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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 and silver. 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 are expressing 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.) Subsections on this page include: 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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. "Eh, I don't worry about the market's 'day to day gyrations.' " 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 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 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." Massive spending and the fast track to socialism Even before his inauguration, Obama was perceived as a big spender. 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. Traveling down the road to serfdom. The economic and social perils of centralized, top-down, big-government intrusion are as well established as it is possible for a public policy to be. We know they lead to lower growth, dependency, and the atrophy of entrepreneurial will. We know this because we have seen it happen again and again for more than a century. And yet, here we are in 2009 poised to travel down that gruesome road to serfdom once more. Slickness With a Straight Face. Clearly the Obama administration has not brought comfort to the markets in its initial weeks in office. The President and his team have also failed to bring clarity or coherence. Their massive agenda is not only ambitious, bold, and expensive, it is contradictory. Take the President's new budget proposal, for instance. The Generational Theft Act of 2009. Barack Obama has dubbed his behemoth fiscal stimulus proposal the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." But if truth in advertising were required of White House plans, only one title would fit the trillion-dollar-plus-and-growing bill: The Generational Theft Act of 2009. President-elect Obama was at his most candid when he told the country Tuesday [1/6/2009] that we face massive deficits for the foreseeable future. "Potentially we've got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come," he said, "even with the economic recovery that we are working on." Obama team ponders how best to waste $1 trillion. You can appreciate the dilemma of Obama's Kenyesians. How best do we waste $1 trillion in next year's "stimulus package?" Do we dress it up in spiffy new language and spend it on creating grids for solar and wind power? Or do we just throw it at traditional infrastructure projects like roads and bridges? Obama stimulus could reach $1 trillion: report. President-elect Barack Obama's team is considering a plan to boost the recession-hit U.S. economy that could be far larger than previous estimates and might reach $1 trillion over two years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday [12/13/2008]. Stimulus: The stuff Obama would build. America may soon get a whole lot of new stuff. As part of a new, massive spending plan designed to jumpstart the economy, there's talk of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on new roads, bridges, trains, schools, power plants, transmission lines and energy-efficient homes. Obama's Job-Creation Program Flunks Basic Math. There are currently about 10 million unemployed workers in the U.S. "If we write a check for $75,000 to each of the unemployed, we won't have anyone 'unemployed,'" said former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. The recipients may not be working in the traditional sense of going to the office each day, but the government can provide for their needs without anyone having to lift a finger. 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. Let's Hope Obama Doesn't Keep His Promises. Put these policy blunders next to other of his objectives — higher minimum wages, requiring companies to pay benefits they can't afford, excessive regulation, the establishment of new entitlements as part of an unaffordable welfare state, higher prices because of higher corporate taxes, the further devaluing of stocks and savings with boosted capital gains taxes — and what you will get is economic deterioration. So the bet you should have with Obama-trusting friends and neighbors is that, to the extent that he fulfills his campaign pledges, the economy will be much, much worse in virtually all categories by the end of his second year as president. The Obama Spendorama: Obama claims to want to "balance the budget and stop spending the Social Security Surplus." Combining that laudable goal with Obama's massive new spending would cause the tax bills of the average taxpayer earning $62,000 to rise $5,300, or 61%. For taxpayers earning $104,000, the increase would be over $12,000, or 74%, and for the top 1%, earning over $365,000, "their income tax bill rise by an astounding $93,500 (132%)!" Obama hosting pricey party in a dicey economy. Unemployment is up. The stock market is down. Let's party. The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun. Don't Know Much About Economics. Barack Obama is an awfully good politician but not much of an economist. His model for lifting America out of its economic slump is President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Obama's New Deal is Bad for America. President-elect Barack Obama is proposing a staggering $500 to $750 billion federal government spending spree when he takes office to "fix the economy." He is promising to add or save 2.5 million jobs by 2011 with this FDR-style monstrosity. ... Obama is not even the president yet, and he is already setting himself up for failure by setting the bar on jobs and economic recovery extremely high. Obama-Economics. It's no secret that Obama wants to spread the wealth around. However, he is neither a Socialist nor a Communist. Why? Because both of these economic theories are based on people working. Also, having such things as welfare, free public housing, and free health care — and making others work to provide them — isn't socialism or communism. It's Obamaeconomics. Obama Considers Major Expansion in Jobless Aid. President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are considering major expansions of government-assisted health care insurance and unemployment compensation as they begin intensive work this week on a two-year economic recovery package. One proposal, as described by Democratic advisers, would extend unemployment compensation to part-time workers, an idea that Congressional Republicans have blocked in the past. Obama's Team Rankles the Right. Conservatives fear that some of these Obama transition advisers are too far left on the political spectrum and are a sign of radical policies to come. "It is disturbing," said Roger Clegg, a conservative opponent of Lee's appointment who is now watching the Obama advisers at the Justice Department. "The transition team as described to me was made up of nothing but people on the far left. Obama's End Run around Congress. Candidate Barack Obama promised "change we can believe in," but he never hinted that this change would all but circumvent Congress to impose on America the most dramatic liberal social transformation since the New Deal. While promising to lead, he did not suggest that he would create a kind of "imperial presidency" that would horrify the Founding Fathers. Based on their own direct experience with a sovereign, they were rightly concerned with any one man having too much power. This is the kind of power that Obama is now reaching for, following the same kind of "stealth strategy" that helped get him elected. The dangers of Obama's public-works juggernaut. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to jolt the American economy out of its depressionary spiral with the mother of all fiscal stimuli. While Mr. Obama seems to have little choice in this policy matter, his desperate gambit has a high probability of failure — and may make the recession worse. Don't believe the Washington chorus: We can't spend our way to economic recovery. Though politically unpalatable, the wiser approach would be to let economic nature take its course. Memo To Obama: Cut Taxes For All. President-elect Obama is letting his outline for economic recovery dribble out into the media ever so slowly. But from what we've seen, the plan seems less like stimulus and more like redistribution. Obama eyes revenues via green policy, taxing rich. President Barack Obama is moving to raise new revenues and curb a massive deficit through two key channels under his maiden budget plan: a green energy scheme, and taxes on the richest Americans. The 10-year plan unveiled Thursday forecast revenues to dip to 2.186 trillion dollars in fiscal year ending September before more than doubling to 4.446 trillion dollars in 2019 as an enormous trillion dollar budget deficit thins out. GOP Attacks Climate Plan as Too Costly. Despite the Obama administration's claim that its budget wouldn't raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year, "the budget before us assumes large amounts of money" from the climate-change legislation, Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said at a hearing Tuesday [3/3/2009]. "And that means higher prices for Americans for food, for gas, for electricity, and in a state like Michigan for home heating — pretty much anything that they buy." How Obama's Soak-The-Rich Plan Will End Up Hurting Middle Class. President Obama has claimed that his budget goes after the rich who supposedly will pay the cost of his spending extravaganza. But it is already apparent that the rest of us will pay plenty. Presidential Bait-and-Switch. Mr. Obama pledged "no tax hikes on any families earning less than a quarter million dollars." What he didn't draw attention to was $600 billion in higher energy taxes he wants to impose through a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. These taxes will hit everyone who drives, flips a light switch, or buys anything manufactured, grown or shipped. Aiding the Bottom 10%: A Recipe for Economic Decline. [Scroll down] The Obama administration plans to spend $275 billion in order to aid homebuyers who borrowed irrationally in order to buy that which they couldn't afford. ... It's well known at this point that subsidization of mistaken investment insures more of the same, and in shielding the profligate from failure, the government shields them from lessons that will help them not to fail in the future. Failure is an excellent teacher, but those most in need of instruction will not be taught if the allegedly soft view of the housing problem prevails. What's Free Enterprise? Don't Ask Us! Since the economy slipped into a recession last year, Americans have seen leaders of both parties push unprecedented policies in response to the downturn, including federal bailouts of banks, automakers and mortgage holders. One after another, proposals have been advanced that have the potential to significantly curtail free enterprise in this country, giving government a far more intrusive role in our economy than ever before. In $3.6 Trillion Budget, Obama Signals Broad Shift in Priorities. President Obama delivered to Congress yesterday a $3.6 trillion spending plan that would finance vast new investments in health care, energy independence and