Economy

Proggies Act Surprised ….. We Told You So!

tiredoflibbs21 Comments

“On Obamacare……

As a result of obAMATEUR’s re-election and the highly improbability that ObamaCare being repealed, we’ve had several businesses come forward and state that this is going to affect the number of workers they have and hours they can work – two of them are  CEO of Papa Johns John Schnatter and Applebees franchisee owner Zane Tankel.  While these aren’t the only two, they are the latest business owners who have publicly stated the harmful impact that ObamaCare will have on their businesses, their workers’ jobs and benefits.

The proggies are “shocked”.  They took to Twitter to demonize these business owners (hey they learned from the professional agitator using Alinski, his mentor’s tactics) , and pushing for others to boycott their businesses.  Hey you proggies – Can’t say you weren’t warned!  Business owners have been out there telling you exactly what you had coming to you if obAMATEUR was re-elected and ObamaCare stayed the law of the land.  Of course, you chose not to listen to those warnings.  It doesn’t make it these business owner’s problems! We told you so!!!

On to raising taxes……..

obAMATEUR is consumed with obsession about raising taxes on the “rich”.  We hear it in the press about his “wanting to make a deal” with Republicans for the so-called “balanced approach”.  All we have heard so far is the raising taxes on the “wealthy” – some balanced approach!  The complicit media (aka the propaganda arm of the White House) has done nothing but interview Republican and talk about raising taxes.  They have yet to question the obAMATEUR about the other half of the “balanced approach” – spending cuts.  Recently, on Good Morning America, they stated concern how “spending cuts will affect the economy”!  Excuse me?  We have seen MASSIVE government spending stagnate an economy.  We have proof that tax cuts work – several instances in fact.  Even the CBO disagrees with the lopsided “balanced approach” on raising taxes – Raising taxes has nothing to do with our fiscal cliff and getting our finances in order..

“Just how much deficit reduction would Obama’s tax hikes on the rich necessarily accomplish?

Nothing, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Letting tax rates rise to Clinton era levels for those families making over $250,000 a year would only raise $824 billion over ten years. That is not even enough revenue to undo the sequester that Obama promised “will not happen” during his final debate with Mitt Romney.”

If we gave you your way and CONFISCATED ALL THE WEALTH of the so-called targeted “wealthy”, you would have enough money to run the government for a few months.  That’s it!!!  We have a spending problem in this country.  This pResident who has ran up the debt than the first 42 presidents COMBINED!  Again, it is not our problem that you PREDICTABLY ignored FACTS and re-elected this buffoon.  We told you so!!!

More recent higher jobless claims ….

We now have 439,000 new jobless claims for the first full week after the disastrous reelection of the “one we have been waiting for” – the obAMATEUR and I do mean AMATEUR!  Pennsylvania and Ohio led the pack.  Two unionized states.  Two crucial states won by obAMATEUR.  The obAMATEUR sycophants are trying to put the best possible spin on these numbers — saying that they’re due to layoffs from Hurricane Sandy.  What utter CRAP!.  Layoffs in Ohio?  Pennsylvania?  Heavy union states?  We had New Jersey turn away NON UNION ELECTRICAL WORKERS, as an example of their dedication to union labor even in a disaster such as this!!!!

These layoffs are the direct result of re-electing this anti-business failure (a failure at everything he has put his hands on) of a pResident.  Businesses have been struggling that last four years.  There has been no recovery.  There have been BILLIONS of dollars spent by these businesses to comply with new regulations coming from this White House and the EPA.  The EPA will soon unleash the flood of new so-called “clean air” rules that will send energy costs through the roof.  Taxes on small business owners are going to rise.  Capital gains taxes on investors – going up.  There is absolutely NOTHING on the horizon with four more years of obAMATEUR that gives one iota of hope for a better business and economic climate ahead.  So … it’s time to go lean … and that’s just what these businesses are doing.  They’re shedding employees to get under the ObamaCare threshold. They’re looking for ways to get more efficient so that they can rid themselves of unnecessary workers.  As a result we see jobless claims are on the rise .. the highest number since the middle of 2011.

