representatives would support narrow ideological goals.  How would it be possible for a representative of a coalition of Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups to serve on the board of Chevron or Massey Energy?

Time for Obama to make sacrifices.  When Obama entered office, he inherited a budget deficit that reflected the toxic combination of recession, bailouts and runaway entitlement programs.  But rather than getting the government's finances under control, Obama and his allies in Congress poured gasoline on the fire with trillion-dollar boondoggles.  To put the recent spending binge in context, consider this:  At the end of 2008, just before Obama took office, the federal debt was about 40 percent of our nation's total economy.  Now, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, the debt will explode to 62 percent of our economy by the end of this year.

Geithner:  Irresponsible spending has fixed the economy.  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is right to say that the country is living beyond its means, but it's a curious statement coming from an official in an administration that has done nothing to curb profligate spending.

Reaganomics Rules — Obamanomics Fools.  Reaganomics, so often derided by liberals, was an economic stimulus that fueled over 20 years of U.S. economic growth, job creation, prosperity, and international power.  Obamanomics, in just 18 months, has been a spectacular failure, creating the potential for a $22 trillion dollars of public debt by 2020 that will take another 20 years to repay.

You're a Liberal/Progressive if You Believe...  increased government spending is the path to prosperity.  It doesn't matter how many times this Keynesian economic model has failed or how many times its exact opposite — tax cuts and lower spending — has succeeded.  It doesn't matter that $865 billion of "stimulus" hasn't stimulated anything other than government payrolls and political cronies, or that the path we're on is completely unsustainable.

Obama's 'Mandate for Sacrifice' Costs Thousands of Jobs.  As many as 100,000 Americans who lost their jobs, or will soon, because of GM and Chrysler dealership closings can thank Barack Obama and his "mandate for shared sacrifice," according to a top Obama official.

The White House's Continuing War on Affordable Energy.  The White House has launched a coordinated PR campaign to argue that it is not anti-business.  That is a difficult argument to make when we look at the Administration's record on energy.  Time after time the Administration has acted to make it more difficult to produce energy domestically and they are actively seeking to make energy more expensive.  This only makes an economic recovery more difficult.

Obama's Next Act .  [Scroll down]  But Obama's most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget.  The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed.  These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures.  They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid.  But Obamacare freezes these out as a source of debt reduction.

We Only Expected Competence.  It somehow has never dawned on the Obama devotees who like to cite the administration's "inherited mess" that this president's failures don't exactly reflect the overcautiousness of a leader constrained by a crisis.  Taking over one-sixth of the private sector in an unintelligible health-care scheme is not an indication of tied hands; it's a demonstration of unbridled recklessness.  So too is dumping unprecedented billions into a liberal wish-list and calling it a stimulus.  And so is cooking up financial reform that makes growth impossible and charges responsible banks with the task of bailing out irresponsible ones.

The Rout of Obamanomics.  In February 2009, I published a commentary in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Reaganomics v. Obamanomics," which pointed out that President Obama's economic policies were exactly the opposite of President Reagan's.  I predicted that as a result they would produce exactly the opposite results.  Art Laffer has produced a far more sophisticated argument advancing a similar analysis.  But the June unemployment report released last Friday [7/2/2010] shows an economy doing much worse at this point than even I expected.

A silver platter of GOP talking points for November.  Let's review some tasty silver platter entrees:
  •  Over $800 billion in stimulus spending that hasn't worked,
  •  Using TARP funds to cherry-pick which banks survive and which don't
  •  9.7% unemployment when Obama promised it wouldn't go above 8%
  •  A "pay czar" deciding how much corporate executives can earn

Endless Zeros.  Twenty trillion dollars.  That is the estimate of federal indebtedness by 2020.  But that $20 trillion is just the federal debt:  it does not include $3.4 trillion in current annual spending, nor does it include state and local obligations.  Government has no intention of paying off this debt — only of continuing to add to it.  What that means is that taxpayers are obligated to service this debt (and whatever is added to it) at prevailing interest rates forever.

Heckuva Job, Peter.  After accruing a $1.3 trillion deficit and the largest debt in U.S. history, what do you do for an encore?  For Peter Orszag, exit was the only option.  If ever someone smelled the smoke and knew it was time to leave the burning building, it's the director of President Obama's Office of Management and Budget.

Obama approval rating takes dive as he faces anti-business charge.  A new poll out Friday [7/9/2010] showed a new benchmark:  a majority of Americans now disapprove of Obama's job performance.  The Economist/YouGov survey of 1,000 U.S. citizens from July 3 to 6 showed that 52 percent disapprove of Obama's job performance.  And Obama's approval in the poll was at 43 percent, a concerning number for the White House.  Gallup's daily tracking poll, which averages all polls over the last three days, showed Obama Friday at 44 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval.

Obama throws out baby + bathwater:
 Drilling ban is Louisiana's third calamity.  It will be years before Louisiana totes up all of the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  But the damage Louisianans suffer if a federal court approves President Obama's six-month offshore drilling moratorium could well be much worse.  Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., estimates that as many as 38,000 jobs will be lost in the first four months alone, with more than 12,000 of those disappearing in just two parishes, Lafayette and St. Martin.

Re:  'Barack Obama:  The great jobs killer'.  The government can force people to pay taxes on their employees, and even to buy them health insurance, but it can't force them to offer jobs to anyone.  As long as federal policy makes business owners afraid to hire additional workers, unemployment will remain at unacceptably high levels in Nevada and elsewhere throughout the U.S.

Green Jobs Don't Exist in a Free Market.  A large part of Obama's $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects.  Obama and his environmentalist hordes convinced Congress that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost their jobs during the recession.  "We know the jobs of the 21st century will be created in developing alternative energy," Obama proudly proclaimed.  This, of course, from a man who doesn't know the difference between price and earnings or overhead and profit.  Well, he doesn't know shineola about the economy and job creation either.  Economic lesson number one:  Government regulations do not create jobs.  Private industry serving the wants and needs of the consumers create jobs.  Period.

Obama's 'Killing Great American Jobs' Machine.  [Scroll down]  [America] appears to have lost its ability to create the millions of jobs that will be needed to keep pace with the yearly flood of new job-seekers entering the workforce.  The reason, economists and other critics say, is the administration's anti-capitalist, anti-free enterprise, anti-free market policies that are impeding investment and venture capital formation, punishing U.S. businesses with higher taxes and new mandates like Obamacare, cap-and-trade energy fees and draconian financial regulations coupled with threats to let the Bush tax cuts expire that are already having a preemptive job-killing effect on payrolls and economic growth.

Carter Country.  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the world can no longer depend on the U.S. to drive the global economy.  Yes, that's the demoralizing sound of the White House spreading more malaise.

And the Voice of the Liar is Heard in our Land.  The [Obamacare] bill will break states.  It will break companies.  It will put a boot down on the head of the American economy.  Which is exactly its goal.  The Obama Administration is not interested in economic prosperity, it is interested in a government takeover.  People who can make their own way and pay their own bills, are poor candidates for a nanny state.  No, the people have to be robbed, browbeaten, left helpless, and only then will they agree to have the chains put around their necks.  Or least stop fighting against them as hard.

King Barry's Big Adventure.  When one looks carefully at the company with which King Barry surrounds himself, and the Progressive Marxist agenda they share, it's entirely reasonable to be not only suspicious, but genuinely afraid of their collective capacity for inflicting a crippling and permanent level of damage to our glorious republic.  This would have to include the possibility of outright destruction.  In fact, many observers would argue that is precisely the goal.

Obama's Destruction Of Capitalism.  Obama's administration is rapidly replacing capitalism, markets and free enterprise with socialism and total government control.  In Marxist theory socialism is a stage on the way to the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of communism.  It's doing this by finding examples of capitalist 'failures' and using them to justify government regulation and takeover.

Obama's Latest Shakedown.  President Obama's oil spill speech revealed, once again, how stunningly shameless he is.  This relentless ideologue is not even marginally competent at masking his ongoing crusade to apply a wrecking ball to every sector of our economy and remake it in his own image.

Obama Has a "Boot on the Throat" Of the Global Economy.  [Scroll down]  This illustrates one of the greatest tragedies of the Obama presidency:  our President's harshest, most angry, most aggressive words are usually aimed at free enterprise.  It's difficult to imagine our President ever claiming to have a "boot on the throat" of Islamic terrorists, or Iran, or North Korea.  Yet even dating back to his earliest days on the presidential campaign trail, he has often spoken words of vitriol towards American businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, car manufacturers, and — yes — oil companies.

The Reason for Constitutional Rights.  The story is becoming an old one with the Obama Administration.  AIG executives receive a lawful bonus, and Democrat leaders in Congress snarl and warn that a special income tax surcharge awaits them, if they do not return the bonuses.  Businessmen are treated like criminals, even when their actions are wholly legal.  What these Democrats are doing, although they are loath to admit it, is grossly violate the constitutional rights of executives at BP or at AIG or some other "fat cats" routinely excoriated by the left.

'Stimulus' or not, Obama seeks new spending.  Though he didn't call it a second stimulus, President Obama this weekend asked Congress to pass legislation that amounts to much the same thing:  extending some of the first stimulus bill's programs and adding some of the White House's new priorities such as small-business lending and a tax on big banks.

Obama and Oil:  Greasing America's Decline.  President Obama has consistently pursued environmental policies designed to forward his socialist agenda at the expense of American economic power.  Very few, if any, of Obama's environmental policies have anything to do with the environment, but instead, they all serve as a cover for economic sabotage.  As an example, the original cap-and-trade legislation favored by President Obama would have reduced U.S. GDP by $9 trillion and lowered emissions past a point where no industrial nation could endure.
[Emphasis added.]

Stimulus II means more cash for Dems.  Unemployment among government workers last month was 3.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, meaning government workers are about three times less likely to be jobless than the general population.  From this disparity, Democrats have somehow concluded that what we really need is a greater disparity.  How else can anyone explain their plan for an additional $50 billion bailout to prevent further job losses among state and local government workers?

Obama is Killing Private Business.  Obama's Interior Department, using lies to justify its offshore drilling moratorium, is already in the process of killing off as many private-sector jobs as any number of jobs bills could create.  Meanwhile, we're bailing out state and local governments that spent too much in boom times and got too cozy with their unionized workforces.  The problem:  At some point, the host organism is going to die.  We can't all work for the government, because someone has to produce something useful for government to tax.

Alinskys in Action.  As Congress considers the Democrats' unprecedented legislative assault on Wall Street, radical leftists say the bad economy gives them new opportunities to push America even farther down the road to socialism.  "The banking crisis is the next big thing," said George Goehl, executive director of the Chicago-based group National People's Action.

Our Pro-Business President.  The big political news out of Washington yesterday is that the White House wants you to know that President Obama is not antibusiness.  That reassuring word comes in a dispatch from Politico.com quoting senior White House aides that they have launched "a coordinated campaign to push back against the perception" that its agenda is hostile to business.  How in the world did anyone get that idea?

Obama's deficit deception:  Barack Obama claims Obamacare is necessary to keep the country solvent.  This is a strange assertion coming from the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history.

America's Predicament:  According to the Obama administration America's public debt will exceed 100 percent of GDP in the next fiscal year.  History shows that most countries whose debt exceeds this mark are rarely able to control it.  This level of indebtedness usually leads to currency debasement.

Barack Obama's Total Eclipse for America.  President Obama's $1.6 trillion deficit for this year, following his $1.4 trillion deficit for last year, has been sucking the capital investment needed to create jobs and economic growth right out of the economy into runaway government spending and government employment.  In fact, total gross federal borrowing this year and last is much higher.  This and the threatening prospect of what lies ahead is what has delayed and slowed recovery so seriously so far.  Now it appears that Obama's policies, hearkening all the way back to FDR's 1930s, may be leading us into another Great Depression, in fact.

Barack Obama = Jimmy Carter?  The president believes that government's proper role is to intervene in and usurp control of America's economy.  From that belief Obama has brought us the government takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler; government bailouts of Wall Street, banks, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government stimulus spending on a massive scale; government federalization of health care, impending government tax increases on income, capital gains, dividends and small businesses; and government debt of officially more than $13-trillion — a growing figure that the International Monetary Fund says will surpass the nation's gross domestic product in 2012.

Halt the Assault.  The Free Enterprise Alliance is leading the campaign to Halt the Assault on America's free enterprise system.  The Free Enterprise Alliance is the action arm for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and other advocates of limited government, open and fair (and intense) competition, and the economically sound principles upon which America was built.

Obama's voodoo economics.  President Obama hyped Friday's job-report numbers, claiming a slight drop in the unemployment rate as evidence that things were "moving in the right direction."  The numbers hardly represent good news as Mr. Obama continues to ignore the creeping indications that his debt-fueled economic policies are hurling the country toward a historic collapse.

Don't be fooled by Obama's 'incompetence'.  It is a tremendous mistake to think that the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will help convince Americans of Barack Obama's incompetence.  Obama's true agenda is so insidious that even his inability to handle a crisis serves his greater strategy.  And that strategy has a name:  it is the Cloward-Piven Strategy. ... If the oil spill in the Gulf manages to destroy the fishing and tourist industries in that region, shut down oil drilling, raise the price of oil and of food all over the country, and bring more and more Americans to a financial breaking point and thus dependent on food stamps and other government programs, Obama and Co. will smile and nod at one another as the Cloward-Piven strategy hums merrily along.

Murdering America.  We are all witnesses to the crime; the deliberate murder of the United States of America.  In just under a year and a half, the White House in collusion with the Democrats in Congress has conspired not to "save" America from a financial crisis they created, but to kill America through a series of multi-billion dollar "bailouts" that have two things in common.  (1) They did not work and (2) they have created levels of national debt beyond anything in the entire previous history of the nation.

$13,050,826,460,886.97.  Seen on the "debt clock" in Times Square, that number seems little more than an abstraction, something almost impossible to process.  But think about it this way:  If you earned one dollar every second, it would take you 416,000 years to earn enough money to pay it off.

Politicians Are Kicking The Can Right Off The Cliff.  The desire of politicians to obtain instant electoral gratification at the expense of long-term financial security has reached epidemic proportions.  In fact, this "party now, pay later preference" has pushed the global economy to the brink of what could be a broader, deeper and more sustained fiscal collapse than anything we have witnessed in recent years — perhaps ever.

Buy Socialism Now, Pay for It Later.  One of the more stunning bits of insanity to come out of 2008 is that during an economic crisis caused by "Buy Now, Pay Later" fiscal planning, a candidate whose entire economic philosophy was built on "Buy Now, Pay Later" was voted in.  The difference is that Obama's "Buy Now, Pay Later" plans weren't there for capitalism, but to fund socialism.  And now with the national debt tripled, and his approval rating lower than a skunk's at an aromatherapy session, he's pushing out ObamaCare's "benefits" ahead of schedule.

Past Deficits vs. Obama's Deficits in Pictures.  [Scroll down]  Now the President is apparently arguing that his trillions of dollars in additional deficit spending are needed to "invest in areas that will determine our economic success in this new century."  This is statement goes to the core of the fundamental difference between leftists and conservatives in this country:  liberals belief economic growth comes from wise investments by government experts; conservatives believe that economic growth stems from millions of Americans having the freedom to make their own economic decisions everyday.

How to Cripple the Free Economy:  The socialist policies implemented by the Obama administration and the Democrat leadership undermine America's economic prosperity and prolong the misery for millions of companies and workers.  Despite passing multi-trillion dollar government tax and spend initiatives, numerous bailouts of failed businesses, and repeated extensions of government benefits, Americans are suffering and the economy is languishing.

Impeach Obama Campaign:  How long must we wait... how long should we sit back and permit Barack Hussein Obama to rip apart the fabric of this country before we take action?  Are you terrified at Barack Obama's campaign to change our country into a third-world nation?  Are you willing to sit back and watch Obama bulldoze our great nation?  Are you willing to let him construct a totalitarian regime... fascism, socialism, Obamaism... take your pick?

A New Direction.  Obama intends to punish productivity and reward laziness to the point that we become an egalitarian society (where everyone has an equal amount of stuff) rather than a society of equal opportunity.  You've seen ObamaCare.  Our country cannot survive this hideously expensive monstrosity.  But there's more to come.  Cap-and-Trade is on the way.  Unions will become more powerful.  And then there's the Value Added Tax.

More about the VAT.

Obama the Warrior.  To speak of [President Obama] as a warrior is the height of absurdity.  Yet in some sense, he actually is a warrior — not in any military context, but rather in the classic parlance of the progressive movement.  He is an aggressive, motivated, and dedicated soldier in the battle to remake America into a collectivist social welfare state.  He struggles mightily to undermine the Constitution, destroy free-market capitalism, subvert traditional culture, and weaken the sovereign nature of the American republic.

Obamanomics 101.  I am not an economist; but if you tell me that private businesses' incomes have gotten smaller while government-provided benefits have risen, you may not be able to call that a lot of things — but you can definitely call it redistribution of wealth.  That is a fancy way of saying socialism.

Death of the Postmodernist Dream.  In just a few months the brave new dream world as we knew it has died — but with a whimper, not a bang. ... The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work.  Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter:  Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don't.  And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn't.  All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.