education by raising taxes on the oil and gas industry, hedge fund managers, multinational corporations and nearly 3 million of the nation's top earners. Nation of sheep. "Socialism," tightly defined, is outright government ownership. It is not, strictly speaking, socialistic to propose that government take over health care policy, redistribute income, prod the automobile industry to make particular kinds of products, and impose a carbon cap-and-trade regime to combat a problem — global warming — that few voters seem to worry about. What, then, do we make of the budget that our fearless leader dropped on our heads the other day, with its announced deficit of $1.75 trillion? ... Our leader wants the country to be run by its national government. "Run by" isn't the same as "owned by." Requiem for a Republic. In his wildest dreams Ronald Reagan never thought that a president of a United States, now in the throes of a serious economic crisis, would adopt a solution to the problems of our economy that would not only worsen the situation, but set in motion the beginning of a transition of the government of the United States from a Constitutional Republic into a coercive quasi-Marxist regime where Washington is the master of our people instead of their servant. A socialist's America. It is finally beginning to dawn on conservatives who underestimated his ideological tendencies, and even on much of a general public that doesn't usually think in ideological terms, that Barack Obama has big plans. And not just plans for putting the economy back on track, either. The first African American president might be the most radical president in American history. Within this context, the economic crisis is simply the necessary pretext for sweeping changes designed to transform America in the Swedish or French image. The Community Organizer-in-Chief. I finally figured this out. Barack Obama is the Community Organizer-in-Chief. He is taking the inequities, the slights, the unfairness, the spread between wealth and poverty, the choices the rich have but which the poor do not ... and he wants to fix that. For everyone. Obama: Bush Made Me Do It. Obama claims to have inherited socialist policies from President Bush. Maybe so. Bush (and a Democrat controlled congress) was responsible for the first bailout bill. But Obama cannot blame the second bailout bill on Bush. Obama's trillion-dollar pork laden stimulus bill is not "entirely consistent with free-market principles." Not even close. To the extent President Obama is taking the country further down the road to socialism, he needs to be held accountable for his actions. Socialist? Moi? President Obama is quite touchy about being referred to as a "socialist." After appearing dismissive of a New York Times reporter's question about whether he was a socialist, he took the unusual step of placing a post-interview call to the Old Gray Lady to clarify his remarks, the Washington Times reports. "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question," said the new Oval Office inhabitant who remarked during the campaign that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." The Editor says... Wow. The reporter must have hit a nerve. Maybe he was a little too close to the truth. Obama Takes On Market-Based Government. Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting. ... The new system was supposed to save money; it almost certainly hasn't. It was supposed to deliver quality; instead we witnessed the most spectacular government failures in years. The Obama Rosetta Stone: [Scroll down slowly] The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth — no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit. ... The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. Of course he's a socialist. Newsweek tells us we're all socialists now. That's an obvious lie, because the Newsweek socialists like Evan Thomas suffer from regular nightmares that American conservatives will find another Ronald Reagan. But that raised the question of socialism. Obama danced away from it, of course, when a NYT reporter actually asked him. Whoooo me? Well, anybody who reads the New Media knows the answer already; and anybody who doesn't know, doesn't want to know. The Schmoo is Alive and Well and Living in the White House. It's difficult to see much difference between the denizens of Dogpatch, the cargo cultists and Obama's disciples, all of whom seem to believe they're entitled to health care, day care, food stamps, college tuition, abortions, a house, a car, a plasma TV and collagen-enhanced lips. It isn't enough that Obama is a messiah for the non-religious and the number one fantasy sex symbol for America's women and Chris Matthews, he's also Santa Claus. When I see what Obama and his elves, Pelosi and Reid, are doing to America, spending money like a teenager who's stumbled upon Paris Hilton's Platinum Card, it makes me fear that, thanks to the last election, America has done to itself what no foreign invader could have hoped to accomplish. Obama's Relentless War on the American Dream. It's probably poor form to piggyback onto another columnist's work, but Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger's disturbing discoveries about President Barack Obama's budget summary justify an exception. Those not blinded by the Obama cult fog have produced abundant evidence of Obama's grudge against capitalism, but Henninger's revelations are hard to top. Despite Obama's later denials, he was most serious when he cavalierly told Joe the Plumber he wanted to "spread the wealth around." We've seen it born out in his policies so far and in the promises of those to come. Obama's Class War Budget vs. Your Income: President Obama met this week with the chairmen of the congressional budget committees and called for a bipartisan effort to "pass a budget that puts this nation on the road to lasting prosperity." But the fiscal 2010 budget he presented is a startling call to political class war. It depicts America as populated by an aggrieved middle class exploited by an upper class luxuriating in ill-gotten gains. Time to Stop the Bailout Stampede. It's becoming increasingly clear that both the elected and appointed Democratic leaders at the helm of the world's largest financial ship of state, responsible for navigating us out of a spiraling economic crisis, have forfeited the common sense and commitment to the principles of a free market — the most basic of which is the freedom of business to succeed and the freedom to fail — which have formed America's economic compass for over two hundred years. Under President Obama, Big Government is Back. Three decades after Ronald Reagan declared that federal activism wasn't the answer to America's problems, big government is back. The evidence is everywhere. There's President Obama's $787 billion program to stimulate the economy, including massive investments in roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects. There's his $275 billion plan to prevent home foreclosures, along with his $634 billion, 10-year proposal to improve healthcare. Stimulating Ourselves to Death. The massive cost of the stimulus doubled even before any legislation was written, much less approved. Originally tagged at $400 billion, the proposal quickly jumped to $825 billion, and latest estimates at press time have it costing north of $1 trillion. ... Given the size, will the stimulus work as advertised? Will the goods and services — be they concrete for new highway projects or groceries for hungry families — pump up flagging demand and boost stalled economic activity? If so, it will be the first time in modern recorded history. Is Socialism Overtaking Capitalism in the Way Schumpeter Foresaw? In his 1942 book, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy," Joseph Schumpeter asked the essential question: "Can capitalism survive?" His unsettling answer was, "No. I do not think it can." Schumpeter's words were in no way meant to denigrate capitalism. Instead, he felt "its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it." History in many ways proved his views prophetic. Card Check: Good for Unions, Bad for America. The Obama administration's budget is full of proposals that threaten to weaken our staggering economy. Higher taxes on high earners and reduced deductions for their charitable contributions and mortgage interests. A cap-and-trade system that will impose higher costs on everyone who uses electricity. A national health insurance program that will take $600 billion or so out of the private-sector economy. But the most grievous threat to future prosperity may be off-budget — the inaptly named Employee Free Choice Act. More about the Employee Free Choice Act. Gregg: 'This country will go bankrupt'. Even though he was almost a member of the new Obama administration, New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg Sunday slammed President Obama's approach to handling the country's fiscal outlook. Grassley: Obama budget step toward 'socialism'. President Obama's budget of tax hikes to pay for massive new spending programs is a "trend toward socialism" that will stifle a creative free market, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee said in an interview Monday [3/23/2009]. Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican, also criticized the new president for going back on campaign promises to run an open and transparent government, citing Mr. Obama's use of a presidential "signing statement" on the recent stimulus law unilaterally cutting back protections for federal whistleblowers. Obama Sticker Shock. President Obama's 2010 budget looks more astounding by the day, especially when someone other than the White House budget office is analyzing it. The latest case of epic sticker shock came Friday when the Congressional Budget Office published its assessment, which found that the proposals would increase the federal deficit by $2.3 trillion more over 10 years than the White House had claimed. US lawmaker: Obama budget makes US worse than Cuba. President Barack Obama's 3.55-trillion-dollar budget plan will leave the United States with a worse budget deficit than Cuba, a leading Republican critic warned Tuesday. "This creates for us a higher deficit than Cuba's. This is not the kind of position we want to put the United States in," Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters. Other Republican critics of Obama's spending policies, including his nearly 800-billion-dollar economic stimulus package, have variously warned that he risks turning the country into Argentina, France, Germany, or Zimbabwe. The 1966 Election's Warning to Obama. It was a historic tidal wave of rejection. Symbolized by, of all things, housewives boycotting supermarkets. And the active participation of seven future presidents of the United States. The 1966 "off year" or congressional elections should also serve as a political warning to the Obama White House as it pursues its strategy of pumping trillions of taxpayer dollars into the economy. Communicating Obama's Fiscal Disaster. President Bush, yes, spent money like a drunken sailor, and left the nation with a record $400-billion deficit. President Obama, however, is spending far more money than Bush, with