The obAMATEUR, his sycophants, drones and lemmings want to blame it on the storm.  Well .. .they’re half-right.  It’s a storm all right, but not Hurricane Sandy.  It’s the storm of taxes and regulations that are coming with the reelection of an anti-business, tax and spend president.

Elections have consequences.  Here’s your pink slip.  Enjoy.  And if you’re an obAMATEUR voter, I’m enjoying it right along with you.  You did it to yourselves.  We told you so!!!

 

Obamunism!

Mark Noonan61 Comments

Jobless claims skyrocket.

Poverty rate shoots up.

Postal service loses $15.9 billion.

EU budget talks collapse.

Hostess a step away from liquidation (that is the twinkie maker, for you liberals out there).

FHA heading for collapse (that means that our fake housing “recovery” is just about over).

Philly Fed plunges.

Eurozone re-enters recession.

Layoffs.

Layoffs.

Layoffs.

But, don’t worry – its all Bush’s Sandy’s fault and with Bernanke about to deploy a depleted-hopium charged financial bazooka, all is well…

Economic Growth

Retired Spook29 Comments

This AP article is at the top of my home page this morning, and, after reading it, this little light went on in my head about the main difference between the approach to government by Obama and Romney. Actually, it goes back to a comment I made the other day about the relationship between economic growth and employment. Obama believes government can create jobs, and actually claims his policies have done so. But there can be no meaningful private sector job growth without economic growth. In each of the last 3 years economic growth has been slower than the previous year, and yet, according to the BLS, unemployment has declined from 10.1% to 7.8%. That’s sort of like a college student telling his parents that his grade point average has gone from a 2.5 to a 3.0, but he’s only attended half of his classes. It’s just not believable.

Now are there things that government can do to affect economic growth? You bet, and our lack of economic growth is largely due to uncertainty in the market place caused by things governments have done over the last 4 years. And no amount of stimulus or QE infinity can erase the negative effects of bad fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy.  Government can’t just say to a private company: here’s some money — go hire someone.  The purpose of business is not to provide jobs.  Business exists to make money, and employees are nothing more than a by-product of a successful business.  Progressive Democrats (I know — redundant), by and large, don’t seem to be able to grasp this simple concept.  A President Romney may not be able to do any better, but a growing number of people think he couldn’t do any worse.

I know we have business people who frequent this blog — I’m one myself.  Let’s have a discussion about the circumstances under which you’ve hired people, how government actions, tax policy and regulations affect your business, and what changes a President Romney could make that would have a positive effect on the growth of your business.

 

Teetering on the Precipice

Retired Spook115 Comments

I suspect more than a few within the Obama campaign and inner circle are in the midst of an Oh, crap moment. I’d have to think they were hoping to get to November 6th without any significant Arab Spring fallout or monetary crisis events. Turns out they have both, only 53 days out from the election.

With the Middle East on fire and both the Fed and the European Central Bank setting in motion virtually unlimited monetizing of the massive debt that Progressive policies have created, Obama’s chances of getting re-elected are growing slimmer by the day.

The premise of the lead article at MarketWatch this morning is that if Spain can just be bailed out, the world is home free.  Happy days are just around the corner.

I don’t know if the first commenter to the MarketWatch article realizes how prescient his comment is:

Fred is taking a tractor-trailer driving test. They come to the crest of a big hill and as they head down the instructer askes Fred “now what would you do if your brakes gave out right here?” “Why I’d call my friend Willie.” “And why would you call your friend Willie?”  “Caws he ain’t never seen a wreck like this one’s gonna be!”

Mark Hulbert’s column pretty much nails it:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — It’s somehow fitting that the stock market would celebrate the fourth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy by staging a huge rally in the wake of the Fed announcing more quantitative easing.

That’s because both the events of mid-September 2008, as well as those on Thursday, underline just how inscrutable — and, therefore, ultimately unpredictable — the markets can be.

Just take the rationale given for the market’s huge rally on Thursday. In essence, we’re told, the market rallied because the Federal Reserve concluded that the economy is in such horrible shape that it must be put on even more remedial life support.

Got that?