Voters fed up with spendthrift Obama.  The Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress have thrown caution to the wind by throwing money every which way, inundating the country in red ink.  The rescue of the big banks, justified by the necessity of preventing financial collapse, morphed into saving General Motors and Chrysler, spending billions of the taxpayers' dollars for the expediency of protecting union jobs.

The Bankrupting of America.  The American public feels it is drowning in red ink.  It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness.  There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public-sector unions.  The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.

More about labor unions.

Sugarcoating Socialism the French Way.  [Scroll down]  John Kerry and Barack Obama, and their many supporters, have spent decades attempting to reshape America in the image of France.  Now, with the passage of Obamacare and increased federal control of the financial, automotive, and energy sectors of the economy, they are close to succeeding.  With the passage of just a few more pieces of legislation — cap-and-trade and the nationalization of 401(k) accounts among them — the transformation of America into a European-style welfare state will be all but complete.

Buy Socialism Now, Pay for It Later.  One of the more stunning bits of insanity to come out of 2008 is that during an economic crisis caused by "Buy Now, Pay Later" fiscal planning, a candidate whose entire economic philosophy was built on "Buy Now, Pay Later" was voted in.  The difference is that Obama's "Buy Now, Pay Later" plans weren't there for capitalism, but to fund socialism.  And now with the national debt tripled, and his approval rating lower than a skunk's at an aromatherapy session, he's pushing out ObamaCare's "benefits" ahead of schedule.

Obamaitis:  Spend more, raise taxes.  Earlier this year, for example, Congress increased the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion, thus giving the federal government a higher credit limit.  The increased limit lets Congress spend and borrow beyond even the current budget deficit, which is now headed for an all-time high of $1.56 trillion.  Going further into the red is inconsistent with President Obama's professed desire to reduce the federal deficit.  But when he appointed members of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, he and Congress agreed that the commission's report would not be due until December — also conveniently after the midterm elections.

Obama Hypocrisy on Small Businesses and Jobs.  After 15 months in office, Obama has yet to make any good decisions to help small business or create jobs.  Instead, additional levels of Obama Administration bureaucracy stifle innovation and burden American entrepreneurs with silly new rules buried in thousands of pages of legislation.  In short, Obama is killing the American growth machine.  Evidence of Obama's assault on business, capital and innovation is everywhere.

Obama uses Grecian Formula:
 Greece Today — USA Tomorrow — Under Obama.  Overtaxed and still over spent, Greece's public sector labor unions are revolting against government cutbacks.  Obama and SEIU have the good ole USA poised to follow that utopian trail into national bankruptcy.  In both countries, the majority of union employees now hold taxpayer funded government jobs, the only kind of jobs that government can create.

My big fat Greek deficit.  [Scroll down]  While America's red ink has yet to reach Greek levels, we are headed in that dangerous direction.  According to the World Bank, Greece's external debt stands at $582 billion, an amount equal to about 170 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).  By contrast, the external debt of the United States is $13.8 trillion.  With our larger economy, that debt constitutes 96.5 percent of GDP — a lower but still troubling number.

Cry Treason!  Let it be said that probably all presidents have been called treasonous by their political opponents.  A growing body of popular opinion, however, is beginning to regard the actions of Barack Obama as treason because they coalesce into a pattern that suggests a deliberate effort to undermine national security and the economy.  The liberties we take for granted, privacy, freedom of speech, and others are seen to be in jeopardy.

Obama Madoff with Our Tax Dollars.  What we have in Barack Obama is an American president pushing trillion-dollar financial policies that exhibit many of the same characteristics of Madoff's Ponzi scheme.  Similar to Madoff's powerful elite and business establishment connections, President Obama has many powerful and loyal connections in both business and government, many of whom are clearly overlooking obvious signs of trouble, with some even turning a blind eye to the facts regarding the president's financial policies.

Cap and Trade — Taxing our Way to Bankruptcy.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has declared (April 28) that he is making global warming the Senate's top priority.  With legislation likely to impose monumental costs on the nation's economy while accomplishing no real-world climate benefits, this is a fitting conclusion for a Congress intent on bankrupting the nation through sheer clumsiness and ignorance.  Global temperatures have not risen for more than a decade, confounding alarmists' computer models.  During the entire 20th century, as the planet recovered from the abnormally cold Little Ice Age, temperatures rose only 0.6 degrees Celsius.

Did someone mention Cap and Trade?

We Are Out of Money.  Today may be terrible, but tomorrow is going to be much worse, at least as measured by such metrics as deficits, debt, and entitlement spending.  In an April speech, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke laid out the misery that awaits us.  "The arithmetic is, unfortunately, quite clear," he said.  "To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above."

Obama's Profits Allergy.  Raised and mentored at the feet of capitalist-hating leftists, Obama repeatedly reveals a visceral distaste for profits.  And I don't mean so-called "excess" or "ill-gotten" profits only, but just plain old profits.  Obama thinks, like a Marxist, that profits are "surplus value" stolen by capitalists from laborers who produce the wealth.  He is obviously so deeply steeped in Marxist indoctrination that he believes that prices are only high because of profits.  In his static view, only a government-controlled system can cut out those evil profits and maintain reasonable prices.

Barack Obama:  Enemy Within.  I've been reluctant to climb aboard the "Obama wants to destroy America" conspiracy train.  I'm no longer reticent to do so.  As Newt Gingrich recently observed, we know this administration to be "far and away the most radical administration in American history."  Although he may not seek to destroy America outright, we can only conclude — based upon his grossly irrational and irresponsible governance — that Obama remains determined to destroy America both as we know her and as our Founding Fathers intended her.

Barack Obama, America's Selective Salary Policeman.  President Obama spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his control-freak administration this week:  "I think at some point you have made enough money."  Peddling financial regulatory reform at a rally in Quincy, Ill., Obama then ad-libbed peculiar definitions of what he called the "American way" and the profit motive.

Obama:  Stuck on Begrudge.  Off the teleprompter for a few seconds while stumping for financial reform recently in Illinois, President Obama had this to say about money, incomes and success:  "Now, what we're doing, I want to be clear, we're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned.  I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."

"Enough Money".  One of the many shallow statements that sound good — if you don't stop and think about it — is that "at some point, you have made enough money."  The key word in this statement, made by President Barack Obama recently, is "you."  There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.

The President Says You've Got Enough Money.  In a recent speech, President Obama declared, "at some point, I think you've got enough money."  And it's what he thinks, not what you think, that matters.  That goes double for what he thanks about your money.  There lies — bare as can be — the irrefutable evidence of the president's true ideology (socialism or worse) and of just how serious a threat he is to this nation.

National Debt Soars Past $13 Trillion.  The U.S. national debt has passed the $13 trillion mark, according to USDebtClock.org, an independent website that tracks the real-time growth of U.S. revenues and spending.

How Obama Himself Made More Than 'Enough Money':  In defending his administration's efforts at putative financial reform, President Obama suggested a ceiling, perhaps government-imposed, for Wall Street executives.  Although he did not begrudge them income that is "fairly earned," he added ominously, "I do think that at a certain point, you've made enough money."  The president may be projecting guilt from his own excellent adventures in greed.

Cap-and-Trade Treason.  Just as the Obama administration moved swiftly to acquire ownership of General Motors and Chrysler, to take over insurance giant AIG, control one sixth of the nation's economy through the healthcare act, and is now seeking to expand the regulation of Wall Street, Cap-and-Trade will ensure the destruction of the nation as manufacturing flees to other parts of the world.

Obama's Salary Cap.  During a two-day swing through Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, the president went off teleprompter and blundered into another Joe the Plumber moment, that unguarded instant during the 2008 campaign in which he told a potential small-business owner that he planned to spread the wealth around.

Now Who's Afraid Of The S Word? How dare you use the S word? they gasped in 2008 when we ran a series about Barack Obama titled "The Audacity Of Socialism."  But now, more Americans than not think that's how our future is spelled.

NYT/CBS Poll:  52% Say Obama Moving America Towards Socialism.  A New York Times/CBS News poll found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, think the policies of President Barack Obama are moving the United States toward socialism.  Published April 14, the poll surveyed the political, racial, and social opinions of both the general pubic and self-described members of the tea party movement.

Ruled by Children.  It is hard to shake the notion that Americans have voted a lot of children to serve in Congress and the greatest child of all, Barack Obama, to be our president.  Who else but children would continue to enact new programs that "entitle" Americans to receive all manner of services for which there is no money?

Hannity's Right:  Obama Is a Socialist.  This is the plain truth.  Obama is a socialist.  Merriam-Webster defines socialism as "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods."  A socialist is "one who advocates or practices socialism."  Obama, for example, practiced socialism with General Motors.  Last year, he directed the government to take 60 percent ownership of GM.

Financial District workers can't bear to watch.  Wall Street worker Steven Cohen didn't waste his time listening to Obama's speech to the financial industry Thursday [4/22/2010].  He knew exactly what message the President was going to deliver, and thinks it's all wrong.  "Why would I watch his speech?" the 54-year-old real estate professional said.  "The man is hurting the job creation engine that makes New York City run.  "I have better things to do with my time."

The President is delusional.
 Obama 'amused' by Tea Party rallies.  President Barack Obama struck a hyperpartisan note Thursday [4/15/2010], telling Democrats that he was "amused" by the Tax Day Tea Party rallies.  Obama, addressing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser in Miami, did little to endear himself to the Tea Party groups protesting around the country, saying "they should be saying thank you" because of the tax cuts he has signed into law.

How Dumb Does He Think They Are?  Does Obama seriously not understand that most voters — not those who show up for his rallies, but voters of normal competence — are well aware of the tax increases in Obamacare, the tax increases in cap and trade, the tax increases when the Bush tax cuts expire next year, and the looming VAT tax that will impact every American family?

The New Front in the War on Wealth.  The United States under the current governing regime continues to move toward a powerful central government.  As a step in that direction, the Congress and the White House recently granted the Internal Revenue Service more police power to not only collect taxes, but within that process, to negate the legal rights of the people to petition the courts and to control the behavior of American and non-American taxpayers.

Debt's All, Folks.  Federal programs grow like Paul Bunyan and live far beyond their usefulness.  There is simply no incentive to cut programs or staff, which would signal loss of power and prestige.  Government managers face no profit motive or expectant stockholders.  Businesses and households cut back if they overspend.  The government just comes up with more ways to tax us, and in increasingly sneaky fashion.  Have you looked at your phone bill lately?

Getting Gas Wrong:  In an economy full of problems there are still a few high points.  One of them, as you may have noticed if you pay attention to your utility bills, is that natural gas prices are relatively low. ... We shouldn't have to worry about this sector of the economy, but there is a dark cloud looming on the horizon in the form of yet another environmental initiative that the Obama administration is pushing forward, one that has the potential to cut domestic natural gas production, cost us jobs and revenue and force energy prices upward.

Fox News Poll:  79% Say U.S. Economy Could Collapse.  The latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it's possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent).

Obama's Campaign Against Success:  "For 250 years, America has been known throughout the world as the place where anyone could work hard, scrape together a little money and invest in a great idea," the Trends writers observe.  "But a creeping kind of governmental interference has seriously threatened this ideal," they argue.  In other words, the Trends writers continue, "the very bedrock concept underlying what's typically called 'the American Dream' is threatened by these measures."

National Debt Up $2 Trillion on Obama's Watch.  The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office.  The debt now stands at $12.6 trillion.  On the day Mr. Obama took office it was $10.6 trillion.

$12,670,895,780,689.20.  The headline above provides the exact amount of outstanding public debt as of Tuesday, according to the latest available figures from the U.S. Treasury.  By the time you read this, that figure will have increased by $17,338,324,977.

Making the Housing Crisis Worse.  The Obama administration has announced a new plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure due to under-employment and unemployment.  Instead of having the government create an economic climate which would actually create private-sector permanent jobs and thus lower unemployment, the government wants to require lenders to cut or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for these homeowners.

Spoiling the Spoilsport.  My theory is this:  the government has to really screw up bad to choke off the market to near-death.  Think Hoover and FDR combined.  The market, like a living creature, hates to die.  Bush and Obama together were only about 10% to 20% of Hoover and FDR together.  So we got only a Great Recession (4% GDP decline), not a Great Depression (25% GDP decline).  The market is gasping for breath, and Obama's shoe is still on its neck, but it's alive.

Underworked Americans hit 20.3 percent.  Mr. Obama's profligate policies have destroyed vast amounts of wealth, and all there is to show from the stimulus is massive debt.  The president seems to have no notion that the money he spends has to come from someplace.  That someplace is the American taxpayer, who is getting squeezed to pay higher taxes while working less.

Note to Doctors:  Now I'm "Entitled" To Your Services.  Vice President Joe Biden did it again.  He reiterated what was once a central theme of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and what has been a central tenet of our government since Mr. Obama became President.  And the idea is, simply, this:  when government takes wealth away from certain individuals and groups, and gives it to certain other individuals and groups, such actions are NOT to be called "economic re-distribution."  Such actions are to be described as "fairness."

Sallie Mae Blames 2,500 Layoffs on Obama's Student Loan Overhaul.  Powerhouse student loan provider Sallie Mae says layoffs are imminent as a result of President Obama's new student loan overhaul.

The ObamaCare tax hike that loses five times what it brings in.  We turn to the Wall Street Journal for the math on what it will cost to raise taxes on corporations' retiree prescription drug coverage.  This is the provision that has caused several corporations to take markdowns recently.  The bottom line:  by closing this "loophole" — which was originally created to dissuade companies from dumping retirees' prescription costs into Medicare Part D — the government could lose more than five times what it brings in.

Debt disaster dead ahead.  When the credit rating agency Moody's announced recently that the United States had moved "substantially" closer to losing its AAA bond rating, it largely ran as a wire brief, buried in newspaper business sections.  But this obscure announcement may one day be regarded as the beginning of the end of American prosperity.

With health bill, Obama has sown the seeds of a budget crisis.  A "budget crisis" is not some minor accounting exercise.  It's a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval.  Large deficits and rising debt — the accumulation of past deficits — spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans.  The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors.  To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply.  Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment.  Not pretty.

With Every Intervention, Concerns Build Over Size of Federal Government.  Health care.  The auto industry.  Real estate.  Wall Street.  As the Obama administration increases regulation and pumps up taxpayer aid in these sectors and beyond, critics say the president is expanding the federal government to unprecedented levels.

CBO report:  Debt will rise to 90% of GDP.  President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday [3/25/2010].

Here's what Obama's 'necessarily skyrocket' plan looks like.  Remember when President Obama said his anti-global warming program meant "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket"?  Well, he wasn't kidding one bit.  He and his environmental extremist friends want to force the rest of us to use less energy and to get what energy we do use from "green" or "renewable" sources.  Want to see that approach applied on the local level?  How about a 37 percent increase in your monthly light bill?

Chicago Does Socialism.  The president promises a state fix for health care; then student loans; and next energy.  There are to be subsidies, credits, and always new entitlements for every problem, all requiring hordes of fresh technocrats and Civil Service employees.  Like a perpetual teenager, who wants and buys but never produces, the president is focused on the acquisitive and consumptive urges, never on the productive — as in how all his magnanimous largesse is to be paid for by someone else.

Transforming America:  The fiscal train wreck is happening sooner than we thought, a leading bond market trader says.  Which is why investors are now telling the U.S. government it will have to pay more to borrow money. ... The passage of the health care bill has focussed investor attention on the runaway deficit situation, and its long-term consequences.  The deficit, which ran to around 3 percent of GDP in George W. Bush's final year, is now exceeding 10 percent.

Obamacare Dystopia.  [Scroll down]  In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn't bother reading (because, as Representative Conyers explained, he wouldn't understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular, good, ol', American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent.  For the purposes of comparison, Sweden's corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland's is 12.5 percent.  But just because America already has the second-highest corporate tax in the OECD is no reason why we can't keep going until it's double Sweden's and quadruple Ireland's.

Obamacare's Consequence:  A tarnished presidency.  The liberal line is that President Obama has secured his place in history by signing into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.  And secured it he has.  Henceforth Obama will be remembered as the man who accelerated America's mad dash toward bankruptcy.

Without Firing a Shot?  During the height of the Cold War, some feared the communists would take over the United States without firing a shot.  Could it be that nearly a half-century later, we're on the verge of that becoming a reality?  President Barack Obama and Democratic congressmen won their respective elections — no shots were fired — and they are feverishly attempting to dismantle this nation's institutions, brick by brick.

Does Obama Employ the Marxist Doctrine of Creative Destruction?  Having watched Barack Obama's sole economic recovery strategy of spending hand-over-fist to "heal" our economic malaise and rampant deficits, we must ask if his theory is a cipher for the mythic phoenix?  Is Barack a classical Marxist seeking to fix a broken society via torching our economy to ashes, confident it will arise again, healed by socialism and communism?  During a turbulently reckless period he seeks a massive government-directed health care bill.  Obama now demands wild expenditures on top of record deficits, in the midst of a prolonged recession, against record unemployment.  So, what other motivation does such illogical decision making suggest?

The Democrats Must Be Stopped.  There are several reasons why some people still don't understand the fiscal disaster that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are visiting on our nation.  The first is the sheer enormity of the numbers involved.  It is hard for anyone really to comprehend the difference between "billion" and "trillion."