a record $1.8-trillion deficit projected for his first year. Period. Repeat that statement. Repeat it to those who don't understand, or don't wish to understand. Repeat it until you're blue in the face. Make the person on the receiving end recite the numbers: $400 billion vs. $1.8 trillion. Watching the Trillions Pile Up. With another $2 trillion in federal interventionism announced within the last week alone, the price tag for America's economic "recovery" continues to soar to stratospheric, scarcely-comprehensible heights. First we had hundreds of billions for troubled — now "toxic" — assets. Then we had President Barack Obama's $787 billion bureaucratic bailout — an unprecedented expansion of programmatic, status quo spending that will create the "Mother of All Annualizations" for dozens of cash-strapped state governments that even now still refuse to live within their means. There's trouble in Toyland. The economy is in free fall, with Congress on the way to approving a budget approaching $4 trillion, just when we were getting accustomed to thinking in terms of billions, not mere millions. Some of us still stop to pick up a penny on the sidewalk, but who in Congress would stoop to pick up a mere million dollars? If You Like California's Sorry State of Affairs, You're Gonna Love Obama's Vision for America. Some of President Obama's critics say he wants to turn America toward European-style socialism but maybe he'll settle for imitating California. California, once known for its robust capitalism, growth and sunny optimism (after all, it's the state that brought us Ronald Reagan), has become a pitiful giant, pinned down by the same kind of big government that Obama envisions for the country. Obama budget breaks the bank. House and Senate Democratic leaders are looking to pass the Obama administration's $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2010 by the end of next week, but the lawmakers under them should take into account the shocking deficit impact and fight to reign in the proposal. We're not holding our breath that they will do so, despite the immense deficit predictions announced Friday [3/20/2009] by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Taking Debt To The Next Frontier. In his budget message, the president says "the time has come to usher in a new era of responsibility." But a new report shows the only thing his budget delivers is an unprecedented era of deficits and debt. Little Dictators. Rep. Barney Frank, the Democrat who sits atop Congress' efforts to deal with the financial crisis, has enough chutzpah for 100 politicians — which is saying a lot. In comments before testimony from both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed chief Ben Bernanke Tuesday [3/24/2009], Frank said he wants to regulate pay on Wall Street — even for companies that aren't getting bailouts. Not Yet Ready for a Welfare State. Roadblocks. That's what Barack Obama has been encountering on the audacious path toward a European-style welfare state he has set out in his budget and other proposals. He continues to insist that America cannot enjoy real prosperity again without higher taxes on high earners, a government health insurance program, a cap-and-trade program that amounts to a tax on energy and the effective abolition of secret ballots in unionization elections. The fact that there are large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress made it seem that the path was open. But roadblocks have started to appear. Budget Smoke and Mirrors: Where's the Outrage? There has doubtlessly been great anxiety about the economy, but I think even greater anxiety exists over what President Barack Obama is doing and planning to do to this country. We've always had economic downturns, and we've always recovered, but we've never deliberately planned to spend ourselves into bankruptcy, from which we may not be able to recover. True, our smorgasbord of entitlements has threatened our long-term solvency for some time ... But Obama takes profligate spending to entirely new levels while pretending to be a fiscal hawk. Geithner: Markets won't solve crisis. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said government action, not the markets, will solve the banking crisis in offering a fierce defense on Sunday of the Obama administration's efforts to fix the financial sector. The Manchurian Candidate starts war on business. Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a Manchurian Candidate to destroy the US economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue? He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action. Communicating the Financial Disaster. How do we communicate the depths of the nation's fiscal depravity? How do we simply — very, very simply — explain the mindboggling generational debt being produced right now by President Obama and the Democratic Congress? Communicating this is crucial because Obama and the Congress, along with their supporters and media, are trying to blame this calamity on George W. Bush. Logically, of course, that is impossible. Politically, it will likely be accomplished — unless we can communicate the reality. Conquered From Within. As the media obsess about Obama on the Leno show and Michelle's new White House garden, the real story last week went virtually unnoticed. Namely, the Fed announcement that it will be pumping another trillion bucks into the economy. That's one trillion dollars it will manufacture out of thin air. The Europeanization of America: [Scroll down] But here we are 20 minutes in, and full-scale Europeanization is already under way: Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized college education, Europeanized climate-change policy... Obama's pseudo-SOTU speech was America's first State of the European Union address, in which the president deftly yoked the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance, entrepreneurial energy and the can-do spirit like joining the vast army of robotic extras droning in unison, "The government needs to do more for me..." A 'Truly Breathtaking' Departure. Team Obama fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner Sunday afternoon [3/29/2009], just a short time after Treasury man Tim Geithner told the television talk shows that some banks will need large amounts of new TARP-money government assistance — even though the bankers don't want it. Does this smack of big-time government planning and industrial policy? Another lurch to the left for economic policy? Toxic Omnibus Anti-Energy, Anti-Civil Liberties Stew. Like its cousin, the $410 billion Omnibus spending bill that President Obama earlier signed into law, the Omnibus lands bill contains several bills from previous sessions of Congress wrapped into one. The final legislative package — which passed the House last week after clearing the Senate the previous week — actually contains a whopping 170 different bills, according to CNSNews.com. ... And as with the AIG bailout, there will be plenty of regrets for this big rush job's lack of initial scrutiny. The GOP's Alternative Budget: We will first consider President Barack Obama's plan. To be clear, this is no ordinary budget. In a nutshell, the president and Democratic leaders in Congress are attempting to bring about the third and final great wave of progressivism, building on top of the New Deal and the Great Society. So America is placed in a special moment in our history — brought about by the deep recession, Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda, and the pending fiscal tidal-wave of red ink brought forward by the looming insolvency of our entitlement programs. If this agenda comes to pass, it will mark this period in history as the moment America turned European. No New Deal II. The data show a significant difference between the economic situation today and that of the Great Depression. Additionally, one must keep in mind that, given the social support measures and automatic counter-cyclical "stabilizers" built in to government spending today (e.g., welfare, unemployment benefits, public pensions, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and numerous other social assistance measures), it is virtually impossible that an economy could shrink and human suffering and dislocation could be experienced to the same degree as during the Great Depression. Dems Manipulating Senate Rules Against Republicans. A procedure known as "reconciliation" has previously been used to push budget legislation through the Senate with a majority — not supermajority — vote. But in advocating for the procedure to be used on cap-and-trade legislation and health care instead of just budget bills, Democrats are throwing out any semblance of bipartisanship and thumbing their noses at the checks-and-balances system that is the crown jewel of the American system. Is This the End of Capitalism? Capitalism didn't tank the U.S. economy. Overbuilt housing did. Overbuilt housing tanked the economies of the U.K. and Ireland and Spain. If little else, we've learned that artificially cheap housing sets loose limitless moral hazard. Virtually every white-shoe financial institution in the world, plus the Russians, stuffed their balance sheets with securities carved out of the dreams of real-estate developers. Obama's $163,000 Tax Bomb. Reconciliation was created by Congress in the mid-1970s to enforce deficit reduction, the opposite of what the president and his party are aiming for. The immense increase in nondefense spending and taxes, and the tripling of the national debt in Mr. Obama's budget, have been the subject of considerable scrutiny since it was announced. Obama's Ultimate Agenda: [Scroll down slowly] His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax. Even Drunken Sailors Have a Credit Limit. President Barack Obama has something that a drunken sailor lacked: a printing press that prints government cash and credit, not to mention the power to tax when he runs a bit low. Generational theft is alive and well in America, and, according to my calculations, the Obama spending spree has cost the taxpayers, their children and grandchildren a whopping $4.27 trillion in spending and $2.4 trillion in new taxes to date. Banana republic budgeting should shame Obama, Congress. It was surely an act of hubris for President Obama to ask Congress to approve a $3.6 trillion federal budget for 2010 that runs a trillion-dollars worth of red ink its first year and then projects half-trillion deficits every year thereafter for a decade. Congress has never before been asked to consider spending of such magnitude, not even during wartime. Obama: The Charming Menace to Peace and Prosperity. Didn't the President, with a straight face, promise to reduce the deficit by half in five years? The Congressional Budget Office forecasts government spending over the next 10 years will quadruple the annual deficit of Bush's presidency. The CBO expects the nation's debt to double in five years and triple in 10. The Universal Pre-K Scam: Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten — at taxpayer expense. It's part of President Obama's massive spending plans. ... It's a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through. It's easy to buy cars with someone else's money. Government