Far from seeing any irony in any of this, however, many investors have evidently decided that happy days are here again.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA +0.20%  now a couple of thousand points higher than where it stood when Lehman Brothers went belly-up, many investors are commemorating the fourth anniversary of that bankruptcy by telling themselves that any Lehman-like danger has passed.

If only.

Go read the whole thing.  The comments he posts from supposedly astute market analysts in September, 2008 are interesting.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:

Instapundit has an excellent run-down on reaction to the “questioning on a probation matter” of the maker of the film the Administration absurdly blames for the riots.  Here’s what gets me:

Reader Jack Moss writes: “Probation is not a law enforcement function, it’s under the court. If his probation officer wanted to question him about the use of a computer, that broke his probation fine. But that wouldn’t include questions about making an anti-Islamic movie. It’s irrelevant. That means that the FBI showed up outside their jurisdiction for a reason given by their superiors. The question then is who ordered them there.”

Suppose this guy was in violation of his probation – ok, fine:  how often do probation violators get an after-midnight knock at the door?  Especially violations of a probation on a non-violent crime?  With a huge string of MSMers there to film every second of it?  The whole thing stinks – partially of intimidation but mostly of appeasement…Obama and Co are convinced (or at least are trying to convince us) that the film caused the riots.  In defense of his twaddle they have now swung the law enforcement power of the United States against the man who made the offending film and it appears that they are doing it to show the Muslim world that they’ll crack down on “blasphemy”.  All this will do is convince the radicals that we can, indeed, ban “blasphemy”…and that if they murder Americans, we’ll go ahead an do it.  So, guess what?  We’ll shortly get more murdered Americans…

What is Wrong With America? We Don’t Like “Dirty” Jobs

Mark Noonan192 Comments

This could be Part 1 of a 10,000 part series, but one of the problems I’m always yammering on about it is our failure to understand that prosperity only comes when you make, mine or grow things.  Keep in mind that I consider my own work pretty much useless as compared to what any plumber, auto mechanic, doctor or drywall installer does in the course of the day.  There is some point in what I do, but I don’t kid myself in to thinking that the world would be worse off, fundamentally, if my entire job title was scrubbed from the books.  The trouble we have is that people who are government bureaucrats, college gender studies professors, lawyers, think tank employees, etc believing they are doing something as important (or even more important) than those people who grow our food and make our clothes.

As we look for ways to fix our nation, one of the most important tasks will be to re-invigorate the concept that work – real work – is honorable.  That the man or woman getting dirty day by day to ensure we have the necessities is doing something 2nd in importantce only to raising children (the fact that we don’t consider raising children to be that important – as we can see in the liberal attitudes towards stay-at-home-mom Mrs. Romney – is an article for another day).  As it turns out, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame from television has written a letter to Romney on this very subject.  To quote:

…I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs.Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce.  We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)…

Precisely – now, what does Mr. Rowe want?  He continues…

…Certainly, we need more jobs, and you were clear about that in Tampa. But the Skills Gap proves that we need something else too.  We need people who see opportunity where opportunity exists. We need enthusiasm for careers that have been overlooked and underappreciated by society at large. We need to have a really big national conversation about what we value in the workforce, and if I can be of help to you in that regard, I am at your service – assuming of course, you find yourself in a new address early next year…

Rowe goes on to note that he wrote Obama the same sort of letter four years ago and never heard back…but it appears that Romney has now read the letter.  Romney is unlikely as a man to lead us on a revolution – but curiously enough he is more likely than Obama (for all the “fundamental transformation of America” that Obama is on about, all he’s really doing is consolidating something that Chesterton predicted more than 100 years ago – that the Ruling Class would call itself “socialist”, put us all in property-less economic straightjackets and, straight faced, tell us they care about the little guy).  I hope that Romney really ponders the letter and starts to talk about he issues raised.  Cutting taxes and spending; very important.  Reforming our regulatory system; vital.  But unless we become an America of working people doing the dirty job of building civilization brick by brick and girder by girder, then we’re ultimately doomed.