Obama:  Serving Ambitions, Not Citizens.  This recession isn't going to end as long as Obama is in office.  The recession is an essential part of the "Progressive" plan to transform the foundation of the country from capitalism to socialism. ... Obama's healthcare plan does nothing to reduce the costs, but instead attempts to subsidize them with taxpayers' money which will only make the problem worse.

Backing Losers, Shackling Winners:  Obama-Style Industrial Policy.  Team Obama seems intent on selecting the weakest players to represent the American economy in global markets.  The administration's tax and regulatory policies handicap our finest industries while trying to promote others that may never be competitive without government subsidies.  At times it seems that this administration wants American industry to fail.

The Real Tea Party Story:  Community Builders vs. Community Organizers.  Toward the goal of destroying Americans' ideas of community-building, [Saul] Alinsky taught his organizers to dissuade the people from believing that there was any hope outside a mother state.  He taught his organizers to intentionally and continually sow discontent with the "status quo"... Now that we've had a year of a proud Alinskyite community organizer as president, it's not at all hard to see that Obama is much, much closer to being a "fascistic demagogue" than he is to being the grand conciliator for whom his befuddled followers fell into willing sway.

Obama Stimulating a Marxist Revolution Using Taxpayer Money.  A Marxist group that has demanded the "destruction" of the U.S. and issued a call "to bring this government down" is the recipient of stimulus funds from the Obama American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).  This same group, the Brecht Forum, has also called for the complete takeover of insurance companies and farms in America.

Obama budget spends more in each of the next ten years than the last one.  President Obama promised a turn toward fiscal discipline in his State of the Union Address.  But his new budget doesn't just plan on more deficit spending for a year, followed by austerity.  Rather, it actually increases deficits in each of the next ten years over what he'd planned for in last year's budget.

Obamacare Declares War On Growth Capital.  U.S. companies are gasping for cash like beached fish fruitlessly flapping their gills.  Rather than help these firms find financial oxygen, President Obama would accelerate their asphyxiation.  Specifically, Obama's February 22 health reform proposal would sic the 2.9 percent employer-employee Medicare tax onto "income from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties, and rents."  This spanking-new investment-income tax would slam individuals who make more than $200,000 and north of $250,000 for married couples.

If the S-word fits, Obama should wear it.  I am honestly confused.  Why is it not permissible for us to call President Obama a socialist?  Why do so many with a media platform dodge the question when asked point-blank if Obama is a socialist?  While obviously expected by those in the mainstream media who look upon Obama as an oracle, it's disappointing and disingenuous when Republican "leaders" refuse to describe the president as a socialist.  Maybe some in the GOP and the mainstream media simply don't know or understand the definition.

The Keynesian Stimulus Dogma.  Most Americans don't believe that the way for Washington to address its gargantuan debt is to increase deficit spending and go deeper into debt. ... Stimulus plans haven't worked, won't work, and we can't afford them.  We are already in great economic danger from deficit spending.  A policy to plunge us even deeper into the debt abyss is kamikaze economics.

The 'I Am Not George Bush' Policy.  George Bush, a purported conservative, ran up deficits reaching in aggregate $2.5 trillion; therefore I, Barack Obama, a liberal, can legitimately exceed that figure by a factor of three or four.  That seems to be the thinking of the present administration.

How Does One Spell Government Bankruptcy?  O-B-A-M-A.  If any chief executive officer in the United States of America presented his board with a budget that was one-third unfunded, he would be fired and tossed out of the boardroom immediately.  President Obama recently revealed a $3.8 trillion budget for FY2011 that has a $1.3 trillion deficit.  This budget short fall represents $4,000 for every man, woman and child in America.  It is equivalent to a business CEO presenting his board of directors with a financial plan to have a 34 percent loss.

Planning to Fail.  The economy seems to have settled in somewhat from the disaster of 2008.  Every indication is the economy is poised for a rebound — provided the right trigger is in place.  In the past, the trigger that has always got the economy back on track has been tax cuts, by Ronald Reagan, George Bush and John Kennedy — presidents from both sides of the aisle.  And just when the economy is primed for that trigger, President Obama is going in the exact opposite direction:  it is as if he is sabotaging the efforts of the American people.

Obama Believes He Has the Secret Blueprint to the Universe.  There must be a simple explanation for President Obama's stubborn refusal to admit mistakes or change his failed far-left policies. ... In a nutshell, what Obama did his first year was rampantly spend taxpayer money to "solve" our financial woes by staggering government investment.  Pointedly, Barack is spending borrowed money, to be repaid later, to solve current problems.  This controversial fiscal policy is called "Keynesian Economics."

How to spell Obama energy policy: 'D-e-l-a-y'.  The need to develop America's bountiful fossil fuel resources will only intensify as our economy grows and those of emerging world economic powers like China and India similarly expand.  But President Obama is moving national energy policy in exactly the opposite direction.  Instead of aiding exploration and development of available fossil fuel resources, the administration appears to be doing everything possible to slow or even stop it.

I Was a Teenage President.  The Obama administration resembles nothing so much as a big house in the suburbs where the parents are away for the weekend.  In the absence of any responsible person to take charge, the Teenager-in-Chief is letting the rest of the adolescents run wild.

Our King of Big Government Suggests We Need Another New Agency.  What is the matter with that man in our White House?  Will he ever stop trying to spend every nickel and dime that Americans have, including our savings that we worked hard for to ease our retirement years?  He acts like a poor kid that suddenly comes into some money and it is burning a hole in his pocket to get spent.

Obama's Lack of Business Sense:  Asked how how and why small business loans would help small business, President Obama replied:  "If [small businesses] can get the bank loans to boost their payroll... they will do so."  He further claimed that in his "travels" he has spoken with small business owners nationwide, and they see optimism and new customers. ... [O]ur President advocates taking loans for the purpose of boosting payroll — in the middle of an economic draught.  It just makes no sense.

There's a simple explanation:  Obama and his team are incompetent.

Like Toyota, Obama's Accelerator Pedal Is Stuck.  As he professes to want to reduce the dangerous budget deficit, Obama brings to mind the hapless engineers at Toyota who find that their vehicles accelerate whether or not the driver wants them to.  It appears that no matter how hard Obama jams on the brakes with his new-found commitment to deficit reduction — having already almost doubled the deficit in one year — the level of red ink just seems inexorably to rise.

Reasonably Sane Sustainability:  Something that is "unsustainable" cannot be sustained.  That is what "unsustainable" means.  Our federal budget is on an unsustainable path.  Therefore, it will not be sustained.  Our only choice is the manner in which it will not be sustained.  One set of choices would lead to one or more "crashes," or bad endings:  federal debt default, hyper-inflation, massive and deep economic recession, riots, chaos.

The Obama Problem:  It's the People, Stupid!  In order to bring about his "social change" (AKA "destruction of We-the-People"), Obama must destroy every aspect of the American way of life.  Since Obama took office he, his mentors and followers have been making tremendous headway.  Via a series of multi-billion-dollar faux 'stimulus' packages and other anti-America bills, Obama and his Democrat-run Congress have virtually bankrupted the USA.

Senate OKs debt ceiling hike to $14.3T.  Senate Democrats passed a $1.9 trillion increase in the federal debt limit Thursday [1/28/2010], seeking to push off another politically painful debt vote until after the midterm elections.

President Obama Signs Law Raising Public Debt Limit from $12.4 Trillion to $14.3 Trillion.  Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon [2/12/2010] the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.

Pay-go gets passed, then it gets bypassed.  The ink is barely dry on the pay-as-you-go law, and Democrats are seeking to bypass it to enact parts of their job-creation agenda.

A New Contract with America.  There is a strong tide running through American politics right now, made only stronger yesterday [2/1/2010] with the president's submission of a $3.8 trillion budget that has a $1.56 trillion deficit.

If you think our debt's bad now ...  On day one of his vow to take "meaningful steps to rein in our debt," Barack Obama asked Congress to freeze portions of discretionary domestic spending. ... On Day Two, taking a break from the rigors of austerity, he was in Tampa, Fla., promising $8 billion for high-speed rail projects there and in a dozen other places.  Four days later, he released a $3.8 trillion fiscal year 2011 budget that would add another $1.3 trillion to the national debt.

It's Official:  Obama's Spending Today Dwarfs FDR's Depression-Era Spending.  Between 1934, the first fiscal year in which Roosevelt and a Democrat congressional majority had full control of the federal budget, and 1941, the year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR never spent more than 12.0 percent of the GDP.  In 1938, FDR spent as little as 7.7 percent of GDP.  According to the budget tables released by the White House Monday, Obama will spend 25.4 percent, 25.1 percent and 23.2 percent in the three years remaining in his term.

An Obama-Sized Government.  By all accounts, federal fiscal policy has now run completely off the rails.  Budgetary pressures have been building for years because of unconstrained entitlement spending and Washington's unchecked appetite for ever-more activist government.  But what had been a chronic problem that all involved knew needed corrective action has now become, in the Obama years, a full-fledged disaster in the making.

Ponzi scheme on the Potomac.  Federal government spending has grown nearly seven times faster than median income since 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and Office of Management and Budget.  At more than $12 trillion, the federal debt is already more than 80 percent of the nation's gross domestic product and growing fast.  The federal government's total debt, including unfunded liabilities, means about $600,000 of debt for every U.S. household.  Sooner or later, the federal government's scheme will come crashing down, and the loss will be mammoth.

Spending America Into Oblivion.  [Scroll down]  He went on to repeat basically what he had said during his State of the Union Address earlier in the week, "By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade.  Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program."  Heritage's Riedl corrected President Obama on Monday, saying, "This is simply not true.  The policies mentioned by President Obama were implemented in the early 2000s.  Yet even with all those policies in place, the 2007 budget deficit stood at only $162 billion."

Obama's Budget:  Fiscal Armegeddon.  [Scroll down]  Amazingly, with the same sleight of hand that his so-called stimulus "created or saved" imaginary jobs (in non-existent Congressional districts), Obama now claims that federal deficits will begin to magically decline by 2012 — although even his rosiest numbers don't envision annual deficits falling below $1 trillion until after 2020.  Where will our national debt be at that point?  $24 trillion?

What the Obama Budget Reveals.  Obama's fiscal 2011 budget, totaling $3.834 trillion, provides more than just details about revenues, expenditures, and deficits.  It offers the clearest road map yet as to where the president intends to lead America.  What that road map reveals is not very reassuring to those who care about limited government.

America's 'Free' Falling Economy.  The latest index of economic freedom shows America falling fast, being ranked for the first time as "mostly free."  We've fallen behind Canada, and it's look out below.  Our accelerating descent into a command-and-control economy with government pulling the strings is taking its toll.

Obama Must Know His Spending Yields Bankruptcy, Not Growth.  On Jan. 16, 2009 — about a year ago — Obama said:  "The first job of my administration is to put people back to work and get our economy moving again.  That's why I've moved quickly to work with my economic team and leaders of both parties on an 'American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan' that will immediately jump-start job creation and long-term growth."  Obama made similar statements repeatedly.  Notice he said "immediately."  Here we are a year later at 10 percent unemployment after Obama promised it wouldn't exceed 8 percent.  Is anyone holding him accountable for this outrage?

The Government's Endless Appetite for Spending.  Last December, Congress approved a $290 billion increase of the debt limit to support the government's borrowing through February.  This lifted the total amount the federal government can borrow to $12.4 trillion.  But today Congress wants to go into even more debt.

The Editor says...
 Please take a moment to recall which party is in control of the Congress while all this is going on.

Obama Chooses Christmas Eve as Night of Darkness For Free World.  The elephant in our living room is what moseyed in when the mainstream media took a holiday and the mask of President Barack Obama began to crack.  How long have we known in our hearts that Obama is not an American?  How long have we known that even though he professes to be one, Obama is not a Christian, nor even a Christian sympathizer and that his actions over the last year prove he is not a benevolent president.  Obama wants a healthcare bill that is signed, sealed and delivered on Christmas Eve.  Obama wants to ruin America and the Free Enterprise system that made America what it is.

A Lesson from James Madison About Obamanomics:  For those who are surprised by Obama's heavy-handed, big-government, "anti-business" policy proposals, I respectfully ask "why?"  Were you watching and listening carefully during the last presidential election cycle? ... In case you missed it, let me assure you — what we know today as "Obamanomics" is quite consistent with the themes and ideas upon which Senator Obama campaigned for the presidency.

It's Not the Economy, Stupid!  It's National Survival!  I don't believe the public has lost faith in Obama over the economy.  And the public's angst is about more than just its losing faith in him.  The public is scared to death — not about the ebbs and flows of the economy in the short term, but about the very survival of the country — because of the reckless spending policies Obama is deliberately pursuing and the other "elements" of his destructive agenda to remake America in his image — including going soft on terrorism.

Socialism's Greatest Lie:  Government Can Give You Everything for Free.  [Scroll down]  It would have been cheaper and simpler for individual taxpayers to see a direct tax hike, instead of the complicated way in which the government moves around money, while the politicians still benefit from covering every angle for a problem that they created.  And then of course there's the loan package.  If you don't want to raise taxes on anyone, you have to borrow money, which is the Lunatic's MasterCard, because while taxes remain the same, the amount of debt being carried rises, and that debt has to be paid off.

Stimulus flop.  The ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) has become one of the spectacular failures of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress. ... America's national security is ultimately tied to the health of the American economy.  This Democratic Congress and Administration have purposely allowed our economic decline to accelerate.

Obama Taxes Our Patience ... Among Other Things.  [Scroll down]  How will a tax on 50 huge banks help you, the ordinary Joe or Jane trying to make ends meet?  The money collected will not go to you in any way.  It will not reduce your tax burden, ease the credit crunch, or lead to the creation of jobs.  In fact, it will do just the opposite.  As large banks are taxed, they will pass the cost onto clients of all sizes.

Obama Rewards Losers, Punishes Winners.  President Obama's misbegotten bank tax is precisely the wrong policy at precisely the wrong time.  It will wind up backfiring across the board.  Why?  Because bank consumers and borrowers are the ones who will wind up paying this tax, creating an obstacle to economic recovery.

The Undoing of America.  As the passage of the bill that will start the process of nationalizing health care in America becomes almost inevitable, so, too, the process of undoing America's standing as The Last Best Hope of Earth will have begun. ... Even a Democrat has to acknowledge the simple logic:  America cannot at the same time be the last best hope of earth and increasingly similar to more and more countries.

Obama's Game of False Choices:  Obama can't come out and say that he's a Marxist-oriented, big-government statist who is recklessly driving our country and traditions into the ground.  But he can say he rejects that false choice and that failure is not an option.

U.S. in Fiscal Peril with $12.1 Trillion Debt.  After $787 billion in stimulus spending and $700 billion in bank bailouts, 2010 is fast shaping up to be the year of the federal budget diet.

Too much debt

2010 Will Be Worse.  The year 2010 is likely to be the pivotal year where pundits stop referring to the recession and begin openly talking about a depression.  Our economic problem is rather simple to describe:  There is too much debt relative to income and/or wealth.

The Editor says...
 Whose fault is that ?

Obamacare Bankrupting States.  Sen. Ben Nelson's "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska may have given Harry Reid his coveted sixtieth vote, but it comes at a price for the other states, states that are already feeling the hammer of rising Medicaid costs.  Just coming to light is a concern that has been giving governors heartburn for months:  the fact that states are going to be hit with a monstrous financial burden with the passage of Obamacare, and none are in a position to handle it.

Obama Uses Global Warming To Destroy The US Economy.  President Obama knows little and cares less about global warming or climate change.  It's a means to a political end.  He's an arsonist setting fires to save the country, but as it burns he uses extinguishers that we know don't work.  He's pursuing a deeply entrenched ideology with help from those who advanced his career as a figurehead for socialism in America.

Nation must 'spend our way out of this recession'.  President Barack Obama called for a major new burst of federal spending Tuesday, perhaps $150 billion or more, aiming to jolt the wobbly economy into a stronger recovery and reduce painfully persistent double-digit unemployment.

Profligate road to perdition.  The fat-filled $1.1 trillion appropriations bill Democrats sent President Obama last week is the latest action in a spending spree that is fast becoming the pivotal political issue of the midterm elections.  The Democrats' yearlong spending orgy, record $1.4 trillion budget deficits and a $12 trillion national debt have been overshadowed by the economy and jobs, health care reform and other issues.

Obama Reducing the Debt?  Dream On.  Obama and his party simply will not agree to keep their grubby government hands off the estimated $200 billion the banks are going to repay under TARP. ... Obama [has announced] that he intends to intercept a good portion of the debt repayments and spend it on job creation and assistance to certain debtors.  I assume we're supposed to be too dense to remember that his stimulus spending to date hasn't created jobs and that most of it hasn't even been used for that purpose.

Congress raises debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion.  The Senate voted Thursday [12/24/2009] to raise the ceiling on the government debt to $12.4 trillion...

Fiddling While Treasury Burns.  The spend junkies who inhabit the United States Congress are once again trying to pull a fast one on the American people.  Driven by an overpowering urge to feed their insatiable habit, they are plotting to raise the national debt ceiling by an unprecedented amount.

The 'Global Imbalances' Myth.  As the economic crisis has eased in recent months, a questionable international consensus has emerged:  The global economy needs to be rebalanced.  "We cannot follow the same policies that led to such imbalanced growth," President Barack Obama said during his Asia trip last month.