to buy 17,600 U.S. cars. President Barack Obama, saying he was committed to a strong U.S. auto industry, announced on Thursday [4/9/2009] the government would buy 17,600 new fuel-efficient vehicles from ailing American automakers by June 1. America's Red Sea. America is diving into a Marianas Trench of red ink. There is barely a digit of black anywhere on the balance sheet, and spendthrift lawmakers are closing off numerous sources of positive revenue. Dr. Obama. Dr. Obama ordered the full dose of $700B worth of antibiotics plus the $150B worth of stimulants that came with them. But that wasn't enough for Dr. Obama. He ordered $787B worth of more stimulants and $410B of surgery on top of that, just for starters. His chief surgeon, Dr. Geithner, said he might need another $500B or $1000B. Once the immediate surgery was finished, Dr. Obama would put you in his chronic care facility, administering multi-trillion dollar procedures for at least the next 10 years. Biden, Emanuel, Clinton Garner 'Big Spender' Label. In fact, all the members of the last Congress who now are part of the Obama administration received failing grades for "taxpayer friendliness" — with the exception of Obama himself, who didn't cast enough votes to qualify. Presto: Another $750 Billion. The U.S. and Europe were widely expected to clash at the G-20 summit in London last month over how to address the global financial crisis. Voila, in just two days the problem was solved with a joint promise to increase International Monetary Fund resources by $750 billion to a total of $1 trillion. The U.S. portion of this new commitment is more than $140 billion. Yet Congress has debated neither the amount nor the proposed use of the funds. Instead, President Obama and his fellow leaders simply waved their hands, like a Star Trek captain, and said make it so. Obama's Soft Polls: Most polls currently have President Obama's "approval ratings" around 60%. That is not surprising, and likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He's likeable. ... But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all, Candidate Obama ran on "change we can believe in," not "revolution you must pay for." New Third Rail Is Rationing Of Health Care. In the service of his ultimate mission — the leveling of social inequalities — President Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two. Problem is, the math doesn't add up. A Damaging First 100 Days. President Obama's first 100 days are nearly over and his supporters are already suggesting that he is the greatest president of all time. Hmm. Of course, only history will tell. But my single-greatest concern remains the fact that Mr. Obama is moving the country away from democratic free-market capitalism and toward a big-government, command-and-control vision of our nation's economy. What we are witnessing is a triumph of government bureaucrats over entrepreneurs, investors, and small businesses. Barack Obama's audacity of hype crumbles. On monetary policy, Obama has remained a bystander to the efforts of Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. Having reached close to zero interest rates in December, Bernanke announced the Fed would print money in an attempt to bring down real interest rates. Obama's First 100 Days. On domestic policy he's as liberal as McCain's supporters (and advisers) expected. With his trillions of dollars of spending, micromanagement of private industry, calls for tax hikes, and attempts to nationalize health care, Obama is shaping up as the most left-wing president since Lyndon Johnson. He makes Franklin Roosevelt look pretty conservative by contrast. Judging the First 100 Days. The President, with a gleeful seal of approval from his liberal allies in Congress, has already managed to bury future generations of Americans beneath a mountain of debt. ... In just 100 days, President Obama has laid the groundwork for the most intrusive federal overreach in the country's history, all funded with money we simply do not have. This agenda will not proceed uncontested. The 100-Day Assault on America. Aided by an eagerly compliant Democratic-controlled Congress, a sycophantic media, and a bunch of squishy Republicans, President Obama has taken the country on a radical, mind-boggling leap into collectivism. ... Obama promises to use taxpayer money to rescue "responsible homeowners" — whatever that means — from foreclosure, thus artificially propping up prices that shut out renters who would love to buy now-much-cheaper houses. Obama proposes spending billions (or trillions?) more on "creating or saving" — whatever that means — 4 million, 3.5 million or 2.5 million jobs. Pick a number. Leftward Lurch Has Wiped Out Reagan's Gain. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's popularity and policies moved American politics firmly to the right. In only 100 days, Barack Obama's politics and policies have shifted America way to the left. The president is seeking to change the whole relationship between the government and the free-enterprise private sector. He is steering the country away from democratic capitalism and toward his big-government, command-and-control vision. We are witnessing a triumph of government bureaucrats over entrepreneurs, investors and small businesses. Get ready for Obama's coming hyperinflation. With an unprecedented deficit that's approaching $2 trillion, this budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic. For those too young to remember, that was the period in Germany in the years between the two world wars when people needed wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread. The same thing has happened in Zimbabwe in the last few years. Obama disowns deficit he helped shape. "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One. It actually was him (sic) — and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years — who shaped a budget so out of balance. Reflections: On February 10, the morning after the crucial Senate vote on the $838 billion kitchen-sink spending bill, the Washington Post bannered, "New Bailout May Top $1.5 Trillion." Libertarians barely had time to contemplate having failed to stop the largest spending bill in history before they were hit with another one, this time to funnel money to banks and other lenders. And this one (which other newspapers estimated at as much as $2.5 trillion, but what's another trillion here or there?) doesn't even require congressional approval — much like last fall's Monday-morning announcements of what Czar Henry Paulson had done over the weekend. Obama's Path to a Lost Decade. History shows us quite clearly that a government cannot spend its way out of an economic downturn. It didn't work in Japan in the 1990s, when the ten stimulus packages implemented over an eight year period failed to prevent the "lost decade." Nor did it work during our own Great Depression, when FDR's own Treasury Secretary lamented the fact that massive spending had brought them little in the way of increased employment and much in the way of debt. Yet spending our way out of this situation is precisely what the President is attempting to do, and the nearly $800 billion stimulus package is merely the tip of the iceberg. The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism. There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture. Barack Obama cracks down on tax havens and loopholes. In what will be characterised by some as yet another example of the anti-capitalist policies being promoted by the US since he took office in January, President Obama is taking on big business head-on in what is seen as the biggest change to US corporation tax laws since 1986. The Day the American Dream Dies. With little fanfare, the Government Accountability Office released a document last week that points to the day when the American dream dies and is buried beneath a middle-class welfare state. You can see death coming for the American dream as surely as you can see cirrhosis coming for a drunk. We are bringing it upon ourselves — although not all Americans deserve what is going to happen. Memo to Capitalists: Be Very Afraid. As long as people have different worldviews, there will be vigorous debates about the effectiveness, fairness and morality of capitalism compared with other economic systems. But common sense supports history's empirical evidence in validating the generalized notion that robust economic production will accompany political and economic liberty rather than command and control systems. People will produce more when they are allowed to retain more of the fruits of their labor. You simply cannot expand the economic pie by separating rewards from efforts. ... Yet the current administration and its wholly owned congressional partners have embarked on a course to destroy capitalism from every imaginable front. Chump Change. After hearing the Democratic Party lay into President Bush last year for his "profligacy," "record spending" and "soaring deficits," we can't be blamed for expecting something else from the party now in power. Instead, we get a 19% rise in domestic spending in 2010 from 2008 (2009 has been wildly inflated by stimulus spending), coupled with $17 billion in bogus "cuts" and record amounts of pork-barrel spending. White House: Budget deficit to top $1.8 trillion. US red ink to top $1.8 trillion, 4 times record; Government borrows 46 cents for every dollar spent. Obama's eight bogus budget arguments. Assertion No. 1: "I pledged to cut the deficit in half" by 2013. Fact: The president doesn't mention that the deficit has quadrupled this year. Merely cutting it in half from that bloated level would still leave budget deficits twice as high as under President Bush. This is like eating a 5,000 calorie meal, and then pledging to halve your calories from that level. From TARP to Obama to Command-and-Control. Speaking near Albuquerque, New Mexico, at a town-hall meeting on Thursday [5/14/2009], Pres. Obama said the federal debt load is unsustainable and warned of skyrocketing interest rates. He neglected to say that his massive spending-and-borrowing policies are directly causing this problem. Now, I have a thought. Stop this massive spending and borrowing. Obama Offers Security at the Expense of Liberty. The Obama administration is assiduous in the protection of this administrative class. It offers $6,800,000,000 to the state of California on one hand, and then threatens to take it back because the state cut the pay of public employee union members by $74,000,000. The government gives JPMorgan Chase $25,000,000,000, and then insists that it give up in the Chrysler deal what it would ordinarily receive in bankruptcy proceedings and turn it over to fund the health care benefits of United Auto Worker retirees. Our Government is Set to Explode. Democrats in Congress, with the support of the Obama administration, are set to upend a policy which for the past 50 years has saved taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, but cut into the ranks of unionized labor. They are preparing to in-source to the federal government thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of jobs formerly contacted out to private companies. Obama's Risky Debt. Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he's labeled "irresponsible"? Well, apparently much more than the massive amounts envisioned by President Obama. The final version of his 2010 budget, released last week, is a case study in political expediency and economic gambling. Obama's Even Riskier Debt. By far the biggest holder of federal treasury bonds is the United States Government itself ($4.2 trillion worth, as compared to $2.7 trillion held by foreigners). Most of this debt is owned by various trust funds, principally the Social Security Trust Fund. That makes the total national debt $10.5 trillion, not $6.3 trillion, 73 percent of GDP, not 40 percent. The big problem here is that many of these trust funds will have to start dipping into their stockpiles of treasuries in order to pay their obligations in the near future. Medicare is already doing so. Massive Expansion Of U.S. Government Gives Socialism A Shot In The Arm. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got a lot of things right, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead. Liberals: The Enemy Within. When Bush ran up the national debt, he got clobbered by Republicans and Democrats, alike. But when, in just three short months, Obama tripled the deficit, nary a discouraging word did we hear from a single liberal. Massive inflation looms over all of us, but Democrats just keep smiling and giving each other high-fives while Obama cranks out funny money like a counterfeiter on speed. Statism the only thing being stimulated. The stimulus will do nothing for the economy, but it will dramatically advance the cause of statism (as Mark Levin rightly calls it). Last week's vote in California is a snapshot of where this leads: The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket. So what if the formerly Golden State goes belly-up? They'll pass the buck to Washington, and those of us in nonprofligate jurisdictions will get stuck with the tab. As Goes California, So Goes The Nation. If you are curious what Barack Obama's economic policies will do to our nation's economy, take a look at California and the economic collapse the once prosperous state faces. California's economic downfall is the result of liberal policies, policies not unlike what Obama is proposing for our great nation. California is an image of what is sure to come for America, should the federal government continue down the road of chasing Obama's proposed economic ruin. When will Barack Obama stop fudging it? The economy remains the President's overriding problem. Just how little he has got to grips with it was shown at his first cabinet meeting, held five weeks ago. He ordered colleagues to find a saving of $100 million in costs; but this was in the context of a total budget of $3.4 trillion. Senator Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans in the Senate, led the ridicule of this proposal, contending that Obamanomics meant the national debt, already at its highest ever level, would double in five years and triple in the next 10. Selective Sacrifice. Again and again President Obama has been asking all Americans to sacrifice during this season of economic hardship. But the president's call apparently does not extend to federal employees. At a time when the private sector is being ravaged by layoffs, pay cuts, and benefits loss, the federal government has embarked on a hiring spree. Even as the country's unemployment soars toward double digits, our government is handing out tens of thousands of jobs each month. Lessons of the Weimar Republic. Although not in exactly the same position as Weimar Germany, the United States now finds itself under the rule of its own charismatic leader and a Federal Reserve that together seem bent upon debauching our currency through inflation. By "priming the pump" in super Keynesian fashion, the Obama administration courts an economic disaster that could make Weimar Germany look fiscally sound. Obama and the Amazing Trillion Dollar Dreamcoat. Obama is amazing, a miracle worker in fact. So much so that he has decreed an end to arithmetic. No way can he spend a trillion here and a trillion there without it adding up. But the O administration is not very good at addition. Or subtraction. Geithner rejects charges US moving toward socialism. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dismissed as ridiculous charges that the administration of President Barack Obama was moving the United States toward socialism. In an interview with The Washington Post, Geithner said the administration "had to do exceptional things to help protect the American economy, help fix this crisis, fix this mess." Recall the Stimulus, Let the De-TARPing Begin, and Set the Fed Free. [Scroll down] When you talk to traders and economists, the whisper story is that Bernanke and the Fed are no longer truly independent of the Obama White House and Treasury. ... Already the Fed has created more than $1 trillion in new cash, and the M2 money supply is growing at its fastest pace in 25 years. This monetary explosion explains what's really driving the dollar down and Treasury rates up. It's not huge budget deficits, but the growing fear that a less-than-independent Fed will keep pushing new money into the financial system in order to fund Obama's liberal spending policies. A political pattern to stimulus tour. Since Congress passed President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus bill in February, administration officials have traveled to at least 66 events across the country to tout the massive spending program or hand out stimulus cash to grateful local officials. But a POLITICO examination of the travel reveals a distinctly political trend line: Top officials have hosted events predominantly in states that Obama won in 2008. What's more, the examination revealed that Obama officials all but avoided Southern states that Obama lost. Barack Obama to increase stimulus spending. Saying, "we're in a position to really accelerate," President Barack Obama announced Monday that he is ramping up stimulus spending exponentially in the next three months, allowing the administration to "save or create" 600,000 jobs — four times as many as during the first 100 days since he signed the bill. The spending plans include national parks, summer youth jobs, veterans' medical centers, police and teachers. Palin's 'Told Ya So'. Palin: Well, when you consider that the federal government is about eleven trillion dollars in debt, and we're borrowing more to spend more... it defies any sensible economic policy that any of us ever learned through college. It defies economy practices and principles that tell ya 'you gotta quit digging that hole when you are in that financial hole'. The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter. Remember the good old days of the Jimmy Carter presidency when the US saw the combination of high inflation and high unemployment? We are sowing the seeds for a return to those days of national malaise. Six Ways Democrats Are Hurting America. [#4] The Democrats have said "yes" to a stimulus package that doesn't stimulate anything: Including the interest, the cost for the stimulus is going to be a colossal 1.2 trillion dollars. However, as of May 22, only 37 billion dollars of that money had been spent. Meanwhile, according to the latest data, which is for April, personal consumption for American consumers dropped 0.1%. So, why are we going 1.2 trillion dollars deeper in debt to the Chinese again...? Obama's giant misfortune cookie. In one of today's richest ironies, America's fiscal health — such as it is — hinges on the generosity of the Chinese Communist Party. ... The Chinese have urged Washington to stop spending and printing so much money, lest inflation turn China's $800.5 billion in Treasuries into a giant misfortune cookie. Enviro-nazis Ultimate Solution. Like many Americans last November, I voted for change. I had hope. I no longer have hope since the president I voted for never mentioned a fraction of the agenda he now espouses. I did not vote to lower my standard of living, humble as it may be. Nor did I ask to jump into the economic abyss in order to "save" the planet. When the economic chickens of this agenda do come home to roost, many people will change their perception of the whole quasi-religious scam known as "climate change." Once you view the fall you're about to take, it's natural to turn around and take a good look at who is pushing you. I voted for change, not economic suicide. The Failure of Obamanomics. Barack Obama has fatally undermined our currency, our solvency, our financial stability and — ultimately — our economy, all to spend money that has had no economic effect! Is Obama a failure? Not by his lights. His goal was never to stimulate the economy. His goal was to expand government spending, and he used the recession as an excuse to do so. And, by this standard, he is a raging success. With the stimulus spending, the government proportion of gross domestic product will rise from about 35 percent to about 40 percent, and with health care "reform" it will go soaring into the mid-40s, bringing us to parity with Germany en route to France! He's Telling You To Be Thrifty? On Tuesday [6/9/2009] the President tried to reinstitute the concept of "Paygo" or pay as you go — if you spend a dollar then the Congress has to save a dollar. However, he exempted about 2.5 trillion dollars of his priorities, including a health care reform jumpstart. It's just too much. When I saw that, I broke out laughing. Here's the president who has spent about $12 trillion in his first few months in office, sqandering it on everything imaginable. Now he's telling us to be thrifty? Never Waste A Crisis — Manufacture One. [Scroll down slowly] Because the current government refuses to consider or enact any or all of [several] tried and true remedies, we must consider the undesirable possibility that its members actually want the "crisis" to continue, or perhaps get worse. If we consider that the political Left, which has seized control of the modern Democrat Party, has a rabid appetite for power, then things may appear to be falling into place. Let's not waste a good crisis by getting rid of it; instead let's milk it for all it's worth. Time to stop the flood of federal regulation. At a campaign event a year ago, then-senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama noted that with government debt soaring to $9 trillion (it's $11 trillion today), Americans were in a hole. He asked his audience, "the first thing you do when you're in a hole is what?" The answer: "Stop digging." But this is 2009 and that was 2008, so that hole is getting wider and deeper. The gathering storm on Social Security and Medicare. President Obama, aided by Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has launched the federal government on the biggest deficit spending spree in human history. The federal government will spend at least $3.6 trillion in 2010, with an estimated $1.8 trillion of it borrowed, mainly from overseas creditors like China. Four Integrity Tests for President Obama. Accepting a huge spending bill loaded with pork earmarks it starkly contradictory to what Obama promised during the campaign. During the campaign this is what candidate Obama said: "We