Time To Spell This Out For The Liberals – Again

Cluster92 Comments

Since I have read many recent posts from our resident liberals who are obviously clueless, apologies for the redundancy, as to what caused the collapse in 2008, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit that. Many of the liberals are of course still in the blame Bush, blame republican mode and pointing to, and ridiculing the absence of Bush at the RNC convention as further proof of that. The first thing I want to point out is that Bush is a very private man which is in complete contrast to the media hound that Clinton is. Furthermore, when he told us that he was retired, he meant it, another concept liberals have trouble understanding so the only surprise to conservatives would be if in fact he did show up. Secondly, the GOP has a very young and deep bench, so I am sure Bush had no desire to take time away from them, again unlike Clinton but of course the DNC bench is pretty thin anyway.

Now onto the cause of the collapse, which of course was the housing bubble. It is estimated that 1 in 7 jobs are connected with housing industry, so it was no surprise that the collapse of that industry sent shocks wave across the entire country and adversely impacted nearly every other industry. Liberals want desperately to blame Bush and deregulation for the collapse, but unfortunately for them, Bush did not enact one piece of financial deregulation legislation during his eight year term. Not one. The last piece of financial deregulation was enacted in 1999 under President Bill Clinton. Furthermore, Bush started ringing the alarm bells on the GSE’s as early as 2001, and then again in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and finally in 2008. Now to be fair, those warnings were ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike in all of those years, but most recently were mocked by Rep. Barney Framk and Rep. Maxine Waters when she stated that “there is nothing wrong with Fannie and Freddie” in September of 2008:

Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke.  Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines.  

Now the question is, why were the GSE’s so over leveraged? Well it was because of a misguided Washington DC policy that said that everyone, including the poor should have a shot at the American Dream and at home ownership. So banks were encouraged, in fact even threatened with Fed support, if they didn’t lower their mortgage standards and start giving more loans to more home buyers. Now, knowing that much of this paper was worthless, the banks started bundling these securities and started selling them to anyone who would buy them in an effort to rid themselves of the toxic assets. And the game continued, fueled even more by rising home values and higher valued loans, in addition to HELOC’s to home owners who saw their equity grow rapidly.  When the house of cards fell, no pun intended, all that money evaporated and the economy is still suffering. Now there is no question that financial sector greed played a role, but the real culprit is the federal government, so the real question you need to ask your self is – is handing out millions of mortgages to people who have little means to pay them back, a liberal policy? Or a conservative policy? As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is”.

Open Thread: BAraCKWARDS! Hope and Change A Miserable Failure!

tiredoflibbs42 Comments

Why? You ask that ‘Hope and Change’ is a miserable failure?

Well, for one thing, if he had a successful record on which to run we would not see the LIES and the PANDERING of certain groups from the left.

The Obama propaganda team tries to distance itself from the now-infamous Romney cancer ad.  But there’s one problem …

Re-igniting the war on women, at a campaign stop this week, Dear Ruler accused Republicans of wanting to take the nation“back to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”

We have not one, not two, but three members of the ObamaMedia who say that Mitt Romney’s ad on Obama gutting welfare reform is raaaaaaaacist.

His green energy programs, most of which went bankrupt…

The Solyndra scandal widens … Obama’s staff arranged for him to be personally briefed last summer on the loan program to help clean-energy companies like Solyndra.

NEGATIVE net job creation even after the stimulus (over $1 trillion in new spending), in which we were promised unemployment would not rise above 8%.  We have been over that for FORTY STRAIGHT MONTHS.  His team predicted that we would be around 5.6%.

Compared with each president since 1945, Obama ranks dead last in job creation, losing 316,000 jobs.

On Monday, August 13, the national debt will reach $16 trillion.  Obama, the same ruler who in 2009 promised to CUT THE DEFICIT IN HALF by the end of his first term, is responsible for more than $5 trillion of that debt.

Out of control spending with the stimulus and other WASTEFUL programs, Solyndra, nationalizing the auto industry, cash for clunkers, omnibus spending bills, etc. etc.

How the Department of Homeland Security wasted millions of tax dollars on a chemical facilities security program.

“We must pass healthcare to see what is in it.” – we were sold a FRAUD when it came to healthcare.  Premiums are going up at a more alarming rate that BEFORE and actually seeing a doctor will take longer and care will be rationed to control costs.

Nearly two-thirds of employers expect to see a cost hike in their health plans when ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014.