Senate OKs $1.1 Trillion Spending Bill.  The Senate passed on Sunday [12/13/2009] a massive spending bill that wraps up $1.1 trillion of the $3.6 trillion annual budget for fiscal year 2010, which started Oct. 1.  The House has already passed identical legislation, and President Obama has indicate he'd sign it.

Wake up and smell the debt!  There is virtually no voice in the government for cutting back on spending.  Instead, under both the recent Bush administration and the Obama administration, spending has ballooned. Bailouts, entitlements, health-care subsidies:  it appears that the government has an endless amount of money to give away.  But the plain and simple fact is that the government is spending money it doesn't have.

The Obama Energy Fiasco.  If the president wishes to free America from dependence on foreign oil, he should be encouraging the production of reliable energy supplies in this country.  What has he done to encourage more production of coal, oil and gas, and nuclear energy?  The answer is that he has done nothing. ... Not only has the president done nothing to promote new supplies of energy, but he has also done much to impede them.

The Surprise at Copenhagen.  Anyone no longer believing Obama's campaign language of "fundamentally changing the United States" underestimates this man.  This is a massive power grab of historical and possibly unconstitutional breadth at a breakneck pace.  Card check, health care reform, TARP fund misallocations, the stimulus bill pork-barrel spending, cash for clunkers, the $3.4 billion settlement with the Indian tribes, the financial reform bill, additions to the federal work force amidst the hemorrhaging of jobs in the private sector, and now this... we had better wake up and smell what this team is shoveling.  And fast.

Federal Employees at the Trough.  With last year's U.S. federal deficit of more than $1.4 trillion, it will become increasingly difficult to reduce the government's level of red ink, particularly if the federal government continues to expand.  However, it now seems quite obvious that the government employment will continue to expand, especially under a nationalized health care system or once Obama's new Consumer Financial Protection Agency officially becomes part of the government Leviathan.

Just The Plan For How Not To Create Jobs.  The biggest political issue today and in the 2010 election is that one in six Americans are jobless.  The political party that offers a solution has the best chance of victory — but, so far, both parties just don't seem to get it.  We are told that the unemployment rate is 10.2%, but that's only part of the problem.  When you add discouraged Americans who have quit looking for a job, plus the underemployed (i.e., working only part-time while seeking full-time work), the figure rises to at least 17.5%.

$2,000,000,000,000 More in Debt?  You Bet.  On Thursday, December 10th, congressional Democrats led by Speaker Pelosi put forth legislation to raise the treasury's debt ceiling by nearly $2 [trillion] to $13.9 [trillion].  Pelosi is hastily lining up a vote before the end of the year because the treasury expects the Congress to hit their existing debt ceiling later this month, essentially "maxing" their available credit.

Fat City.  What are the risks of an exploding U.S. public debt?  The Chinese, Japanese and Arabs still buying that debt will begin to suspect they are holding onto paper on which the United States will default, or will cheapen by inflating its currency — as the Germans did in 1923 to avoid paying war reparations.  When they do, they will stop buying U.S. debt and start dumping.  The Fed will then have to raise interest rates to attract borrowers, throwing the economy into a tailspin.

Congress punts problems to 2010.  Trying to save Christmas, Congress is setting itself up for one wild Groundhog Day of budget woes come February.  The House, anxious to go home, is to begin voting Wednesday on four year-end bills, most of which share one thing in common:  a two-month punt on every tough issue, from managing the federal debt to helping the nation's growing ranks of long-term unemployed.

Runaway Debt Must Be Stopped Now.  The U.S. government's unprecedented spending splurge, with no end in sight, is creating a mountain of debt that endangers both our economy and way of life.  Can something be done about it?

How Likely Is Hyperinflation?  During the past several months, concerns have risen that the expansionary policies of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve System to counter the present crisis are creating the danger of a substantial future inflation.  Some speak even of a hyperinflation, that is, of a rate of inflation exceeding 50 percent per month.

The Audacity of Debt.  At least someone in America isn't feeling a credit squeeze:  Uncle Sam.  This week Congress will vote to raise the national debt ceiling by nearly $2 trillion, to a total of $14 trillion.  In this economy, everyone de-leverages except government.  It's a sign of how deep the fiscal pathologies run in this Congress that $2 trillion will buy the federal government only one year before it has to seek another debt hike — conveniently timed to come after the midterm elections.

Uncle Obama's Extortion Racket.  Uncle Obama has gotten ahold of your credit card.  And he's amassing charges on it that you — not he — are liable for.  You can call the fraud line, you can call the police, you can call any politician or government agency, and they will all tell you the same thing.  Shut up and pay up.

The purpose of a business is NOT to provide jobs!  The purpose of a business, small or otherwise, is NOT to provide jobs to the populace.  The purpose of a business is to make money for the owners.  For some reason, President Obama and the Democrats (i.e. liberals) believe that the existence of a business is to provide jobs regardless if they are needed or not.  This sounds a lot like a government job.  Hire people to do nothing.

Obama Shatters Spending Record for First-Year Presidents.  The federal government spent $3.5 trillion during President Obama's first year in office.  This far exceeds the spending for any other first-year president.

Voter Anger Is Building Over Deficits.  Last year, Mr. Obama made fiscal restraint a constant theme of his presidential campaign. ... However, since taking office Mr. Obama pushed through a $787 billion stimulus, a $33 billion expansion of the child health program known as S-chip, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations spending bill, and an $80 billion car company bailout.  He also pushed a $821 billion cap-and-trade bill through the House and is now urging Congress to pass a nearly $1 trillion health-care bill.

Rising debt could derail Congress on just about everything.  The Senate began a debate Monday [11/30/2009] over the future of health care in America that's likely to go on for weeks, but behind the scenes, lawmakers are struggling to resolve an even more explosive issue:  how to pay for all their ideas.  Federal budget deficits remain at record highs.  The national debt is $12.1 trillion and Congress must vote soon to let it go higher or else the Treasury won't be able to issue new debt.

Surge adds to Obama's pricey plans.  The president insists that lawmakers should not put a price tag on national security, but every item on Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda — from health care reform to another proposed job-creation bill — is threatened by the grim budget reality of a stagnant economy, colossal deficits and record levels of public debt.

Read the Numbers:  Obama Will Bankrupt America.  When President Barack Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession.  It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state.  Not only has Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America.

Infatuated with the New Deal.  [Scroll down]  Obama acted as if he's downright puzzled by the lack of hiring.  "I want to hear from CEOs about what's holding back our business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring," he said.  "And if there are things that we're doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it."  Could the president really not have a clue about his administration's role in putting a chill on hiring?  I doubt it.  He couldn't be that oblivious.

Obama:  The Un-Stimulator.  Why aren't businesses hiring?  Because they don't know what's next.  The small shop owners, mid-size company budget planners and corporate strategists — they all look ahead and see nothing but questions and worries.  What will the massive new health care bill cost?  Will there be cap-and-trade taxes after the Copenhagen summit this week?  What domestic priority will Obama push next?  If you don't know what a new employee will cost you in 2010, the last thing you want to do is hire one.

If Obama were a Marxist, what would he believe?  Critics claim Obama's budget is an example of the Cloward-Pivin model of planned economic destruction of a functioning capitalist economy via sabotage.  Outlays are so gigantic, and so dreadfully misspent, that our financial infrastructure will soon collapse.  A trillion dollar tax increase and spending rising by $10 trillion dollars over the next decade is probable.  If so, government default will occur, only offset by mass currency printing, which will then bankrupt the general populace.

Obama's $250 Bonus Turns Social Security into Welfare.  Since Social Security recipients will get no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) next year, President Obama wants to give each of them $250, a move supported in principle by the Republican House and Senate leadership.  However, this move is not only unjustified; it makes a fundamental change to Social Security's structure and starts the process of converting the program from an earned benefit funded by a worker's own contributions to a welfare program.

How Do You Measure Integrity?  The term "kleptocracy" is applied to a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of its own officials and the ruling class via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service.  That sounds pretty close to what we have in America today.

The Five Obama Fails.  The Obama administration burst onto the presidency with a historic wealth of good will, hope, and change.  It is now marked by one failure after another.  Unfortunately, these failures are not without costs.  The burden is borne by consumers, taxpayers, and generations yet to come.

Dick Morris and the Crusade against ObamaCare.  But Dick Morris is doing his best work now in his crusade against ObamaCare.  He seems charged with high purpose, principle, and energy.  If he continues to receive support, he might help save America from a health care catastrophe.  Catastrophe, of course, is also the title of Morris' recent co-authored bestseller outlining the countless ways that the most radical president in American history is leading the country towards a rendezvous with decline and doom.

How to Wreck the Economy.  "The higher jobless rate could be the new normal" reads the headline of a recent AP report. ... The report's message is clear.  It will be a long time before we recover our former prosperity.  Things, in fact, may never be as good as they used to be, at least not in our lifetimes.

US public debt tops 12 trillion dollars for first time.  The US public debt topped 12 trillion dollars for the first time in history, Treasury officials disclosed Tuesday [11/17/2009], moving past a key barrier that raised hackles in Congress.  Treasury data showed Monday's outstanding debt at 12.031 trillion dollars, up from 11.999 trillion on Friday.

Socialist or vast expansion?  Gov. Rick Perry, Texas Republican, recently joined commentators Rush Limbaugh, Patrick Buchanan and others in using the word "socialist" to describe President Obama and his policies, and we all know what's coming — a verbal bombardment.  Critics will call him hysterical, paranoid and stupid.  They will say he is a scaremonger misusing the language for political effect.  Instead of looking at where Mr. Obama's policies are taking us, we'll have another fight over the meaning of a word and its connotations.

The Coming Deficit Disaster.  President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems.  He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation's health-care system.  But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care.  It's the deficit.

Our national debt:  How much would 12 trillion eggs weigh?  The Federal Government's tidal wave of debt now exceeds $12 trillion dollars.  We have plummeted an additional trillion dollars in the last 8 months. ... Each American household's share of this debt is $103,000. ... All these mind numbing numbers begs three fundamental questions.  Who is going to end up paying for this tsunami of debt?  Are there politicians willing to tax us enough to pay off this deficit?  (Yes!)  What's the threshold where taxpayers refuse to be taxed further, even with the threat of jail or loss of property?  We may be finding out these answers within the next few months.

Roll Obama Back.  Even during the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama promised to reduce the federal deficit.  In his first 100 days, he increased spending and grew government faster than at any time since World War 2.  But his tsunami of deficit spending — in the failed "stimulus", nationalization of GM and Chrysler, his $3.6 trillion budget for FY 2010 and more — has created an enormous voter backlash.

America Needs More Jobs, Not More Debt.  Last week, as the national debt topped $12 trillion for the first time in U.S. history, one influential policymaker said, "I think it is important, though, to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt ... that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession."

Cloward-Piven Government.  It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt.  President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis."  Part of a series, it connected then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.

A National Nightmare, Indeed.  Joe, when The New York Times is sounding the warnings over the exploding national debt, you and Barack insist not only on not reversing your disastrous course but also on making it worse.  How can reasonable people assume anything other than that you are trying to run this nation into the ground financially?

Obama Will Carry Pledge of 17% U.S. Emissions Cut to Copenhagen.  President Barack Obama will travel to Copenhagen for climate-change talks, where he'll offer to cut U.S. emissions about 17 percent by 2020 in an effort to help break a deadlock between rich and poor nations.

Debt is Destroying the Dollar.  Gold increasingly looks to investors to be a more reliable store of value than governments' bonds are, especially U.S. bonds as the U.S. government threatens to pile a mammoth health care entitlement onto the nation's Ponzi welfare state, increasing the nation's debt and borrowing.

When Our Military is Attacked, Obama is a Nowhere Man.  During a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Croft when the stock market was sinking, Obama giggled.  He wasn't embarrassed afterwards or apologetic.  More worrisome than his bizarre behavior was that he didn't regard it as strange.

Obama vs. The American Businessman.  Obama has demonized just about every business sector in America.  Through the 2008 campaign to the present, he has gone after credit card companies, the coal industry, mortgage companies, real estate companies, steelmakers, utilities, drug companies, doctors, oil companies, Wall Street, defense contractors, and health insurance companies, just to name a few.

All Falling Down...  When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect.  Does he include the cost of interest?  Where will the money came from?  Who will pay the interest?  Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life?  Did he cut back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs?  Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day's end?

Obamanoia.  Imagine that you are a small business owner, and just consider — why expand now or rehire? since (a) I have no idea what the new taxes will be; (b) I have no idea about what all these new regulations, cap and trade, card check; etc will cost me; (c) I am beginning to think all this trash talk about bad doctors, insurance companies, the Chamber of Commerce, CEOs, the wealthy, etc. suggests this administration does not like me or what I do; ... If I have a business, somewhere down the line there is going to be a government-run rival, sort of like your local can't go broke PBS station in every avenue of commerce. Why insist on ensuring hustling employees when the rival, overpaid DMV-like work force can't go broke whatever they do?

Could America go broke?  The idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt — that is, tell lenders that it won't repay them all they're owed — was, until recently, a preposterous proposition.  Argentina and Russia have stiffed their creditors, but surely the likes of the United States, Japan or Britain wouldn't.  Well, it's still a very, very long shot, but it's no longer entirely unimaginable.

Democratic deficit duplicity.  I nearly fell out of my chair as I read this New York Times headline:  "Democrats Push for Plan to Cut Deficit."  From the headline alone, I couldn't tell whether this was before, during or after they supported President Barack Obama's intentional, exponential escalation of the deficit to $1.4 trillion.  That's simply immeasurable chutzpah.

Destination:  Banana Republic.  When Senator Judd Gregg (R) New Hampshire, stated that out of control deficits could lead America into status as a Banana Republic, he was right on target.  His web site statement that unless we act soon, these deficits are here to stay was also correct, although with all due respect to the Senator, it appears that we are already too late.

Is Obama pushing to intentionally make America a second-rate world power?  The deficit run up by the first Obama budget was four times larger than the already huge deficit imposed by the last Bush budget.  Added together the Bush and Obama deficits have seriously weakened the confidence other nations, and specifically investors in those nations, have in the American economy and thus in the American dollar.  Investments are now going "off shore" more than ever.

Wealth Redistribution on Steroids.  If this government wealth-confiscation trend continues unabated, the mercenary, larcenous socialists of the Obama regime will break the backs of the perpetually demonized wealth-producing Americans, a result so inevitable that we must assume that is what they intend.

In Praise of Lobbyists.  Raising taxes on the overseas profits of American firms has been a central plank of Barack Obama's agenda since his campaign for President in 2008. ... The U.S. is one of the few developed countries that even tries to tax corporate overseas profits.  Most operate on a territorial system, in which business profits are taxed in the country in which they are earned.

America cannot afford Obama.  [President Obama's]  recent comments in regard to coal-fired power plants are a wide open door to the real Obama and his plans for the destruction of the American way of life. ... He has proudly stated that he plans to put policies in place that will cause electric rates to skyrocket.  Under Obama, it won't matter whether or not you can afford to buy that big screen TV, you won't be able to afford to turn it on.

Former CBO Chief Calls Obama Administration Fiscal Policies 'Laughable'.  A former Republican congressional budget chief called the Obama administration's claims to fiscal responsibility "hypocritical" and "laughable," noting in particular the mounting unemployment numbers (9.8 percent nationwide) despite the $787-billion stimulus plan enacted in February that he said was poorly designed.

The Nation's Climate Change Solution:  'Make the Recession Worse'.  A lefty magazine editor has come up with a list of brilliant solutions to the planet's purported climate change problem:  make the recession worse, make goods more expensive, and restrict all intercontinental travel to blimps.  So said Emily Douglas, web editor for The Nation, who, when asked Wednesday [10/14/2009] how we could "reverse our culture of consumerism," replied immediately "make the recession worse."

Without A Shot Being Fired, A Dictator Has Taken Over the United States.  [Scroll down slowly]  It makes one wonder if this was all part of his plan to decimate the United States one more decisive step along the way to his assumption of the "Leader of the World" title.  He and his family are having one grand ball at our expense while he lollygags instead of tending to our free trade business of state.  And through it all, incredibly, there remains a corps of hardline supporters who are blind to all his faults.

Obama's "Progressives":  When he was still an adolescent in Hawaii, President Obama came under the influence of Frank Marshall Davis, a widely known communist in the 1950s.  Obama is completely at home with "progressives", but is ironically being attacked by the nation's far Left for not fulfilling their dream of the complete transformation of the nation from capitalism to socialism fast enough.  The destruction of the nation's economy is necessary to complete the transformation and it is only the outrage and protests of Americans that will save us from a fate that has been and remains the goal of the nation's communist enemies.

Obama's permanent depression.  President Barack Obama may be remembered for permanent depression, the way that Leon Trotsky's name is linked with permanent revolution.  Fiscal stimulus combined with near-zero interest rates have proven to be a toxic cocktail for the United States, the macroeconomic equivalent of barbiturates and alcohol.  Keynesian spending creates a deficit that sucks all the available capital out of the grassroots economy and transfers it to the Treasury market.