need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure we're not spending money unwisely." He has talked repeatedly about fiscal responsibility and real change in politics. Talk is cheap. This spending bill is not. Not with over 9,000 earmarks totaling some $12 billion. Media's Mask Is Slipping As Deficits Surge. A calm Sunday breakfast might have been ruined after a glance at the Washington Post's front page on June 14. A chart below the fold explained that under Obama's federal spending proposals, the U.S. would be required to borrow $9 trillion during the next decade. That's $9,000,000,000,000. The Post compared that, in today's dollars, to the financial burden of World War II: $3.6 trillion. That's not all of Obama's spending plan. That's only the part that's in the red. ... Sadly, this Washington Post article notwithstanding, the news media aren't questioning the new health "reform" drive. They are enabling it. Barack And His Dad: A Kenyan Economy For The U.S.A.. [Scroll down] I also pointed-out last summer that communism, itself, is a part of Mr. Obama's heritage. Barack Hussein Obama Sr., the biological father of our President, was a bureaucrat in the communist government of Kenya back when the nation first declared its independence in the 1960's. ... President Obama has demonstrated that he is skillful at seizing, controlling, and redistributing other people's wealth. But mere wealth redistribution is not the way of the industrialized world. It is the Kenyan-styled path to the Third World, and the path to the world's 82nd largest GDP. Obama's Worst Role. So what exactly is wrong with Mr. Obama's plan? The short answer is that he is attempting to stimulate demand, rather than stimulating supply. To make things even worse, he also is taking actions that will depress supply. ... Stagflation and other terms that haven't been heard since the miserable Carter years now are voiced again in economic forecasts. Give me, give me! We as a nation have been moving closer and closer to this moment, baby step-by-baby step, stride-by-stride, and now we are at the leaping stage. Government has just taken over GM; ABC will present little more than an Obama infomercial from the White House itself on the administration's health care "plan" and the president is even seeking authority to take over other companies. All the steps along the way, an income tax, Social Security, government hiring quotas, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, government bailouts, government subsidies, government housing and more. Why I dumped Obama's party. Republicans offer our only hope in slowing the Obama "change" juggernaut before the America of unbridled optimism and opportunity goes the way of the buffalo. I don't want my great-grandchildren growing up in cradle-to-grave government care, where only the privileged few may afford a car, or own a home, or get non-rationed health care. ... Second, the popular myth that the Democratic Party is the party of tolerance and big-tent ideas is spectacularly false. A fiscal conservative such as myself is treated by Obamaniacs like a ringing cell phone in church. Watching How Hopenchange is Made: It seems clear that, if the public knew what is in this [Waxman-Markey] bill, and how much it may cost them, they would concur with this analysis: it is a "disaster." But the Democrats plan to ram it through without hearings or even public availability of the relevant text. The same legislative process that brought us trillion-dollar stimulus spending and trillion-dollar deficit budgets is about to replicate itself yet again. Why so fast? Aside from the obvious reasons, there is a need to make room for the next bill to be railroaded through on a fast track by a one-party Congress. What is going on with the Cap and Trade bill?. The bill is only available online at the House Rules Committee and is reported as "text of the bill to be introduced." Despite having a bill, H.R. 2454, that has been reported out of the Energy & Commerce Committee and discharged by eight other committees, there is now, suddenly, a new bill that is almost 300-pages longer -- but it's still being considered as H.R. 2454. Did someone mention Cap and Trade? Washington's Plot to Explode Your Taxes. Everyone in Washington knows the record Federal deficits and debt are out of control and can't continue. President Obama knows it. The ultraliberal Democrat Congressional leadership knows it. Rank and file Congressional Republicans and Democrats know it. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been openly saying so. Obama's economic policies, adopted by the Democrat-controlled Congress, call for total Federal borrowing of $3.5 trillion this year alone! Recovery When? How About If? I have long tired of the economists and investment gurus debating "when our economy recovers" and how to position your investments for "when America bounces back" and so on, as if it's a foregone conclusion. Haven't they heard? The America that always recovers is not in anymore. Any assumption of a recovery fails to consider the idea that we now have a government run by people who ignore American history and who are hell bent on changing America's future. ... We cannot be on the verge of any meaningful recovery because we are in a downward swirl of liberal policy consequences — and we have a government determined to correct this by getting more and more liberal. A Cancer In The Capitol Is Killing Us. There is a rapidly growing cancer in the nation's capitol, a disease called progressive socialism which comes from repeated exposure to Marxism and Communism. This disease will become fatal to the American Republic in just a few short years if not treated and defeated in the next two elections. It's not too late to save America, but it will be very soon if we don't act now. The government-funded $10 tomato. How could we end up with a $10 tomato? The prices of tomatoes, potatoes, breakfast cereal and other commodities are generally kept fairly low because consumers control what they buy. No matter what we do in our current system of shopping, we will not see a $10 tomato until Obamanomics causes hyperinflation and we begin using tomatoes as currency. However, there is one other way that we could see a $10 tomato. That is if we get government involved in the food industry. When did the lowbrows take over the culture? [Scroll down] Look at Obama's unbelievable spending spree. No sane and sensible taxpayer could possibly believe that spending trillions and trillions of dollars on blue-sky fantasies makes any sense at all; the only reason Americans aren't in open rebellion yet is that half of them can't believe it's happening, and the other half are idiots. We haven't seen the effect (yet) on our pocketbooks. There's food in the stores still, and housing has gotten cheaper. But let Obama's budget affect our wallets directly and just watch the voters explode with rage. Europeanization: With U. S. unemployment set to climb to 10%, and Canada not far behind, the North American market economies will soon be looking at what used to be derisively termed "European levels" of unemployment. The question is whether these high unemployment rates are merely short-term blips that will be followed by quick recoveries, or whether high jobless numbers will persist, turning Canada and the United States into grim replicas of sclerotic Europe. Time to Get Mad. Why aren't millions of honest, decent, hard-working Democrats up in arms? I can guarantee that if a Republican president had done half the things that Obama has pulled off in his first half year, most of us on the right would be calling for his head. ... Even before grabbing up car companies and banks, he got the ball rolling with a trillion dollar, 1100-page pork-filled stimulus package that had to be passed, he insisted, within a few short hours or America was going to be turned into a pumpkin. Well, without anyone having had time to read anything but the price tag, it was passed into law. Obama then took his own sweet time signing it. In the months since its passage, the unemployment rate has soared, entire states are going belly up and, apparently, nobody seems to know what happened to the money. U.S. Red Ink Tops $1 Trillion for First Time Ever. Nine months into the fiscal year, the federal deficit has topped $1 trillion for the first time. The imbalance is intensifying fears about higher interest rates and inflation, and already pressuring the value of the dollar. There's also concern about trying to reverse the deficit — by reducing government spending or raising taxes — in the midst of a harsh recession. 2010. Next year's elections are going to produce a political earthquake. That is because we currently suffer the most left-wing government in our nation's history. After just 6 months in office, the flower children that rule Washington in overwhelming numbers are already smashing through all records regarding federal taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. Obama and his ultra-left Democrats adopted a so-called stimulus bill raising spending a trillion dollars that never had a prayer of actually creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth, because it was based entirely on old-fashioned, brain dead, proven to fail, Keynesian economics. Obama's War for Socialism. Yes, For Socialism. At some point of embittering clarity, Americans will open their eyes to the glaring significance of the Obama era and see the Power Grab Years for what they are. Whether this realization comes in time to stave off the eradication of the United States as we thought we knew it, or whether it comes too late, I predict it will surely come. A Rush to Disaster. "Now is not the time to slow down or lose heart," the president said, also warning that any health-care overhaul enacted by Congress "cannot add to the deficit, and I mean it." But in bombshell testimony Thursday [7/16/2009] that rocked Capitol Hill, the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned that proposals now before the House and the Senate would do exactly that — and then some. Obama's Insidious War on the Middle Class: Like a PacMan gobbling up everything in sight, going after folks making more than $250,000 a year is not enough to satisfy Obama's insatiable appetite for money and power. He wants more. Although it means breaking a campaign promise to only tax the "rich," Obama's mad rush for revenue to fund his social engineering has transformed his agenda into a war against the middle class. Just who do they represent? Virtually every day when Congress is in session, I get a press release or two from each of Montana's representatives explaining how they are looking out for our state. Usually, those press releases are proud announcements of how the senator or representative wants credit for the U.S. government agreeing to spend millions more of taxpayer money in Montana. For some reason, these announcements never seem to reference the national debt that they are expanding. Obama and the Last Hurrah of Liberalism. Over the past fifty years, regardless of who was in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of left-wing radicalism in our institutions and the uncontrolled spending and growth of government. When a President as