Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Just Another Trite Populism Stump Speech Filled with Prevarications and Obfuscations of Fact.



by Robert Janicki
On Tuesday night, President Obama defiantly gave Americans the single finger salute as he vowed to veto any legislation that diminishes Obamacare, Dodd-Frank or his unilateral amnesty action done through the stroke of a pen with an Executive Order.
Obama tried to paint an economic picture embellished with a rosy glow of unreal accomplishments from a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production.  
The economy has had the slowest recession recovery in 70 years.  The American economy is still in a fragile state and has not returned to the growth rate of previous recession recovery periods.
The claim of shrinking deficits is only true in the context of Obama having run up the deficit greater than any other president before him and only now has deficit spending begun to slow down. 
Industry has grown, not because of Obama policy, but despite the crushing policies of Obama's agencies inflicting onerous and costly regulations on American industry.  
Finally, booming energy production is due to the private sector which has increased crude oil and natural gas production 67% on private and state lands compared to a measly growth rate of only 6% on federal lands.  And even that growth rate on federal lands only occurred because of private  lawsuits brought against the Obama administration in federal court forcing federal regulatory agencies to do their job of approving oil and gas leases on federal land according to federal law. 
Again, Obama perfunctorily injected several personal homilies of Americans in distress as he does in his major speeches.  The SOTU speech had the same humdrum feel of his many campaign stump speeches of the past.  President Obama did not lay out a cogent and coherent plan to bring along America into the inevitable future it will face either domestically with the economy, the area of foreign relations or national security in the face of the greatest challenge to American liberty and freedom with Islamist terrorists around the world.
Obama once again played the divide and conquer game of pitting the wealthy against the middle class and the poor, by calling for raising taxes on the wealthy to redistribute their wealth, as if the wealth of America is static and the wealthy have stolen wealth from the poor and middle class to attain their "unearned" wealth in the form of tax loopholes like capital gains compared to "earned" income of the working class.
What liberals refuse to acknowledge is that without the wealthy investing and putting their wealth "at risk" of losing value, there would be little economic growth in America.  Wealthy Americans are rewarded only when their risks are overcome by good business decisions in the private sector.  The working class does not have the same risk, since their reward is an immediate return for their labor and cannot be recalled should their employers fail to make a profit.
Raising taxes for any purpose at a time when the American economy is still in such a fragile state borders on malfeasance of Obama's leadership.  Obama's plan, like all historical liberalism, is to raise taxes, borrow more money and then to throw that money at the problem of income disparity.  Basically, Obama is seeking to reward his constituency at the expense of the producers who foot the bill for his delusions of Marxist socialist wealth redistribution.  
With Obama, it's always more "cowbell" government spending over and over again.  With a Republican Congress, I expect there will be no "cowbell" spending, the likes of which we have seen in the past six years.