Obama's Competing Waterloos.  The Heritage Foundation reports that Obama's budget would produce $13 trillion in deficits over the next decade, even more than the outrageous $9 trillion previously projected.  This is nation-shattering stuff, folks, and Obama and his minions remain unflappable, intent on staying the bankrupting course, sporting Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?" expressions.  The fact that we know they can't be that oblivious is what makes us wonder whether something more sinister lurks in their motives.

Spending Money Freely.  The larger vision of Obama's approach to each separate issue is to see how government can manage the solution.  To establish government in this position of power, taxes must fill the coffers and empty the wallets.

Obama still at odds with facts about health care.  The first hints of real trouble can be found in President Barack Obama's initial address to a congressional joint session on Feb. 24.  That's when the jarring incoherence of his lavish plans came into full view.  He said the "state of the economy is a concern that rises above all others."  He said it was imperative that the nation bring its budget under control so that we don't bequeath to our children a debt "they cannot pay."  But by then he had signed a $787 billion stimulus bill that would dramatically worsen the deficit.  In that same speech — in which he called the economy the top priority — he pressed Congress to approve major legislative initiatives that had nothing whatever to do with the immediate problem of economic growth:  a job-killing cap-and-trade plan and a deficit-bloating health care reform plan.

This Just In... Obama Is a Leftist!  Voters last year elected a left-wing former "community organizer" with one of the Senate's most liberal voting records.  He seeks to take the country — over the growing resistance of even those who voted for him — to an idealized world of government-guaranteed equality of outcomes.  He wants a government-guaranteed "level playing field" of wealth redistribution via taxing those deemed to have too much.  Obama's goals are open, blatant and confidently asserted, backed by a filibuster-proof, supermajority, Democratic-controlled Congress.  There is no Big Secret, no subterfuge, no bait-and-switch.  This is who and what he is.

The Assault on American Business.  The message from Washington is clear and getting louder by the day.  If you run a successful business you face excessive government regulations and higher levels of taxation for years to come.  The more productive and profitable you become, the more you will be forced to pay for the privilege of operating in this country.  This threat is real and it appears that many companies and business owners are taking steps to protect themselves.

Manufactured Healthcare Crisis.  If there were ever any doubt that Barack Obama personifies the Crisis Strategy, it should long since have been removed for anyone with a mind. ... For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Crisis Strategy was the brainchild of two radical socialist college professors, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.  The idea was to overwhelm government with demands for services to the point where the system would collapse and provide an opening for the socialists to take over.

It's official:  Obamanomics has failed.  With the sycophants in the Obama press corps distracted while rubbing elbows with the Obamas and other rich folk on the Vineyard, the O Team threw their sucker punch:  officially announcing that the federal budget deficit next year will be nearly 20% more than in their first forecast made just last May, and over the next ten years will be two trillion dollars more than they had predicted.

What's $2 Trillion Among Friends?  $2,000,000,000,000.  That's the amount by which the Obama administration raised its ten-year estimate of the nation's budget deficit from the one it made only a few months ago. ... The new estimate assumes that Medicare and Medicaid spending will be cut by $622 billion, even though Congress has made it know that it is reluctant to make any such cut.

Finding no buyers for snake oil.  Master politician that he is, Barack Obama is a lousy calculator.  He spectacularly misjudged the American public's appetite for a government nanny.  Or maybe he miscalculated the power of his slippery tongue to sell government snake oil.  His apparent willingness to abandon the attempt — for now — to nationalize the health-care industry appears to defer the Democratic first step in remaking the home of the brave and the land of the free into Little America, cutting it down to a size incapable of intimidating the likes of Switzerland or Swaziland.

Obama Down, Economy Up.  [Scroll down]  The stock market moves inversely to Barack Obama's approval ratings. ... Even daily stock trading vividly reflects this same pattern.  The sharp, cliff-like lines on an intraday chart often coincide with the ubiquitous Obama pronouncements and press conferences. Most interesting is actually watching one of these events in real-time, with one eye on the television and the other on the tape.  The averages sink with practically each utterance, their descent arrested only when the president mercifully finishes up.

Why Does Barack Obama Hate Our Economy?  I think it's a question a lot of us — both right and left — are asking right now.  We originally had such high hopes for President Obama.  While his wife obviously hates America, not even considering liking it until it looked like her husband might get the highest job in the land, it always seemed that Barack was at least apathetic about the existence of America.  While he wouldn't shed a tear if it was destroyed, he didn't seem to mind it being around either.  But his actions lately have shown that not to be true. ... At this point, even the most ardent Obama supporter has to admit he's actively trying to destroy the American economy.

An Anti-Business President.  Democratic presidents are not famous for appointing businessmen, merchants, or entrepreneurs to their cabinet or senior White House staff.  These are people who have started or run private businesses, created jobs, met payrolls, and made profits.  Thus they might be sensitive to how government can help or hurt business enterprises, especially during an economic downturn.  The number of such people appointed by Obama:  zero.  Members of his cabinet and White House staff come predominantly from government, academia, think tanks, and the law.

Know-Nothing-in-Chief.  [President Obama] wants to eliminate many deductions for upper middle class and wealthy taxpayers.  He's eager to spur the growth of unions, though success here is likely to slow the rate of growth and increase the rate of unemployment.  He wants government to intervene more aggressively in the economy, a reliable job killer.  He's asked for authority to seize any financial institution deemed (by his administration) a "systemic risk" to the economy.  He thinks government can teach the private sector lessons in efficiency.  That would be an historic first.  He believes his budget, which triples the national debt, "lays the foundation for a secure and lasting prosperity."  Whew!  And this is just what Obama has proposed in the first six months of his presidency.

Obama's budget will make us the most socialist country in the world.  America has sold its soul for unsustainable entitlements, and the price could very well be our capitalistic society as we move closer and closer to socialism.  Socialism, as Winston Churchill defined it, is a philosophy of failure.  Yet when President Barack Obama fired the CEO of GM, the American public barely batted an eye.  As financial markets have teetered on the brink of going under, the U.S. government has stepped in, taken ownership, arbitrarily decided what companies will fail and pumped and inflated others with fat TARP and bailout funds...

Obama Agenda Tanks, Stock Market Soars.  While some have attributed the recent rise in stock prices to positive earnings reports, the most important factor at play is the growing confidence amongst investors in the economic prospects of the nation as a whole.  Smart investors have been painfully aware that an alarming number of President Obama's policies, including CO2 emission regulation and healthcare reform, are quite simply business killing initiatives.

Why the Obama Stimulus Plan Must Fail.  Today's investors have figured out that tomorrow does not look so rosy.  So they are holding back on investment until the storm passes.  No new investment, no new jobs.  As libertarians well know, each new extension of government power should be examined under a presumption of error.  By that standard, the president's stimulus package — indeed his entire legislative program — should be scrapped.

Obama thinks you're stupid.
 B. H. Obama's Socialist & Bankrupt Circus:  It seems more obvious every day that America is now under the leadership of a far greater pitchman than even P. T. Barnum could have ever imagined.  President, or should I say, pitchman Obama's understanding of humanity seems eerily similar with that of P. T. Barnum.  For starters, Obama obviously believes, as Barnum did, that "there's a sucker born every minute," and that selling his entire socialist plan for America depends on it.

Record Deficits Could Sink Obama's Presidency.  Ronald Reagan ran large deficits; so for a while did Bill Clinton.  Both Bushes did every year.  And Barack Obama, who admittedly came to office amid a liquidity crisis that called for fiscal stimulus, trumped them all with the largest proposed budgetary shortfall in the nation's history that may hit $2 trillion dollars.  Economists differ on the precise percentages of gross domestic product at which annual deficits began to drag down the economy.

Stocks Surge as Obamacare Implodes.  Hate to say it but Obama's disastrous press conference last night is a big contributor to today's roaring stock market.  The Dow opened strong and is now up over 200 points, continuing a very bullish rally that is breaking new high ground for shares this year.

Obama saving the dinosaurs.  Obama and his team seem sharply opposed to the view that creative destruction is a valuable economic force.  They seem happy with what might be called destructive destruction — the obliteration of value and wealth without any resulting positive change. ... Imagine the wave of innovation that could be set off if General Motors and Chrysler were allowed to fail.  Existing firms, such as Ford, Honda and Toyota, would have vast new markets to compete for. ... The message is clear.  If you succeed and become profitable, Obama will take a big share of your profits for the federal government and give another big share to the unions.

Reclaim the Constitution or else it's adios to the republic.  It's gotten to the point where the federal government can do whatever it wants, and that is just plain scary.  Last week, you could turn west to California, east to Washington, D.C., or stop in the middle at Detroit to find numerous examples of federal power gone so far out-of-whack that it can no longer rightly be called government but should be recognized for what it is — assisted suicide.

The Birth of American Socialism.  [At first] we were told by the Media and other Liberal institutions; there will be no ownership of stock from the government.  This is just a way to float loans to the banks.  That changed almost immediately, and now the government holds "preferred" stocks meaning they get paid first, but do not hold a voting interest in the company.  Now that`s going to change as Our Savior, the Most Merciful Barack Hussein Obama has quietly announced that he`s changing the stock from "preferred" to "common", making the United States Government the majority shareholder of over 500 financial institutions in America.  In short, with the stroke of a pen we have become a socialist entity.

Obamanomics:  Naive, Or Intentionally Destructive?  Does President Obama want the U.S. economy to decline further?  Or is he just simply naïve about what is required to make the economy grow, and about the differences between "good" and "bad" economic policy? ... Back in February and March I began stating — in writing and on talk radio — that this President has no intention or desire to grow the U.S. economy, but rather, wishes only to grow U.S. dependency.

Obama the Destroyer.  If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely "change America," and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

The Drive to Abolish National Currencies.  [Scroll down]  In effect, the present crisis was created for the intended solution — a global currency that would dissolve national sovereignty.  This is no longer merely an academic question.  World leaders are gathering on our soil next week to urge global investors to abandon the US dollar as the preferred reserve currency in favor of an internationally traded currency unit similar to the Euro.  Americans must be ready, or what has already happened in Europe will happen here.

Obama's revenge against GM:  These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States.  We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin.  If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.

Your EPA Mafia At Work.  I am increasingly of the opinion that the main goal of the Obama administration through CO2 regulation, exploding deficits, punishing taxation, and any other means at their disposal is the destruction of the economy and the complete control of impoverished Americans.  This is an administration that exists to impose an Orwellian socialist utopia when the smoke clears.  When it comes to CO2, Obama, all of his so-called science advisors, and the Environmental Protection Agency are all lying.  A criminal fraud is being perpetrated.

Obama's Cirque du Stimulus.  Charges that the Obama administration's extravagant fiscal and monetary recession-fighting measures are the road to perdition, even if true, miss the much larger and more important point.  Obamanomics is not really aimed at ending recession and fixing the U.S. credit system.  It may be that, in terms of official immediate objective, but the Obama presidency is mostly about fulfilling a much larger ideological ambition.  The recession crisis, as many have already noted, is really a handy pretext for a national plan to push down America's private sector and boost the public sector.

Obama signs stimulus, Dow plunges nearly 300.  Stock market down 2,000 points since Election Day.

Obama is Unifying the Nation Against Washington DC.  According to Rasmussenreports.com only 16% of the nation strongly disapproved of Barack Hussein Obama on the day of his inauguration.  That number has since become 32%, doubling during his first six weeks in office. ... This most likely has a lot to do with the fact that Obama and Pelosi's Obamanomics adventure into Marxism, has already cost average Americans nearly $3 Trillion in lost investments and savings, as the DOW lost another 30% of its values just since the day Obama was elected.  $4 Trillion in Marxist Social Engineering efforts, all at overtaxed taxpayer expense may have something to do with it too.

The Obama depression:  Obama's role model is Franklin D. Roosevelt, yet Obama evidently is not familiar with Amity Shlaes' fine book, The Forgotten Man.  Obama says he is embracing "experimentation — if that doesn't work, then you do something else."  Shlaes shows that what FDR called "bold, persistent experimentation" deepened and lengthened the 1930s Depression:  Businesses faced with ever-changing rules didn't know whether to invest or hunker down.  At least, though, FDR famously said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  He tried to raise the nation's spirits.  Obama, though, has repeatedly dampened them with his self-fulfilling prophecies of gloom.

Dow Sees Biggest Two-Day Drop Since 1987 After Obama Elected.  The economy was already week, to be sure, but anyone trying to argue that Obama doesn't bear some responsibility here is fooling themselves.  You can't campaign on massive tax hikes (both those promised by Obama himself and those that will happen when Obama and the Democrats "roll back" Bush's tax cuts) in uncertain economic times and not expect the market to react when you win the election.

The Stock Market Has Spoken.  It's simple really, Senator Barack Obama prior to his election to the United States Presidency stated that he would increase taxes on the energy sector to push forth a new wave in alternative energy.  Before he was elected Senator Barack Obama also attacked the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA.  Campaigning Senator Barack Obama also told the unions that he would support them, and unions look out for their own interests and not the interests of the corporations where they work.

Obama's First Month:  The Dow opened at 8281.22 on the morning of Obama's inauguration.  Today [one month later] it opens at 7465.95.  That's a vote of practically no confidence in Obama's strategy for reviving the economy.  The numbers were worse on the biggest days of the Obama presidency.  The Dow fell 332.13 points on inauguration day, 381.99 points on the day Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced step two in the bank bailout, and 297.91 points when the president signed the stimulus bill three days ago.  Financial markets are a bet on the future.  The market's view is that an Obamanomics-driven economy looks grim.

Is It Any Wonder The Market Continues To Sink?  Last Oct. 13, in trying to explain why the market had sold off 30% in six weeks, we acknowledged that the freeze-up of the financial system was a big concern.  But we cited three other factors as well:
 •  The imminent election of "the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party."
 •  The possibility of "a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal."
 •  A "media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises."  No wonder, we said then, that panic had set in.

Nationalization rumors sink stocks.  Fears that the federal government will be forced to nationalize some of the largest banks sent the stock market plummeting Friday, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a six-year low.

President Obama and the Coming Stock Market Crash.  How destructive to the U.S. economy would a Barack Obama presidency be?  Beneath Obama's flowery rhetoric lies a dangerous economic plan that will wreak havoc on the American economy.  Obama plans to return to the failed policies of high taxation coupled with an expansion of government spending.  Worse, Obama says he is absolutely committed to almost doubling the capital gains rate — something he will easily accomplish with a Democrat Congress.

President Obama's 2,000-point tumble.  On Nov. 4, after Barack Obama clinched the White House, the market closed at 9,625.28.  In mid-morning trading today [2/17/2009], the day President Obama signs his massive Generational Theft Act into law and a day before he unveils a massive new mortgage entitlement, the Dow dropped to to 7,606.53.

Obama Calm Can't Stop $torm.  Last fall, Barack Obama was deemed by all the great and good as the man to save the country from its financial crisis because of his calm.  As John McCain flailed around, Obama stayed steady, and commentators ascribed to him the most extraordinary leadership qualities based merely on his equipoise.  How is that working out?  Well, the stock market has lost roughly 25 percent of its value in the past two months, destroying more than $2.6 trillion of wealth.  But at least President Obama is calm.

The 10 Biggest Amateur Mistakes By the Obama Administration So Far.  [#1]  Barack Obama may be a liberal thriller, but he's also a stock market killer.  Since he came into office, his Bunyanesque new spending proposals, his plans for a trillion dollar tax hike, his regular badmouthing of the economy, and his incessant tinkering with banks and the housing market have caused the stock market to go into a freefall.  Granted, stocks would have likely dropped anyway because of the economic crunch we're in, but the market wouldn't have already reached the lowest level since 1997 without lots of help from Obama.

Now Obama Tells Us?  Imagine that last fall before being elected, Barack Obama had outlined the positions he has embraced since being inaugurated as president.  An honest campaign speech could have gone something like this: ... "Although my new spending proposals may raise the federal deficit in my first year to $1.75 trillion, I promise the American people that by the end of my first term, I will halve the federal deficit — albeit adding another $3 to $5 trillion to the national debt.

Obama Appoints University of Starbucks Economics Department.  Ever walk into a Starbucks and see a bunch of people sitting there debating textbook theories and solving all the world's problems over a mocha java?  If so, then you've visited a University of Starbucks campus.  These are precisely the kind of people who have gotten America into the current economic mess.

Treasury's Unreality Show.  The latest example came yesterday, when equity markets showed early strength after a dreadful week when they had fallen nearly 6%.  Then investors started to absorb a three-paragraph morning statement from five branches of the Obama financial regulatory team asserting that the government "stands firmly behind the banking system during this period of financial strain to ensure it will be able to perform its key function of providing credit to households and businesses."  Stocks headed south around 10 a.m. and didn't stop until they'd lost another 3.4% or so.  The nearby chart of the Dow since Election Day is a running tally of ebbing confidence in the new Administration.

How Obama handles 'priorities'.  In the Middle Ages, when a young prince suddenly became king, the royal court, the church leadership and other senior aristocrats would scrutinize his every word and habit for signs of what kind of mind would be deciding their country's fate and their personal prosperity and safety.  Today, around the world, President Barack Obama's every word, every action, every inaction is being likewise scrutinized for similar reasons.

Investors Unimpressed with Obamanomics.  The old saying that money isn't everything seems to epitomize President Obama's inept attempts to jumpstart the economy by throwing $2 trillion to $3 trillion at it.  Nothing appears to be working.