A new CBO report says that under ObamaCare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022.

And from the GOVERNMENT IS OUT OF CONTROL FILE:

The Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his own property surrendered to authorities this week to begin serving his 30-day jail sentence.

The looters, moochers and drones will insist on four more years of this train wreck of an administration.

Pathetic.

Keep it civil people….

Update: whatever happened to:

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.” 
(Remarks by President Obama to a Joint Session of Congress, September 9, 2009)
This afternoon Budget Committee Ranking Member Ryan walked through why the bill put forward by Democrats FAILS the President’s deficit test.
Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan took apart obamacare in six minutes.

Let’s Be Honest – Part Deux

Cluster88 Comments

A while back I wrote this same entitled thread about the need for honesty in politics, and quite frankly this is a thread that could be written every day. Last time I spoke of Harry Reid and his incessant whine of Republican obstructionism, of which I pointed out was just a cover for Harry not getting anything done in the Senate. In fact we are now over three years without a national budget, which is unconstitutional and has nothing to do with obstructionism. I believe the reason Harry won’t put together a budget is because he is afraid of being honest with the American public in letting them know exactly where the money is being allocated. Another part of that previous thread was Harry’s reluctance to even bring to the floor the two Ryan budgets, and the other Congressional Republican legislation that continues to languish on Harry’s desk. Why is Harry so afraid of even having a debate on these proposals? It simply doesn’t make sense, of course neither does Harry who will no doubt go down in history as the worst Senate Majority leader ever.

Today I want to speak about “fair share”, the Democrat mantra designed to enrage the proletariat and marshal the troops to Obama’s heroic cause. Fair share is obviously code for the “rich” not paying enough in taxes – well again, let’s be honest. The fact is, the top 10% of wage earners paid 71% of all federal income taxes and brought in 43% of all income earned. The bottom 50% of wage earners paid just 2% of all federal income taxes and brought in 13% of all income earned. Not exactly a “fair” ratio in my opinion, and this doesn’t even account for the nearly 47% of all wage earners who didn’t pay any federal income taxes. Couple this with the fact that nearly 110 million people received a welfare benefit in 2011, up from nearly 97 million in just 2009, which equates to a 13% increase in welfare distribution in just the last 3 years. And much of this welfare is in the form of food stamps which had a shocking 164% increase in the last three years, yet you will never hear this from the Obama media, which is dishonest to say the least. During the Bush administration, when budgets were actually submitted, government spending never exceeded $2.5 trillion. Obama’s spending has never been less than $3.4 trillion, absent any budget of course and that is another fact not mentioned in the media. Of course the media did try and spin that a while back, by lumping in the Obama 2009 stimulus into Bush’s budget, but were appropriately reprimanded for their dishonesty. The fact is, Obama has raised annual baseline government spending by over a $1 trillion dollars, with no plans to scale that back, thus the need for the “rich” to pay more, however, if you were to raise the top bracket by the 3.9% that Obama is calling for, that would generate approximately $70 billion dollars, or enough to run the government for 8 days. So who are we kidding? That isn’t a solution, but if you listen to “The One We Have All Been Waiting For”, this is what is holding American back.

We can never have an honest conversation about the countries affairs while liberal partisan ideologues run the show. Obama has no desire to actually be honest with the country and that is why he needs to go.

Unemployment at 8.3%

Mark Noonan22 Comments

So, how is that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?  41 months at 8% or higher unemployment.  And with 150,000 dropping out of the labor force, you know that the real unemployment rate is much, much higher than the official number.

The BLS, apparently working hard for Obama’s re-election, decided that with unemployment rising they’d better give the MSM something else to talk about – certainly don’t want them talking about the massive number of people out of work.  Better to have them talk about the number of jobs being created!  So, they just made up some numbers to make it look like the number of jobs went up.  From Zero Hedge:

Happy (about) the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the US “added” 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an “adjusted” rise? Simple: the BLS “added” 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This was the largest seasonal addition … for a July NFP print in the past decade…But wait, there’s more: the Birth Death adjustment, which adds to the NSA Print to get to the final number, was +52k. How does this compare to July 2011? It is about 1000% higher: the last B/D adjustment was a tiny +5K! In other words, of the 163,000 jobs “added”, 429,000 was based on purely statistical fudging.