accomplished as Ronald Reagan was unable to do so it is apparent that no future Republican President or Congress, short of major national catastrophe, will ever be able to fully turn back this tide as they cannot overcome the apathy of the people and the hostility of a partisan media, entertainment establishment, academia and federal bureaucracies. Obama's Policies Would Redistribute Nearly $1 Trillion Every Year. By 2012, nearly $1 trillion from the top 30 percent of American families will be redistributed among the bottom 70 percent if Obama's proposals on taxes, health care, and climate change become law, according to the Tax Foundation. "Even if none of Obama's policies becomes law, the extent of income redistribution is remarkable," Scott Hodge, president of the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, said. "The top-earning 40 percent of families will transfer $826 billion to the bottom 60 percent in 2012." Andy Williams accuses Barack Obama of following Marxist theory. Williams, a lifelong Republican whose hits include Moon River and Music To Watch Girls By, told the Radio Times he thought Mr Obama wanted to turn the US into a "socialist country". A Community Organizer Takes On the World. The call du jour from the mountaintop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is for all of us to rise above, or in new age parlance "transcend," mere mortal self-interest. On the domestic level this means that capitalism — a mean, primal, greedy, and materialistic approach to economics that steals from the poor to give to the rich — must be replaced (slowly, but surely) with a more enlightened approach; one that emphasizes social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth. This is all the rage these days. It may be called "progressive," but it's really a barely-if-at-all disguised form of socialism. Are We Witnessing the Collapse of Liberalism? Democrats are indebting the nation to the tune of trillions of dollars. The greenback has been debased. Serious inflation is coming, and that inflation will trigger another economic downturn, one that might be sharper and deeper than we're now experiencing. What commonsense American believes that mountains of debt and looming inflation are good for a struggling economy? See also What's the rush? $230,000 per job. The Obama administration is attempting to spin the tepid job creation sparked by the $787 billion federal stimulus program into an economic success. But the numbers don't add up to a good return for taxpayers. In fact, the numbers don't add up at all. ... Even using the administration's more generous projection, it's still $160,000 spent for every job created or saved. In Michigan, the job-to-spending ratio is more skewed. The White House Web site, recovery.org, reports that Michigan has received $5.2 billion and has created or saved 22,500 jobs. That's $231,000 for every job. Glenn Beck, FOX's "Rodeo Clown". [Glenn] Beck, more thoroughly than any other FOX commentator, aims to connect the dots in a complex equation representing what "fundamentally transform America" means to the Obama administration. He's not fixated on the President because he knows Obama isn't leading the parade; Obama's riding the horse that's leading the parade. The horse is socialist progressivism. Perry: Obama 'hell-bent' on socialism. Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry accused President Barack Obama on Wednesday of "punishing" Texas and being "hell-bent" on turning the United States into a socialist country. Speaking at a luncheon for a Midland County Republican Women's group, Perry said that "this is an administration hell-bent toward taking American towards a socialist country. And we all don't need to be afraid to say that because that's what it is." Tea parties and other organized rejection of Obama's plans This subsection is now located on a page of its own — here. A few words about FDR's New Deal Don't Repeat the Errors of the New Deal. The historical model that the Democrats are choosing to hold up as they ponder our financial crisis isn't Harry Truman's Fair Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. At least three economic reforms under discussion now were also central in the New Deal package. Trouble is, these reforms didn't necessarily work well when they were first tried — and some failed outright. The Old New Deal. The New Deal ... actually began under Hoover, who initiated new spending programs and jobs programs, and tried to inflate the money supply and bail out the banks. He was blasted by FDR for his big government policies, and FDR won the election. Once in power, FDR went nuts, instituting a program of central planning that combined features of the Soviet and Fascist models. It was one idiotic program after another. The New Deal Didn't Do the Job. "I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ... And an enormous debt to boot!" Surely this must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denouncing the Bush administration's economic policies. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again. The words came from none other than Henry Morgenthau Jr. — pal, lunch companion and loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. How Government Prolonged the Depression: The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn. The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Just a few more zeroes. Part of the problem is that the model is all wrong here. The economic problems we face today are not remotely comparable to those we faced in 1931 or 1932, not so much less serious or more serious as simply different. Although Democrats continue to worship at the altar of the New Deal, even liberal economists concede that it didn't "solve" the Great Depression but, indeed, certain of its features might have even made things worse. How to cause a depression: Tucked within the economic stimulus bill the House passed last week was a clause requiring state and local public works agencies to buy American iron and steel for their reconstruction projects, and the Senate expanded it to all manufactured goods. It was modified slightly on Thursday as Senators had a second thought. If the nation is going to spend $43 billion to $100 billion on infrastructure revitalizing the civil engineering, architecture and construction industries, it sounded reasonable that the spending should also be used as a catalyst for other American products like U.S. Steel's steel, DuPont's plastics, 3M's chemicals and so on. But a brief history lesson will show them the folly of their ways. A whiff of Smoot-Hawley. In 1930, as the Great Depression tightened its grip on the country, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, erecting a high and onerous tariff wall around the U.S. economy. The lawmakers thought they were helping American workers; instead, they greatly lengthened and deepened the Great Depression, here and worldwide. Smoot-Hawley's Ghost Appears as Economy Tanks. The rising protectionist tide hasn't reached crisis proportions yet. But the camel's nose is under the tent. Unless governments get serious about arresting the trend soon, the chatter about 2009 morphing into a replay of the Great Depression will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 increased duties on more than 20,000 goods, inviting retaliation by other countries. Within two years of the law's enactment, global trade declined 70 percent. The Ghosts of Smoot and Hawley. Despite pleas from no fewer than 1,028 economists and Henry Ford, President Hoover signed the bill into law on June 17, 1930. It worked, sort of. Merchandise imports fell by $1.738 billion in the next year and half. Unfortunately, our trading partners retaliated, and our merchandise exports fell by even more — by $2.232 billion. Obama is headed for a one-term presidency. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the New Deal's Big Government spending failed to end the Great Depression. That is clear to anybody who reads Paul Johnson's masterful chapter on the New Deal in "Modern Times." Or Amity Schlaes' superb "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression." Or the utterly convincing data-driven study by UCLA professors Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian that concluded the New Deal lengthened the Great Depression by at least seven years. The New Deal Put "Great" in Depression. You can't say this often enough. The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. If you want a book-length treatment, a good one is Amity Shlaes readable Forgotten Man, now out in paperback. Witless protection: Some think the New Deal rescued the United States from economic crisis in the 1930s. Others argue precisely the opposite. But whatever their ideology and whatever their credentials, most of the pundits, historians, and economists who debate the Great Depression agree about one thing: Whatever may have caused the crisis, protectionism, trade barriers, and, yes, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped ensure that it lasted as long as it did. So uncontroversial is this view that it is virtually U.S. government policy. New Deal or Raw Deal? Not only did FDR raise the top income tax bracket to 79%, but he also proposed to Congress raising it to 99.5%. This proposal did not get through Congress. In April of 1939, after more than eight years of the New Deal, the unemployment rate was 20.7%. Henry Morgenthau, a very close friend of Franklin Roosevelt, and his Treasury Secretary, testified before Congress with brutal honesty about the greatest experiment in Keynesian fiscal policy. He said, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promise." Same Old New Deal. Fidelity Investments' CEO calls President Obama's economic plan "New Deal II" and says it won't work any better than it did for FDR. Whitewashing FDR: When it started becoming fashionable to compare the current economic malaise to the Great Depression, decades of scholarship flew out the window overnight. In place of the policy nuances that have been debated over the years by historians and economists, we were offered a simple-minded, three-act morality play in which Herbert Hoover embraces unchecked laissez faire, producing and aggravating an economic crisis, until Franklin Roosevelt rides to the rescue. A Bad Deal Revisited — Obama and FDR. The theme of this script has already been written, and some of the rehearsals have already been held. Barack Hussein Obama is to play Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the New New Deal. George Bush gets to be Herbert Hoover. Obama himself has drawn the parallels on numerous occasions, which have been echoed repeatedly in the media — both favorably, by liberal supporters, and unfavorably, by those who dread the harm it could do to the country. The Reality of the New Deal: Seventy-six years ago in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR launched its intended solution, the New Deal. If, as it now seems, the current financial crisis's closest counterpart is the Great Depression, it is paramount we understand both it and its intended solution. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the Depression's cause — not its cure — came from the government and the New Deal did less than both its supporters and critics claim. You Know The Real Reason Why Time Mag Is Going Down the Drain? The Content! Given that it's such old news that the New Deal was an economic flopperoo and that President Obama is pushing a New Dealish-like economic stimulus package, you'd think that maybe Time would be interested in engaging the whys and wherefores of such things. Or in anything like a critical analysis of FDR and BHO. It needn't be negative or libertarian, but something other than idle idol worship might actually pull some eyeballs. Be Prepared for the Worst. A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954. The Ghosts Of '38. That little-remembered year during the depths of the Great Depression was one of the most edifying in electoral history. With FDR in the White House, and still very popular, a rogue Congress with radical ideas embarked on a series of legislative initiatives that helped push a recovering economy back into depression. A Man, a Plan... On February 5, 1937, just 16 days after his inauguration to his second presidential term, Franklin D. Roosevelt called a surprise meeting of his cabinet in the White House's West Wing in which he unveiled to the cabinet, Congress, the press, and the nation a proposal for a dramatic reorganization of the federal judiciary that became known as his court-packing plan. 