Obama's On a Path to an American Welfare State.  Forget all the conspiracy theories of a mythological "North American Union" combining us with Mexico and Canada.  Barack Obama wants America to be an unofficial member of the European Union.  The path he outlined in his quasi "state of the union" address is to remake America on the model of a European welfare state.  Down to lows unseen since 1997, the financial markets are as nervous as a politician on a polygraph.  When the president speaks of catastrophe, they panic.

It's Obama spreading panic.  President Obama, in his pursuit of liberal big-government spending, has totally neglected the role of the president of the United States in reversing global panic.  To the contrary, his every remark and the constant preoccupation of his Cabinet is to heighten the sense of crisis and to escalate the predictions of doom if we do not do as they tell us and raise spending now and taxes later.  Instead of being a firewall, reassuring Main Street even as Wall Street crashed, he has become a conduit of panic, spreading the mood of desperation from the stock exchange floor to kitchen tables across the world.

The Era of Big Government Is Only Getting Warmed Up.  The president's address tonight comes at an interesting juncture.  The stimulus has passed, but the administration is backpedaling on just how much good it is going to do and how quickly we will feel its effects.  The mortgage bailout plan has induced a populist backlash.  And the financial sector is paralyzed with fear.  Despite promises of fiscal responsibility, there is nothing but government spending and rising deficits in the near term.

Stocks end at 12-year lows.  Stocks tumbled Friday on worries about the government taking a bigger chunk of Citigroup and a bleak reading on the economy, again touching 12-year lows.  The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 119 points, or 1.7%.  It was the lowest close since May 1, 1997.  The S&P 500 (SPX) index lost 18 points, or 2.4%, closing at its lowest point since Dec. 18, 1996.

Markets Aren't Easily Charmed.  Some things can't be disguised by stagecraft or media cheerleading.  In the end, it matters what you do, not how you describe your plans.

Marxist Obama-nomics Destroy DOW.  The DOW Jones average closed at $8,281.22 on January 19, 2009, the night before the Obamanation became an historic reality.  A little more than a month later, the DOW continues its free-fall approaching the $7000 mark (sic) and nobody knows where the bottom is.  But so far, Obama-nomics have cost Americans trillions in new debt and 14% of their savings, in just a month...

At This Rate, We Run Out of Dow to Lose in About 88 Days.  Dow down another 88 today.  As I try to repeat each time, the market is responding to all kinds of economic data, but to the extent that it is responding to Washington, it's not liking what it's hearing. ... The increase in gun sales is the only genuine economic stimulus that can be credited to Obama.

Obama and the Stock Market.  [Almost nobody in the media is] saying anything critical of Obama's policies which, obviously, the stock market — conventionally the predictor of our economy — thinks are dead wrong.  Cognitive dissonance?  Mental imbalance?  Slavish idolatry?  Or just plain inability to admit you made a mistake?  You tell me.  Meanwhile, the market goes lower and lower while the media continues its hosannas to BHO.

Obama lied; the economy died.  George W. Bush didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  He was merely mistaken.  Whereas President Obama told a whopper last week when he claimed he was not for bigger government.  As he said Tuesday night:  "As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets.  Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't."  This he asserted though the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II.

In Free-Fall, Stocks Hit Lowest Mark Since '97.  The global financial rout worsened yesterday [3/2/2009], driving U.S. stocks to their lowest level since 1997 amid deepening questions about whether governments around the world are being forceful enough in combating the economic crisis.  There was no single cause for yesterday's sell-off, which sent each of the major indicators down at least 4 percent, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing below 7000 for the first time in 12 years.

The Editor says...
 No single cause?  I beg to differ.

The Anti-Reagan:  Barack Obama allegedly intends to be a transformational president like Ronald Reagan.  But now President Obama is raising taxes on businesses and retirees, socializing the largest sectors of America's economy, and decimating state sovereignty and creativity.  This is the polar opposite of what President Reagan did in the 1980s, and reveals Barack Obama as the Anti-Reagan. ... President Reagan's administration was the first in half a century where the government share of the economy decreased, as he slashed the growth rate of government while the economy swelled.

Don't Worry, Be Happy.  So the stock market drops over 25 percent since Election Day, almost 20 percent since Inauguration — and Barack Obama tells the American people at his press conference Tuesday [3/3/2009] not to "spend all your time worrying about that":  "You know, it bobs up and down day to day.  And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you're probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong."  But the stock market isn't gyrating, or bobbing up and down.  It's dropping.

Is America Being Deliberately Destroyed?  If a foreign power had invaded our nation and imposed these measures we would be at war with it.  With all the numbers, the billions and the trillions coming at us every day, White House budgets, proposals to raise taxes "on the rich", a new health care scheme, a "cap-and-trade" emissions plan to penalize utilities and all other companies for releasing "greenhouse gas" emissions, it has been a dizzying ride since January 20th and it's all downhill.

Market to Obama:  I'm Just Not That Into You.  The Dow Jones industrials fell 4 percent yesterday [3/2/2009], dropping below 7,000.  The market barometer is now down a whopping 30 percent since Election Day, including an 18 percent drop over the past three weeks.  That, even as President Obama's plans to stimulate the economy, fix the banking system and bailout struggling homeowners have come into sharper focus.  One could view the slow-motion crash as a financial vote of no-confidence in the White House's ability to effectively fix America's economic mess and lead the rest of the world out of its tangle.

It's Only Your Life's Savings.  To be clear:  there is no bobbing here.  [The stock market] is sinking like a stone.  And unlike polls the markets are "real" in the sense that they are tied to real money, real earnings, and real economic behavior.  His glib waive of the hand — too busy to worry about the market because he's busy remaking society — is the perfect example of precisely what this administration is getting wrong.

The market's harsh verdict on Obamanomics:  Officially, President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget is titled "A New Era of Responsibility."  That's false on two counts.  It's an era — not of responsibility, but of big-government taxation, spending, and regulation.  And it's not new.  History is full of attempts to inflate the state to grow the economy.  Virtually all have ended badly.  As Monday's sell-off reminds us, Wall Street's verdict on Obamanomics has been quick and sharp.

Coming next year:  Obama's inflation.  In the last five months, according to the Federal Reserve Board, the money supply in the United States has increased by 271 percent.  It has almost tripled.  Have car sales tripled? Home purchases?  Consumer spending?  Corporate investment?  Not only have they not tripled, they have all declined more sharply than they have since at least the recession of 1981-82, and perhaps since the Great Depression.

The Obama Economy.  As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic.  Yesterday [3/2/2009] the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997.  The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.

Capital On Strike.  In the three months since the election, the broadest measure of the stock market's value, the Wilshire 5000 Index, has plunged more than 30%, slicing over $3 trillion from Americans' wealth.  Investors have walked away from investing, while businesses shut down factories and offices and slash jobs.  This is both highly significant and dangerous. Capital, bluntly put, has gone on strike.

The Stupid Party.  One can see why the White House is trying to foment controversy.  It provides a convenient distraction from the ongoing failure of the administration's economic policies.  This failure is well established, despite however popular those policies seem to be at the moment.  The president's stimulus package, housing plan, and bank rescue have been met with shudders from the markets.

Is Obama Out of His Freakin' Mind?  President Obama blames the continuing global financial crisis for the unmitigated carnage on Monday, when the Dow fell below 7000 and closed down 300 points (or 4.2 percent) at a 12-year low of 6763.  [Nonsense!]  The man is in denial.  By now we know the economy is ailing.  The main thing that has changed:  The disturbing details of Obama's tax-and-spend plans are becoming all too clear.  Most of the moves he has made in his first 43 days in office have been bad for the markets, damaging to investors, ill-advised for the economy and detrimental to repairing the financial collapse wracking the entire planet.

Stocks Should Matter to Obama.  Any president, particularly the current one, has a lot of things to worry about.  Should the level of the Dow Jones Industrial Average be one of them?  In a word:  yes.  The question seems especially relevant after Thursday's stock selloff drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average down further to 6594.44.

The Emperor has no clues.  This is getting worse by the day.  First off.  Obama doesn't understand how the market works.  It's a vote of confidence each and every day how things are going to be in the future.  Not how things were yesterday.  Or, even today.  During the campaign, Barak Obama famously displayed his dismaying ignorance of economics and the availability and utilization of capital when he was surprised to learn, during an ABC interview, that lower capital gains rates result in high federal revenues.

Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.  It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.  The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end.

Caught in the Financial Downdraft.  President Obama and his aides this week were selling hope.  The markets aren't buying.

Did Obama Cause the Stock Slide?  At least on Wall Street, the honeymoon is over for President Barack Obama.  Polls still show the President has strong popularity among the general U.S. population, and Obama continues to command power in Congress.  But among investors, fairly or unfairly, there is griping that the new Obama Administration is at least partly to blame for the recent slide in stocks.

'Manchurian Candidate' Starts War on Business.  Back in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson gave us the War on Poverty.  In the 1970s, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs.  Now that we have seen President Barack Obama's first-year legislative agenda, we know what kind of a war he intends to wage.  It is no wonder that markets are imploding around us.  Obama is giving us the War on Business.

Obama's Political Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome.  President Obama has purposely recreated a version of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome by following the Hoover/FDR model of economic destruction, increasing taxation and regulation during a recession.  Obama is compounding the damage by destroying the domestic nuclear, oil and coal industries at the same time.  It should be obvious that we need to double or triple our domestic energy production and reduce absurd government regulations.

Memo to President Obama:  First Things First, Please.  Welcome to the Barack Obama bear market.  On Inauguration Day, the official beginning of the era of "hope" and "change," the Dow stood at 8,281.  On Friday [3/6/2009], it closed at 6,626 — the fastest drop for any president in more than 90 years.  Given his track record so far on economics, no wonder Obama wants to talk about health care instead. ... What policies have Obama and his team presented to reassure the markets and offer the promise of stabilization and renewed growth?  The short answer:  None.

Obama Fiddles While Wall Street Burns.  [Scroll down]  The Dow Jones fell to twelve-year lows last week, having fallen about 20% since Obama's inauguration.  This is the fastest drop under a new president in 90 years, according to a Bloomberg News report.  Unemployment has topped 8% and is still climbing rapidly. ... Where is the promised clear and specific plan to save the financial industry?  It's nowhere to be found.

Dr. Obama:  First, Do No Harm.  When it comes to our complex economy, President Barack Obama would do well to heed the physician's ancient commandment to first "do no harm."  Instead, Obama's administration has been prescribing all sorts of multibillion-dollar borrowing remedies without any consistent diagnosis of what is exactly wrong with the weak economy or even how bad things actually are.

The Death of Democratic Capitalism?  How far will the Obama administration move to assert regulatory control over key sectors of the economy?  Are we moving away from democratic capitalism, and toward some sort of corporatist state-directed economy?  That could be the biggest stock-market and economic-growth issue facing us today.  Stocks plunged almost 300 points on Monday [4/20/2009] over new fears of bank nationalization.

Obama's agenda will ruin U.S. for years.  Let's face it, most of you fell in love with Obama for one of two reasons.  He either seemed like this new type of politician who was going to ride into Washington and bring about reform and change, or he simply wasn't George W. Bush.  Either way, you bought into something quite different than what you got.  Many of us knew before the election that Obama, for all his smooth talk, is in over his head.  Not only is he not up to the job (better equipped to do late-night talk shows), his agenda will damage us well into the future.

'I Bond' Payments Get Wiped Out.  Rates on government securities, certificates of deposit and savings accounts all have plummeted in recent months.  Now, yields on another safe haven — Series I Savings Bonds, or I bonds — are dropping to nothing.  Friday [5/1/2009], the Treasury Department said these inflation-linked bonds that are purchased between May and October will earn 0% for their first six months, the first time rates have hit 0% since the bonds were issued in 1998.

Household Wealth in U.S. Decreased by $1.3 Trillion.  U.S. household wealth fell in the first quarter by $1.3 trillion, extending the biggest slump on record, as home and stock prices dropped.  Net worth for households and non-profit groups decreased to $50.4 trillion, the lowest level since 2004, from $51.7 trillion in the fourth quarter, according to the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds report today.  The government began keeping quarterly records in 1952.

How Obama's socialism works:  [Scroll down]  At the core of the new policy will be the simple assumption that Washington knows best.  But it doesn't.  The stagnation of the Japanese economy in the past 20 years is eloquent testimony to the fact that government usually gets it wrong. ... One way or another, the government usually runs the economy into the ground, as it will under King Barack I.

If this mess is what he really intended, we're all in big trouble.
 Obama:  Stimulus bill worked 'as intended'.  With bad-news stories about the stimulus spending bill piling up at home, President Obama used his weekly radio address Saturday to try to reset expectations, saying that despite continued job losses and the slow distribution of the money, the program "has worked as intended."

Obama is printing money as fast as he can.
 What's The Stimulus Have To Do With It?  The plain fact is, a recovery was baked in the cake as 2009 began.  The main reason was the Fed went pedal to the metal on money creation in December, slashing its benchmark fed funds rate to zero.  Since then, the monetary base — the most basic money supply controlled by the Fed — has grown at an average yearly rate of nearly 100%.  That's the biggest sustained rise since the Fed began in 1913.

US deficit climbs to 1.3 trillion dollars.  The US budget deficit reached 1.3 trillion dollars for the current fiscal year in July, official data showed, news set to fuel opposition to US President Barack Obama's ambitious health care and climate change proposals.

Indentured Grandchildren.  If you are blessed, as I am, to have grandchildren, you may not realize that they are more than just treasured children of your children, a gift beyond measure.  They are also indentured servants who will be paying off your cumulative national debt for a good part of their lives on earth.

Repeal Obama's Raw Deal.  Obama's reckless spending has already sent the federal deficit mushrooming, like some economic radioactive cloud, in just his first year, and evidence mounts that Obama's economic policies are nothing more than a Raw Deal.  Last spring, Obama tried to jawbone international leaders into imposing the same sort of porkulus package that Democrats strong-armed through Congress here.  They, for the most part, rejected Obama's exhortations.

Obama and 'Redistributive Change'.  [Scroll down]  Why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?  Once again, I don't think health care per se was ever really the issue. ... Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern.

Senate must raise debt ceiling above $12 Trillion.  The Senate must move legislation to raise the federal debt limit beyond $12.1 trillion by mid-October, a move viewed as necessary despite protests about the record levels of red ink.

Bursting the Government Bubble.  America is now engaged in the unprecedented growth in government accompanied with unprecedented debt at the federal level.  The Federal Reserve in cooperation with both the Bush Administration in its final days and now the Obama administration is propping up the credit markets with over $1.0T including the TARP funds, and open market purchases of the US debt obligations.  Can the too big to fail hypothesis for the big banks also be applied to the Federal government?

Is the US Government bankrupt?  Before we continue to debate the merits of any Obama health care plan, we need to consider a few important facts.  By any rational means, we must consider the present condition of our Government's financial situation.  An honest look at those finances would have a prudent person conclude that our government is tacitly bankrupt.  Our unfunded liabilities far exceed our assets.

Iceberg Dead Ahead, Captain Orders "All Engines Ahead Full".  Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year.  Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 for every American.  By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the president's budget, the deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.

Trickle Down Poverty.  Instead of approaching the economy in a way that opens a door through which the poor can use their God-given talents to better their circumstances, Obama plans a state-run economy that will result in trickle down poverty.  And for all his talk about "spreading the wealth around," our president is really poised to spread dependence on a discombobulated bureaucracy.

In His First Year, Obama Presides Over 4.1 Million Jobs Lost.  Unemployment shot up in 2009 from 7.7 percent in January to 10.1 percent in October before settling at 10 percent in December.  Behind those percentages were more than 4.1 million people who lost their jobs during the year.  According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that's the most job losses in a year since 1940.

None Dare Call It Socialism.  Socialism vs. Obamaism may not be a distinction without a difference.  But it's certainly a distinction with such a trifling difference that there's not nearly enough there to make a living on.

Obama is killing the economy.  Barack Obama has the worst budget record of any president in American history. ... Mr. Obama's [first] budget, coupled with the $787 billion stimulus slush fund, was the most irresponsible in history.  The effects of his ruinous policies can already be measured.

Obama's demonization of banks:  Banks are not the bad actors Democrats want people to believe.  Banks have paid back almost all the [bailout] money they were lent along with interest.  The same cannot be said for government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have irretrievably lost $400 billion and counting — and the Obama administration is offering those losers a blank check for billions more.

The Bill Comes Due for Socialism.  It began as a beautiful cruise to a land of "hope and change," but it has become a nightmare in which the ship of state is being deliberately steered toward a whirlpool of debt from which, if Obama is successful, the nation cannot escape.

Mr. President, Words Matter.  For two years Obama serially damned the entrepreneurial classes.  They should "spread the wealth," be "patriotic," and pay "their fair share."  They should be paying more income, payroll, and inheritance taxes.  They could not be trusted with health care, student loans, high finance, or auto manufacturing.  Their lifestyles of private jets and Super Bowl junkets came at the expense of the downtrodden.

A New Era Of Irresponsibility.  If you're one of those who doubted the White House's pledges of fiscal restraint, the new budget confirms your worst fears.  Over the next 10 years, it boosts spending, taxes and debt by record amounts. ... The proposed budget over the next decade would rack up $45.8 trillion in new spending, $9.1 trillion in deficits and more than $2 trillion in higher taxes on Americans.