I’m a little bit surprised at this much brass on the part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – all economic indicators in July were lousy:  there wasn’t the slightest indicator that we were actually adding jobs…and here they come up, straight faced, and try to tell us not only that the economy created jobs, but created them faster than in June, when things were better than in July.  But putting out that number – even with 16 million people out of work – allows Obama and his Democrats to keep up the meme of “jobs are being created” thanks to the stimulus.  That meme – which is the only positive thing Obama has – would be permanently finished if we had a jobs print in negative territory.  Now we know:  until after November 6th, no matter what is really happening, the BLS will not put out a negative number…even if actual jobs losses will be in the 200,000 range, they’ll just fudge it until they get a positive number.

Fine and dandy – we know that Obama’s hope for re-election revolves around lying about himself and lying about Romney.  The jobs report is the “lie about Obama” part, the latest fracas over Romney’s tax returns (set aloft by Harry Reid, who also seems to have some unanswered questions about his own past which have been floated just as credibly as the tax charge) is the “lie about Romney” part of it.  We’ll see if it works – the idea is to turn off independents, depress Republicans and fire up Democrats as Obama’s only hope is a narrow win in a low-turnout race which allows him to cobble together 270 electoral votes.  If it works, then it works – but it only works if Obama can fool the people.  He managed it in 2008; I don’t think he’ll be able to do it in 2012 (much harder to fool people by scaring them than to fool them by making nice).

In the end, I expect that reality will defeat Obama – he and his minions can lie all they want but the people know what they are going through.  I don’t know about you out there – maybe you’re all rich – but as for me it has been quite a lot of cutting back.  My shirts, for instance, are bought at Goodwill these days…and I’ve found in conversation that I’m not remotely alone among my friends determined to bargain shop or do without.  Things are rough; people fear the future; and for me and mine we’re actually far better off than many millions of people who were suckered by Obama in 2008 and now know the reality.  After all the hype and lies I think that on November 6th the real people of the United States who have been living in the Obama Recession will show up to vote – and we’ll have a new President on January 20th.

You Didn’t Build That – Redux

Cluster31 Comments

I want to further the conversation on the current issue of business vs government as recently defined by our President who no doubt has a healthy disdain for success, in my opinion. I believe that this issue is one of the fundamental differences between conservative and liberal thought. Liberals, or at least the majority of current progressives, believe in social justice engineered by a large central federal government, taking from those at the top of the economic ladder and distributing to those on the lower rungs. This is hardly a new concept and has been done numerous times throughout history with little success. It has never resulted in lifting people out of poverty, nor has it resulted in creating a higher standard of living, or brought out the best in any individual. It has only served to enrich a ruling class at the expense of a permanent under class. What’s frustrating from a conservative position is that if you oppose the progressive agenda, than you are an evil over lord without any compassion, when in reality, conservatives do care, and have much more effective ideas on how to administer safety nets to those truly in need.

When the President stated that if you had a successful business, you didn’t build it and that others did, he offered a genuine glimpse into his true ideology, and that is one of collectivism. Of course this should be expected from someone who has never been a part of private enterprise having never started a business, nor even managed one, and yet has been the recipient of the benevolence of others almost at every stage of his life. Obama fails to understand the financial risk that so many people take to start their own business and be independent. If that individual fails, will the collectivists be there to off set the losses? I hardly think so, but the collectivists are sure there to take from that individuals success now aren’t they? Considering that business’s and successful individuals pay the majority of income taxes, it can be easily argued that they are largely responsible for building that infrastructure that others enjoy. It can easily be argued that without successful business’s, the government would not have the money to build those roads that those who don’t pay income taxes use on daily basis, so really, who should be more grateful? Shouldn’t the 47% who pay no income tax be grateful that hard working Americans provide the funds to build that infrastructure that they benefit from? Shouldn’t the president and other elected government officials be grateful to hard working, risk taking Americans for paying their salaries and benefits?  I really believe that this President and most liberals have their priorities all screwed up, and have put the cart before the horse.