The Editor says... Overbearing one-party rule sounds like totalitarianism to me. The use of AIG as a scapegoat Unfortunately, too many people form their opinions based on emotional outbursts and TV sound bites rather than sound reasoning. These are exactly the people Obama and the Democrats are inciting with their phony outrage over bonuses paid to AIG executives. The whole purpose of this endeavor is to stir up envy and outrage against people who make a lot of money, as one of the first steps toward "spread[ing] the wealth around" through outright socialism. Obama, Congress Knew About AIG Bonuses for Months. Cue the outrage. For months, the Obama administration and members of Congress have known that insurance giant AIG was getting ready to pay huge bonuses while living off government bailouts. It wasn't until the money was flowing and news was trickling out to the public that official Washington rose up in anger and vowed to yank the money back. AIG is Obama's Katrina. The bill that allowed for the AIG bonuses was hastily written. It was rammed through without discussion or debate. Republicans were systematically excluded from the bill. Not a single Republican was allowed to participate. When Democrats showed up to the conference committee, they brought the finished conference bill with them and didn't allow Republicans to see it. Then it was posted online in the middle of the night. And the very next day it was passed, almost exclusively on Democrat votes. President Obama promised he wouldn't sign anything into law until it had been online for five days, so that the American people could read it. If this had been done, business experts and finance experts would have analyzed the bill, and we could have caught this and stopped it. A Hidden Agenda behind the 90 Percent Tax? Taking advantage of the populist revolt against Wall Street and AIG bailouts, the House Democrats have passed a vengeance tax on TARPed financial firms that amounts to a 90 percent marginal tax rate on bonuses. ... Yet one wonders about this 90 percent tax rate. If it passes the Senate, will it ever be repealed? This could be the ultimate class-warfare spread-the-wealth redistribution scheme, aimed squarely at punishing success and penalizing the so-called rich. AIG — It's the Contracts! There seems to be a simple fact missing from all of the coverage of the AIG "bonus" fiasco: the sanctity of contracts. Congress can not be allowed to violate them. Altering a contract's terms is the function of the parties to the contracts or of the courts when one of the parties defaults. The Bonus Tax Is Just Plain Stupid. Like Bernie Madoff, I've got the government coming after my money. Unlike Madoff, I didn't do anything wrong. The House of Representatives, alas, thinks otherwise. Last Thursday, 328 members voted for a bill that would slap a 90% surtax on my bonus, with Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel dismissing the payout I received in January as "repugnant to everything that decent people believe in." The Senate is considering a similar bill. The Real AIG Conspiracy: What is wrong with this picture? Is there not something over-inflated about the outrage led most vociferously by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Barney Frank, the two leading shills for the bank giveaways over the past year? And does Pres. Obama perhaps find it convenient that finally, at long last, he has been able to criticize something that he believes Wall Street has done wrong? Cry, the Beloved Republic. Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Let's get this straight: Our president takes over $100,000 from AIG in campaign donations. Then he signs into legislation a bill crafted by his own party, with input from his own Treasury secretary, giving mega-bonuses to the execs of this bankrupt, federally bailed-out company — and then goes on the stump to trash the culture of Wall Street as typified by ... AIG, of course. Defending AIG: When a company is collapsing — as AIG certainly was at the time these contracts were negotiated — everybody who has an alternative is looking to jump ship. Think about it. If you knew that your employer might not be around in a few months and you had very specialized skills that were much in demand elsewhere, would you be willing to go down with the ship? Not likely. But if your employer offered you a handsome financial incentive to stick around, you'd be far more likely to take the risk. Well, that's exactly what AIG did when it negotiated retention bonuses. Off With Their Heads. This is nuts. I mean, really folks ... we have gone bat-guano insane over this AIG bonus brouhaha. You're being manipulated. The Dems' AIG Bonus Scam. [Scroll down] It's a farce — a sham. What's going on here is that the news media finally got around to mentioning that this $165 million for bonuses is part of the more than $170 billion of taxpayer money that Congress and President Obama insisted must be awarded in haste to the failed insurance giant American International Group, Inc (AIG). The public, understandably, is really angry. So the Democrats are terrified that the public might actually start figuring out what an incredibly incompetent job President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are doing. Congress ignores Constitution to cover blunders. Political pandering and posturing are alive and well and flourishing in Washington to the detriment of the American taxpayer. And from day to day, Senators and Federal officials change their stories regarding their involvement in the AIG bailout. First AIG, Then All Banks... Next, It'll Be You. The AIG bonus debacle is the latest stomach-turning episode. The political class's bungling of the bailouts has made the scandal not just who knew what when, but who should have known what when, rushing through trillion-dollar spending bills that elected officials — much less the public — hadn't even skimmed. More grotesque than taxpayers funding unseemly bonus packages has been Congress's pitchforked attempt to make up for that misstep. Punitive, 90 percent, retroactive taxes on bonuses are only the beginning of the policy fallout of this political scandal. And So Begins Another Week Of Malfeasance. With the braying of 328 yahoos — members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate legal earnings of a small unpopular group — still reverberating, the Obama administration Monday [3/23/2009] invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government. Employees Fear for Their Lives: The Other AIG Outrage. Employees of American International Group not involved with the shady credit default swaps that led to the company's near-collapse last year are angry for being unfairly blamed for a mess they say they had nothing to do with and are scared by threats of violence against them and their families. American Mob Rule. In the last three months, we've been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already angry public. Take the AIG debacle. ... Politicians rushed before the cameras to demand all sorts of penalties for these greedy investment bankers. Soon, they passed an unprecedented special tax law just to confiscate 90 percent of these contracted bonuses. Those who shouted the loudest for the heads of the AIG execs had the dirtiest hands. U.S. is sleep-walking to socialism. President Barack Obama has just fired the chairman of General Motors, and if that doesn't give you pause, here are some other interesting items. The administration is trying to figure out how to seize troubled companies and the House threw a hissy fit aimed at undoing perfectly legal private contracts. "We own AIG," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, speaking on behalf of the federal government as he tried to justify some sort of renewed, murderously angry French Revolution, this one in our country and aimed at executives receiving bonuses. Ready, Blame, Fire. Heads must roll! The chief watchdog of the government's $700 billion bank-bailout plan says top executives of struggling financial institutions must be fired if the economy is to have any chance of recovery. Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and chair of the congressional oversight committee monitoring the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, told The Post that letting banking leaders off the hook for the mess their companies are in will plunge the country into a deeper hole. Obama and Mob Rule. Barack Obama is ignoring the words of the Democratic Party's founder, Thomas Jefferson, who warned, "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." The mob is in the form of nightly polls taken by President Barack Obama's political advisers. ObaMob Rule. Obama is using the mob-incitement tactics of his mentor, Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky. The flash point he used was justified citizen outrage over AIG bonuses. Now he has claimed for himself the right to fire people in private businesses. Using his new-media outreach program and his e-mail database of 13 million people, Obama is further attempting to influence policy changes through protests outside AIG offices. He has even organized targeted doorbelling activities in support of his plans. Bankrupt Tribune gives bonuses after berating AIG. Two months after denouncing a troubled financial company for doling out hefty management bonuses, a bankrupt news media company is doing the same thing. Nationalizing General Motors and Chrysler This subsection is now located on a page of its own — here. Jump to Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Jump to Pork barrel politics. Jump to President Obama -- Year One. Jump to the Obama Index Page. Jump to Biased reporting about the economy. Back to the Home page 
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Document location http://www.akdart.com/obama12.html Updated November 19, 2009. Page design by Andrew K. Dart ©2009 |