3.8 Trillion for What?  [Scroll down]  The prospects of a staggering $1.6 trillion deficit in this fiscal year hasn't stopped Obama from proposing a lot of new spending in the past week or so:  $4 billion for an "infrastructure innovation and finance fund," $5 billion for an anti-nuclear proliferation program, an additional $3 billion for aid-to-education, and $25 billion more to bail out state governments who have spent themselves deeply into debt.

Collapsing Ceiling.  Congress stands ready to lift the debt ceiling an additional $1.9 trillion and is eager to waste hundreds of billions more.  Do our representatives realize the long-term damage they're doing to the economy?

Out Of Control Spending.  The president has a peculiar understanding of leadership.  By all accounts, federal fiscal policy has now run completely off the rails.  Budgetary pressures have been building for years because of unconstrained entitlement spending and Washington's unchecked appetite for ever-more activist government.  But what had been a chronic problem that all involved knew needed corrective action has now become, in the Obama years, a full-fledged disaster in the making.

Obama Begins His Assault on Your Life Savings.  The welfare state and your life savings are two cars heading down a one-lane road in opposite directions.  One must yield, or there will be a crash.  For Americans who believe in the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, self reliance and respect for private property, the solution is obvious.  The welfare state must yield.  For politicians who believe in the welfare state and redistributing wealth, the solution is equally obvious.  Your savings must yield.

Obama — Too Little, Too late, Too Cynical.  The United States may very well owe a crushing $20 trillion by 2020.  And thus President Obama last week named a bipartisan commission to find ways to address our national debt.  Such a Periclean response might sound sincere and worthwhile.  But it comes 13 months into this administration — and only after Obama added nearly $1.5 trillion in new borrowing in 2009.  And by the time the new deficit commission submits its recommendations at the end of this year, the current 2010 budget will have put us out another $1.5 trillion.

Obama Administration Using Accounting Gimmicks That Would Make Enron 'Blush'.  Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) says the Obama administration is using an accounting "gimmick" in its budget by not including the debt owed by mortgage firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Bill and Hillary:  Driving the Left into a Ditch?  It's bizarre. Why does President Obama insist upon driving public option health care legislation through Congress when voter opposition to it is at an all-time high?  Unhappiness with Obama and the other leading Democrats is so high that a national tea party movement has virtually brought the Republicans back from the electoral grave.  The president's job approval numbers have been in a year-long slide.  In almost every election since he took office, Democrats have gotten trounced.  Yet he continues to push extraordinarily unpopular policies.  Could it be the advice he's been getting?

GOP senator says ObamaCare will "divide and bankrupt America".  Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and personal friend of President Obama's, on Saturday [2/27/2010] took a highly public stand against the president's health care plan and against his intentions to "ram" a bill through Congress, warning that such a move will "divide and bankrupt America."  Coburn, chosen as the Republican lawmaker to deliver the party's regular weekend address to the nation, cautioned Obama against supporting the use of "reconciliation" ...

Auto Schizophrenia.  Under assault from Washington on global-warming regulations and tort litigation, the U.S. auto industry still managed a 24 percent sales gain in March as it continues its climb out of the worst sales recession in 30 years.

President Alfred E. Obama.  Observing President Obama's relentlessly reckless approach to our nation's fiscal integrity is reminiscent of the signature phrase of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, "What, me worry?"  Obama struck again last week at the G-20 conference in Toronto, urging other nations to follow his Pied Piper lead into deficit spending hell.  Unlike recent U.S. presidents who recognized and touted this nation as the world's exemplar for economic growth and prosperity, Obama is turning us into a poster nation for financial irresponsibility.

I'll Take a Double-Dip.  The United States of America is in great peril.  Absent drastic and immediate intervention, America as we know it will cease to exist. ... Keynesian economics has been a failure wherever implemented.  Government priming of the economic pumps has never worked and has inevitably led to banana republics and rivers of blood when the populace is finally purged of wealthy, productive citizens to tax.  Nobody could be stupid enough to believe that continuing down this path will lead anywhere but to financial ruin.  All of this chaos and uncertainty is intentional and the Obamacrats are engaging in the wholesale overthrow of our free market system.

Democrats deeming themselves defeated come November.  On the first day of July, the House of Representatives passed a "budget enforcement resolution" that "deemed as passed" a $1.12 trillion budget. ... Pelosi's spineless minions did not dare pass a real budget, for a real budget would have shown in black and white — in red ink, actually — just how wildly mismanaged the federal fisc has become.  The trio of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Pelosi is putting the finishing touches on a one-year deficit of $1.6 trillion, while setting in motion an expansion of the standing debt to well north of $14 trillion.  This is no mean feat in an era when Democrats themselves denounced George W. Bush's deficit of a mere $160 billion in 2007.

Boring Barry.  Marxists like Obama have nothing new to say.  The whole sum of human problems, according to the goateed gurus of radical socialism on college campuses, is the unfair distribution of wealth, and the only solution to this "problem" is coercive redistribution.  It is hard to overestimate just how dull, dumb, and monotonous radical socialism is to people who are forced to listen to it all the time.

The Dangers of Big Government Debt.  Warnings about America's impending financial car wreck are being sounded, loud and clear.  The only question is whether those driving the car will slam on the brakes before it's too late.

25 Reasons to Send the Democrats Packing in November.  [#1] Remember the stimulus bill?  Republicans strongly opposed it and said it wouldn't work.  Democrats said it would revive the economy and keep unemployment under 8 percent.  So, what happened?  Democrats shoved through a bill that cost $1.1 trillion when you add in the interest.  It cost more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, and putting a man on the moon — combined.  The result?  The economy didn't take off, the unemployment rate is still at 9.6 percent, and Democrats are calling for...you guessed it, another stimulus bill.

Our Boy-President.  In 2008, Americans elected a boy-president.  In short order, he becomes Jimmy Carter on Socialist steroids.  He apologizes to the world in a submissive fashion and caves in to Muslim extremism.  He also is hell-bent on bankrupting the government in order to finance a permanent power-grab.  Worst of all, he is insistent on building a nation of government addicts in the form of welfare, unions, and heavy-handed market Socialism.

"Eh, I don't worry about the market's 'day to day gyrations.' "

— President Obama,    
March 3, 2009.    



Older commentary
written immediately before and after the 2008 election:

Stocks plunge as investors ponder Obama presidency.  A case of postelection nerves sent Wall Street plunging Wednesday [11/5/2008] as investors absorbed a stream of bad economic news and wondered how a Barack Obama presidency will help the country weather a possibly severe recession.

Barack's Siren's Song — The Seduction of a Nation.  Barack Obama's repackaged song of social justice through wealth redistribution is nothing but a version of Karl Marx's dream, trimmed and garnished for the ears of worried Americans.  Joe Biden, already mesmerized by the idealism of his left-wing Party, is convinced that such comparisons must be a joke.  Unfortunately Joe, there is no joke.  The facts are facts, and you and those like you are willing to sail this great nation onto the rocks.

We're ALL Democrats Now!  It will take a few years for the 63 million Americans who wanted "change" to figure out what the rest of the world already knows, — socialism doesn't work.  The 5% Obama promises to rob on behalf of his constituents have already changed investment strategies to protect their earned assets.  By the time Obama arrives on their doorstep, the cupboard will be empty.

An Obama Panic? Markets Fear His Policies.  Barack Obama has re mained cool and confident amid the financial melt down, even as John McCain at times has been embarrassing, lurching from one proposal to the next.  But while the polls are reflecting Obama's steady hand, the markets haven't.  In fact, they're getting worse by the day as Obama's lead widens.

Is This the End of Conservatism?  As historian John Steele Gordon helpfully pointed on in the Wall Street Journal, panics are not unusual in American history.  We've experienced them almost every 20 years since 1819.  Gordon blames Thomas Jefferson, which is intriguing, but the point is that we've always emerged from these periodic paroxysms intact and our economy has continued to grow. ... But if we elect a crypto-socialist like Barack Obama and give him a bigger Democrat majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate, banking regulation may be the least of our troubles.

The Obama (Stock Market) Discount May Be Real.  Are investor concerns about an Obama presidency influencing the stock market?  And by "concerns" I mean "existential panic."  And by "Obama presidency" I mean "a tax-hiking and regulatory reign of terror."  And by "influencing" I mean "eviscerating."

U.S. Stocks Tumble in Market's Worst Two-Day Slump Since 1987.  [In the first two days after Obama won the presidential election,] U.S. stocks slid, sending the market to its biggest two-day slump since 1987, after jobless claims jumped and the shrinking economy crushed earnings at companies from Blackstone Group Inc. to News Corp.

Investors Flee From 'Change' Obama Hypes.  Are Barack Obama's proposed tax increases adversely affecting our financial markets?  We say yes, unambiguously.  The senator has done a masterful job distracting attention from his tax increases with his $500-per-worker tax credit supposedly for 95% of Americans. ... With the bottom 40% of income earners not paying any federal income taxes, such tax credits would not reduce any tax liability for these workers.  Instead, since they're refundable, they would involve new checks from the federal government.  These are not tax cuts as Obama is promising.  They are new government spending programs buried in the tax code and estimated to cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years.

Investors' Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami.  Right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.  It isn't only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House.  It's that he'll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

A Barack Market.  The voters may be full of hope about the looming Obama Presidency, but so far investors aren't.  No President-elect in the postwar era has been greeted with a more audible hiss from Wall Street.  The Dow has lost 1,342 points, or about 14%, since the election, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hitting similar skids.

Obama proves to be stock market poison.  Hours before the polls closed on November 4th, the S & P 500 stock index closed for the day at 1005.75.  Yesterday [11/20/2008], after 12 trading sessions since the election results were known, the S&P closed at 752.54.  That is a drop of 253 points, and 25.2%.  There has never been such a reaction to an election result in American history.  The loss is 2.5 trillion dollars in market value, just for for the S&P 500 companies.

Markets and Marxists Don't Mix.  The USA has elected a far-left president, [which threatens] to fundamentally change the nature of the United States of America and its Constitution.  This political development is not promising; no socialist system of government has ever had the record of employment, productivity, innovation, and growth that the USA has enjoyed under a system of free-market, rule-of-law economics. On the contrary, socialist states are universally noted for functional inefficiency and institutional corruption ... .

We fail to learn from history.  We just had a presidential election that in some circles produced a lot of euphoria.  But I believe that at some point — I hope sooner rather than later — many Americans are going to wake up and realize that this election was not a cure for our problems but a symptom of the disease.  I think this is what our crashing financial markets are telling us.

The Obama Jolt:  Barack Obama wants to give the economy a jolt.  So far, though, the biggest jolt we've seen is the one the economy has given to Obama.  That jolt, in the form of a plummeting stock market, upset Obama's desire for a leisurely transition.  It made him virtually America's acting president.  Obama is fond of saying — he said it again last week — that the country has only one president at a time, and until January 20 it's George W. Bush.  True enough, but financial markets don't look at Washington that way.  They focus on the future, and that means Obama.

Obama Sinks the Markets.  The Dow has now fallen more than 50 percent from its peak.  Last month, it saw its biggest one-month drop since 1933.  Grandpa's retirement savings just half vanished over the last few months, and the president is telling him it's just a meaningless blip.  This is not a poll — this is all about the American people's economic future, or their present.  The stock market is in its greatest free fall since the Great Depression, and the president shrugs his shoulders.

From TARP to Obama to Command-and-Control.  Perhaps this is why the stock rally has stalled.  And raising taxes on entrepreneurs, investors, businesses, and the entire energy economy through cap-and-trade is no way to promote growth.  Nor is unprecedented command-and-control intervention in the economy.  In other words, a war on capital with an unlimited welfare safety net will do us in.  Plus, Mr. Obama's massive health-care expansion plans will end up bankrupting the entire nation.  This is his responsibility; he owns the problem now.  When will he stop?

The Obama Recession.  I think it is time to call it "The Obama Recession."  Using Obama's own numbers, we are now worse off than we would have been had Obama's stimulus not gone into effect.



Nationalizing the banks

Is the kettle black enough?  If ever there was a case of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, it is the cluster of new financial "reform" regulations Washington politicians are trying to foist on the back of Wall Street.  In a typical political smoke-and-mirrors misdirection, President Obama wants us to believe greedy Wall Street bankers are to blame for our economy sinking in financial quicksand and that more government regulations and controls are the answer.  Don't believe it.

Obama's Economic Policy:  Crony Capitalism.  The so-called financial-reform bills now working their ways through each house of Congress are, like the health-care-reform bill before them, not about reform at all.  They do not reform anything.  Instead, they make the federal government the major player in a major industry.  Just as the health-care-reform bill will transform private insurance companies into the equivalent of public utilities, whose every major decision needs government approval and whose returns on capital are more or less guaranteed, these bills would do the same for big banks and other financial institutions.

Financial fascism.  The "Dodd financial reform" bill being considered by the Senate will make it illegal for 99.6 percent of the population to invest in needed new and promising start-up companies while at the same time ensuring that the 33 largest banks, which control 92 percent of all bank assets, will be required to purchase more federal government debt before giving loans to businesses and individuals.  Quite simply, the government is continuing to practice financial fascism.

The end of American capitalism?  The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout.  The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.

Bank of America tumbles on nationalization worries.  Bank of America Corp shares fell below $5 for the first time since 1990 on speculation that spiraling losses at newly acquired Merrill Lynch & Co might lead to government control of the largest U.S. bank, wiping out shareholders.

Standing Athwart Nationalization.  [Scroll down]  And the Obama proposal definitely deserves more scrutiny.  As I noted previously in the Spectator, the administration's white paper puts no limits on the type of firm the government could seize.  On page 19, the paper defines a "Tier I financial holding company" that would be subject to seizure as "any firm whose combination of size, leverage, and interconnectedness could pose a threat to financial stability if it failed."  This is eminent domain on steroids.  It would be the arbitrary decision of politicians as to what businesses pose a "threat to financial stability."

Citiboobs.  Citigroup's arrogance is about to fly sky-high.  Literally.  As The Post reported yesterday, the bank — having wrangled a $45 billion cash handout from US taxpayers, plus another $306 billion in federal guarantees of its assets — now plans to buy (get this!) a $50 million ... corporate jet.  You've got to wonder:  Is the company begging to be nationalized?

Citi's Sky-High Arrogance:  Just weeks after Citigroup averted total collapse with a $45 billion shot in the arm of taxpayer cash, the bank jetted its former CEO and his family on one of its corporate jets to a posh Mexican resort for New Year's, The Post has learned.  Sandy Weill, 75, hopped aboard the tanking bank's Bombardier BD 700 Global Express on Dec. 26 with his wife, Joan, daughter Jessica, her husband and their children.  They flew from Westchester County Airport to the Los Cabos shore region in sunny Baja, according to aviation records and sources familiar with the trip.

Republican Says He Won't Drop the Idea of Nationalizing the Banks.  A Republican and a Democrat agreed on Sunday that the government may have to take a larger ownership stake in the nation's banks.  But the Republican lawmaker seemed to go even further than the Democrat in backing the idea of nationalization.  "Let's talk" about nationalizing the banks, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said on ABC's "This Week."  But she also said the nation is not ready to "move to the point of a formalized nationalized banking program yet."  Rep. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who appeared on "This Week" with Waters, said the nation's banks are in so much trouble, "We're going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago, no one likes."

Government Ownership in Banks Could Cause More Problems than It Solves.  The federal government's purchase of $250 billion in stocks from U.S. banks as part of the $700 billion financial bailout could cause a repeat of the same poor market discipline that caused the credit crisis, according to free market economists.  "These shares put in the hands of the government has a muting effect on incentives," said Frank Gamrat, senior researcher at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.  "Profit-making incentives drive the economy and maximize performance.  You take out that incentive when the government is going to provide capital."

Bank nationalization on the agenda, Lindsey Graham joins Marxist revolution.  Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he would entertain the idea of bank nationalization, on ABC Sunday morning.  Graham attempted to get comfortable with TARP II and the next bank bailout, saying "I would not take off [the table] the idea of nationalizing the banks."  Graham didn't have much good to say about the stimulus bill passed by the Senate, but the news of his openness to bank nationalization isn't going to be pleasing to the conservative base of the Republican Party.

Greenspan backs bank nationalisation.  The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.

Reid:  Don't call it nationalization.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he supports efforts of the federal government to dramatically expand its stake in Citigroup, but wants people to back off from the dramatic rhetoric.  "It's not nationalization, it's protecting the taxpayers' interests," Reid (D-Nev.) told MSNBC's Morning Joe program on Monday.

The Problem With 'Nationalization'.  The chorus for nationalizing America's struggling banks is growing louder, and support for the idea comes from strange sources.  Alan Greenspan has said that he understands that "once in a hundred years" the government needs to take over the banks, and now is the time.  Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, has called for doing what works and "if nationalization is what works, then we should do it."  That is the kind of pragmatism that leads to socialism.

Don't Nationalize Our Banks.  The federal government may be getting ready to nationalize one or more of America's major banks.  The reason often cited for taking such drastic action is "systemic risk."  Are our banks really in such dire shape?  You might be surprised to discover that the answer is no.

Just say no to bank nationalization.  Last Labor Day, the thought of nationalizing banks was alien, if not seditious. Today, some argue for bank expropriation.  Bafflingly, this advice comes not from Communists, but from Republicans.  "It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said in Wednesday's Financial Times.  This would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them."  Greenspan, whose monetary bubble elevated the economy to the vertiginous heights from which it is tumbling, seems old enough to understand that banking without the "problem" of prices is like flying without the "problem" of altimeters.

Will Obama (Inter)Nationalize the Banks?  Citing the "tragic failure of financial regulation," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told PBS' Charlie Rose that henceforth, "capitalism will be different."  No question about that — it already is.  Taxpayer bailouts of individual companies and entire industries have transformed congressional hearings into shareholder meetings.  In the Obama economy, auto manufacturers submit their business plans to Washington for approval.

Bad medicine.  The president knows that if the government actually takes over this country's banks, insurance companies and manufacturing giants, they will perform as nimbly as the Postal Service.  He may not be a socialist, but the rhetoric he has encouraged may lead gradually but inexorably to something just as economically dangerous.  There is a word for an economic system that allows business enterprises to remain in private hands so long as those ostensibly running them cede real decisionmaking power to government.  It's called fascism.

Obama Wants to Control the Banks.  The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future.  Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control.  And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough.  The White House wants to tell 'em what to do.  Control.  Direct.  Command.

Obama Is the 'Arrogant, Dismissive, and Derisive' One.  The imagery behind Obama's threat couldn't be more obvious:  comply with my demands or I will make sure you are harassed, intimidated, and run out of town on a rail.  He made them an offer they couldn't refuse.  Don Corleone couldn't have said it better.  We cannot forget, however, that it was Barack Obama himself along with his fellow Democrats who agitated this mob-like frenzy about the banks, the CEOs, and the bonuses.  It was Obama who said the bonuses were an "outrage" and a "violation of our fundamental values."

Backdoor Path to Bank Nationalization.  A big New York Times story this morning [4/20/2009] strongly suggests that Team Obama is about to up the ante in an effort to control the banking system for as long as the eye can see.  White House and Treasury officials are now talking about turning government TARP loans into common stock for the 19 biggest banks.  It's clearly a backdoor path to nationalization, as Uncle Sam would be the largest shareholder in these institutions.  What's more, it's not at all clear that the administration will even let certain banks pay down their TARP loans.

A Backdoor Nationalization.  Just when you think the political class may have learned something in months of trying to fix the banking system, the ghost of Hank Paulson returns to haunt the Treasury.  The latest Beltway blunder — and it would be a big one — is the Obama Administration's weekend news leak that it may insist on converting its preferred shares in some of the nation's largest banks into common equity.  The stock market promptly tumbled...

Government Bullying of Private Industry More Serious than Imagined.  Three cheers for Andrew Cuomo!  No, honestly.  He's taken a break from extorting AIG execs to give up their bonuses to expose a far more frightening extortion plot:  the effort by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to force Bank of America to go through with the Merrill Lynch deal — and conceal the mammoth losses from the shareholders.

20 Great Moments from Obama's First 100 Days!  [#17]  The only thing more startling than finding out that there were banks that want to give back hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxpayer money was being told that Barack Obama?s administration was refusing to let them give the money back so he could retain control over the banks.

The Party Of Yes: 6 Ways Democrats Are Hurting America.  [#2]  Taking over the banking industry:  Granted, George Bush got the ball rolling and plenty of Republicans voted for TARP.  So, the GOP's hands aren't clean on this one.  But, we now have the government leaning on banks to take pennies on the dollar from the car companies, refusing to let banks pay taxpayer money back, and there's even still talk of completely nationalizing the banking industry.  What is there in the history of this country, especially in the wake of a banking related housing crisis that was created by the government, that would make anyone think this is a good idea?

Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?  Only luck and falling oil prices saved Washington from having to face mass bankruptcy of the airline industry last year.  Now the specter is rising again.  Fuel prices are up.  Traffic continues to plummet amid a global recession.  United Airlines last week mortgaged its spare-parts inventory to raise cash at a usurious 17% interest rate.  Yet the Obama Justice Department has come out of the blocks trying to scuttle a promising experiment to stabilize the chronically unprofitable U.S. airline sector.  The new administration seemingly won't let companies fail, and won't let them succeed either.

U.S. Raises Estimate for 10-Year Deficit to $9 Trillion.  The nation's fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday [8/25/2009].

The Editor says...
 "Deeper than widely expected" means "Deeper than the Obama administration was willing to admit."  Many observers on the other end of the political spectrum predicted this months ago.  This leaves only one question:  Is the Obama administration incompetent or just dishonest?

White House projects bigger deficits, bigger debt.  The federal government faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, White House officials predicted Tuesday in a fiscal assessment far bleaker than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.

Government overspending is national suicide.  Remember when the deficit was so bad that Democrats said we (or more accurately the Republicans) were placing a terrible burden on our grandchildren?  That was several trillion dollars ago.  Democrats now appear perfectly fine with extending the growing deficit and national debt to their great-grandchildren.

The Pelosi-Obama Deficits.  The good news is the deficit for 2009 will be "only" $1.58 trillion, about $250 billion lower than expected thanks to less need for TARP funds.  But the Obama fiscal plan envisions $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade, which is $2 trillion more debt than the White House predicted earlier this year.

Sunbathing Obama Burning Us to a Crisp.  Sunning lazily this week on the rocky shores of Martha's Vineyard, President Obama is in a terrible pickle.  He has flushed billions of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars down the toilet "stimulating" the economy, acquiring insolvent car companies, and buying up clunkers that are immediately rendered inoperable by the feds — an apparent government specialty. ... And now he has blown the top off all limits on the amount of suffocating debt he is willing to pile on the children and grandchildren of America.

Obama's 09 deficit exceeds all eight years of Bush red ink.  How much is President Obama boosting federal spending? ... This year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household, tax $17,576 per household, and borrow $13,392 per household.  This spending is not just temporary:  President Obama would permanently keep annual spending between $5,000 and $8,000 per household higher than it had been under President Bush.

Doubling the national debt.  The Obama administration late last week, in classic late Friday afternoon attention-dodging mode, released its midsession budget review.  The good news:  the federal deficit for this year will be only $1,600,000,000,000 rather than $1,800,000,000,000.  The bad news, which will be released officially Tuesday:  the projected federal deficit for the next ten years is projected to increase to $9,000,000,000,000 from $7,000,000,000,000.  That's an extra $547,000 per day every day for the next 10 years.

9 banks fail in 1 day; $2.5 billion hit to FDIC insurance fund.  Federal regulators have shut the doors on part of a small banking empire built by through a string of 28 acquisitions over the past two decades.

Nine U.S. banks seized in largest one-day haul.  U.S. authorities seized nine failed banks on Friday, the most in a single day since the financial crisis began and the latest stark sign that substantial parts of the nation's banking industry are being crippled by bad loans.

Obama's Internal Reporting Service?  America's Founding Fathers envisioned a limited government in which laws were fairly and evenly enforced and justice was blind.  Yet as government's lust for additional power and its appetite for new spending have both exploded in recent years, so too has Washington's apparent willingness to play politics with prosecutions and government leaks.  We saw this trend at work in the recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, which even a kindergartener could tell was timed to coincide with President Barack Obama's "War on Wall Street" and the perpetuation of his failed bailout method of financial reform.

Violating privacy one bank account at a time.  Sen. Christopher Dodd's "regulatory reform" bill, S. 3217, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, has many contentious proposals that have members from both political parties on edge.  The bill cauterizes "too big to fail" by establishing a Financial Stability Oversight Council that would indentify politically important institutions, sending the signal that some companies are indeed too big to fail.

Obama's leap to socialism:  President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country's banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.  This seemingly insignificant change is momentous.  It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation.  It means socialism.



To sum it up,
Obama opposes capitalism

Obama's War on Capitalism:  [Scroll down]  Of course, this war on capitalism is carried out as a war on business and industry:  a concerted effort to take the reigns of the economy out of the hands of the people and place them in the hands of the government.  According to Charles Krauthammer, this blitzkrieg on freedom has already "destroyed a third of this nation's wealth," and Obama's zeal for the cause portends even greater loss in the near future.

Is Obama Designing the End of Capitalism?  All of Obama's economic policies thus far are designed to drive America into full embrace of socialism. His chief means for this transformation:  inflation.  He is attempting to inflate the currency through two primary means:  intense deficit spending, and pushing up production costs through union subsidization.  In order to make these measures politically palatable, he cites FDR as an example of good deficit spending; he cites the credit crunch as an excuse for inflationary monetary policy; and he recommends unionization in order to boost wages.

Preparing for the Coming Tax-Revolt.  It doesn't matter that increasing taxes on successful people will not bring in much dough.  What matters is punishing success, not filling the treasury.  No one should be surprised at this.  Whatever else you can say about Obama, he has never made a secret of his redistributionist philosophy.  Economics for him is not about the creation of wealth.  It is about 1) the redistribution of wealth and 2) penalizing those who have had the temerity to succeed.

Gov't Spending Shatters Postwar Records.  Congress is burning through the nation's community chest, spending trillions in tax dollars as if it were Monopoly money.  The legislators are on pace to burn through a record $4 trillion in fiscal year 2009 — approximately $1 trillion more than 2008's history-making expenditure, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Americans Are Beginning to Understand the Left.  The left everywhere seeks to make as big and powerful a state as possible.  It does so because only the state can redistribute society's wealth.  And because only a strong and powerful state can impose values on society.  The idea of small government, the American ideal since its inception, is the antithesis of the left's ideal.  The cap-and-trade bill's control of American energy and the ObamaCare takeover of American health care will mean an unprecedented expansion of the state.  Added to increased taxes and the individual becomes less and less significant as the state looms ever larger.

Big-Government Medicine.  Big new taxes.  Big new spending.  Big new government.  This seems to be the proposed cure for the Wall Street-inspired recession.  The government now runs major banks and companies, and plans to take control of the American health-care system.  And it aims to tax energy use in the United States to reduce production of carbon dioxide.

An Olympics We Can Believe In.  The picture now comes into sharp focus.  Americans voted for president a man who thinks that government creates wealth; that "greed" caused the current economic crisis; that taxpayers should provide health insurance for those who don't have it; that a government-induced housing and financial crisis can only be addressed by more government; that government can more efficiently and profitably run businesses than can the private sector; that "global warming" requires the imposition of job-killing and price-hiking action against emitters; and that government should "spread the wealth" by taking from those who have "too much" and giving to those who have "too little."

Obamanomics:  Decreased Productivity = More Jobs.  The president believes that increased per-employee productivity is a problem that he needs to "work on."  In other words, the president sees his challenge now as how to get the American worker to be less productive, so that companies require more employees to maintain current output.

The New Jobs Bull.  In a follow-on to the president's jobs summit, Congress is cooking up a jobs bill for a vote next week.  It's the same tired recipe to expand government at the expense of the private sector.  Call it a jobs kill.  Last week, we watched as 130 Big Labor bosses, community organizers, left-wing think tanks and a few token CEOs supposedly put their heads together to come up with a way to create jobs in the worst U.S. recession since 1929.

On jobs, Obama giveth, and Obama taketh away.  [Scroll down]  Big Government policies are killing GE jobs that might thrive in the free market, while creating GE jobs that never would survive in a free market.  Obama is replacing unsubsidized jobs with subsidized jobs.  Biden calls this "a new economy."  Obama calls it "remaking America."



Massive spending and the fast track to socialism

Even before his inauguration, Obama was perceived as a big spender.

Dems to lift debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion, fear 2010 backlash.  In a bold but risky year-end strategy, Democrats are preparing to raise the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion before New Year's rather than have to face the issue again prior to the 2010 elections.  "We've incurred this debt.  We have to pay our bills," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told POLITICO Wednesday [12/9/2009].

Obama's Only Real Accomplishment.  Barack Hussein Obama has accomplished only one thing in his first year in office.  Obama's only real accomplishment is that he took hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, and directed them to his donors on Wall Street, in the unions and the insurance industry.  Barry Hussein took in nearly 15 million dollars in donations from securities and investments companies, and his first priority was to pay it back with a massive bailout that has exploded the deficit.

Socialism in Stages.  Every bureaucratic intervention in the market reduces long-term wealth creation, even if it provides a temporary boost to the economy.  In time, this reduction of wealth is blamed on the inefficiencies of the remaining "unfettered" market, which provokes calls for greater intervention, ad infinitum.  Health care is a perfect example of the incremental socialization process.

House Democrats pass $447B omnibus.  House Democrats passed a massive $447 billion appropriations conference report Thursday [12/10/2009] to fund a host of different government agencies in fiscal 2010.  The conference report, approved on a 221-202 vote, didn't get any support from House Republicans, who raised concerns about spending increases.

Small Business vs. the Great Ozbama.  Mr. President, the bulk of the job losses at the small business level aren't tied to tight credit at all.  They are the result of your policies and threats of policies that target business owners.  I have lost count of the different ways you and your Democratic Congress and your czars have threatened to take money away from business owners.  I was up to 30, and just gave up.

Why not?  The government can pay for everything.
 Obama pledges billions for rural broadband.  President Barack Obama has pledged £2 billion in loans and grants to fund the expansion of America's broadband network to help better serve rural areas and urban communities.

Government Giveth and Taketh Away.  [President Barack Obama] now is promising to "spend our way out of this recession." ... It is estimated that the president's eruption of generosity will cost an additional $170 billion, perhaps more.  He has made this promise despite the fact that fear is spreading throughout the country that our government deficits are unsustainable.  The so-called Independents have forsaken him owing to their fear that he is bankrupting the country.

Dr. Dean's Admitted Socialism.  On Sunday's "Face The Nation" on CBS, Howard Dean, doctor, former Vermont Governor, former head of the DNC, stated that the Veterans Administration's health care system is, in fact, a socialist system.  Yes, he said that.

Taking the National Debt Seriously.  If you think those town hall meetings over health care were fierce, wait until Americans come to understand the threat to our national financial survival posed by the interest on the government's credit card. ... It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable.  The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill.

Obama Will Spend More on Welfare in the Next Year Than Bush Spent on Entire Iraq War.  As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama's proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush's war spending by more than $260 billion.

U.S. Budget Deficit Hit Record $1.4 Trillion in 2009.  The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday [10/7/2009].

How Uncle Sam is killing your savings.  The government is spending trillions to keep interest rates down in order to support the economy and prop up housing prices, and those low rates have inflicted collateral damage on savers' incomes.

Dangerous deficit:  America's red ink hits a troubling mark.  The federal government's announcement that the deficit for the fiscal year that ended in September is $1.4 trillion, the highest since 1945, is very unwelcome news.

Coming Soon:  $500 for Every Newborn?  Imagine a world where every baby received a trust fund at birth.  It might sound like a fairy tale, but being born into money — or at least into a $500 savings account — could soon become reality for all children born in the United States.

The Editor says...
 (1) This sounds like alien bait to me.
(2) Indigent people do not need to be encouraged to reproduce.
(3) Hillary Clinton tried this idea already, except her idea was $5,000 per child.  [1] [2] [3]
(4) Obviously this is just another "trial balloon" being sent up by the White House to see which way the political wind is blowing.

Obama Administration to Increase 10-Year Deficit Estimate to $9 Trillion.  In a report next week, the Obama administration will increase its 10-year budget deficit projection to roughly $9 trillion, an increase of about $2 trillion from the previous projection, an official at the Office of Management and Budget told FOX News.  The 2010-2019 cumulative deficit projection replaces the administration's previous estimate of $7.108 trillion.

The Taking of America.  [Under President Obama,] Americans have been saddled with more spending and a greater level of debt than all previous 43 Presidents combined.  There is no way these trillions of dollars can ever be paid back and Obama knows it.  He also knows or at least thinks that most Americans are so stupid they will roll over for all of this and just let it happen.  He's wrong.

Obama's Red-Ink Ocean.  They call this restraint?  President Obama yesterday proposed cutting $17 billion from the federal budget — barely one half of 1 percent.  All while spending $3.4 trillion.  Pain?  Restraint?  It's more like party time, we'd say.

Responding to the Obama State.  By now almost everyone agrees the numbers are staggering.  Since Barack Obama took his oath of office around 11 weeks ago, he has proposed a $3.6 trillion budget, which will create a deficit this year of almost $1.8 trillion.  This amounts to 12.3 percent of the GDP, up from 3.2 percent in 2008 and 1.2 percent in 2007.  The President's budget was submitted in conjunction with a $410 billion omnibus spending bill, complete with some 8,500 earmarks.  This legislation, in turn, came in the aftermath of a $787 billion stimulus package.

Printing Money — and Its Price.  It may seem perverse that in this new era of reckoning — with consumers finally tapped out, government coffers lean and banks paralyzed by fear — many economists have concluded that the appropriate medicine is a fresh dose of the very course that delivered the disarray:  Spend without limit.  Print money today, fret about the consequences tomorrow.  Otherwise, invite a loss of jobs and business failures that could cripple the nation for years.  Such thinking carries the moment as President-elect Barack Obama puts together plans to spend more than $700 billion on projects like building roads and classrooms to put people back to work.