Can anyone name one thing going well?
Our President was elected with great enthusiasm and the support of our young. Post Partisan!
He brings inflammatory race issues into the equation in a routine altercation requiring a beer summit. I sense no change in the "relations" of the races in this country.
Immigration was ignored until 1070 and remains unsolved. Local governments, even before Mr. Obama's economy, struggled to accommodate services for illegal immigrants, now the new fiscal reality of empty coffers and reduced tax revenue allows them no option of providing those services, yet the Federal mandate remains.
States are going bankrupt, they can no longer provide needed services, let alone to illegal immigrants. They are going to need to Federal government to bail them out, but the Federal government is out of bullets. The Federal government has wasted our treasure on a failed stimulus and health care paralysis.
Unemployment remains astoundingly high, few jobs have been created in the private sector for many months. A huge tax increase is just months away as are the multiple others (health care, financial) passed by our Democratic controlled congress at the direction of our President.
Our military remains mired in the Afghan and Iraq war. Iran, N. Korea, are as threatening as ever. Muslim terrorists continue to periodically attack us. The One's speech at the Brandenburg gate seems a lifetime ago.
The health care industry is in a deep depression as is the auto industry. There are no "green" jobs being created.
A deeply flawed health care bill was passed over the objections of a majority of the country, insisted on as a "castor oil" cure for what ails us by the Democrats and our President. No one's health care has significantly improved, taxes are about to start, and a model of the system, abet on a smaller, less complicated scale is failing spectacularly in Mass.
We have an ongoing environmental disaster, our CEO won't talk to their CEO, won't help the states and mainly wants to litigate a solution as oil continues to spill. The damage of this disaster to the areas economy will be long lasting as will the damage to tax receipts. A company employing thousands of Americans will likely not survive.
Several European countries have grown their government too large and promised too much to too many, leaving few to work and bills too large to pay. Our President and his supporters argue that could never happen to us, because we are too big and too sound, ignoring that at one time, so were they!
Equity markets, not ignoring such flawed economic reasoning, continue to dwindle.
The deficit grows and grows eating up more and more of what we produce without any serious proposals of reigning in the spending and scope of government. An ever growing group of citizens is protesting our impending bankruptcy and for caring about our country, they are ridiculed, BY OUR PRESIDENT.
And most importantly, the successful, the leaders, those who would normally pull us out of such an economic malaise sensing the hostility and understanding the flawed logic are sitting on their hands!
Is this the CHANGE you asked for? Is this why you voted for B. Obama?
Really?
3 comments:
I'm not alone:
WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Barack Obama: The great jobs killer
Former President Ronald Reagan might have said, "Obama, there you go again."
The current occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.
Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.
It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes -- rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money).
As far as the taxpayers -- the people who actually take risks with our own money to create small businesses and jobs and pay most of the taxes -- we require protection under the Endangered Species Act.
You won't find proof of the damage Obama is doing on Wall Street, but rather on Main Street. My friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business. Small business creates 75 percent of new jobs (and a majority of all jobs). I called one friend who was a wealthy restaurant owner. He says business is off by 60 percent. He's drowning in debt. He won't last much longer. His wealth is gone.
I called another friend in the business of home improvement. He says business is off 90 percent from two years ago. My contractor just filed personal bankruptcy. She won't be building any more homes. The hair salon where I've had my hair cut for years closed earlier this year. Bankrupt. But here's the clincher -- ESPN Zone just closed all their restaurants across the country. If they can't make it selling cheap food and overpriced beer with 100 big screens blaring every sporting event on the planet to a sports-crazed society, we are all in deep, deep trouble.
I've polled all my friends who own small businesses -- many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies.
The days of jobs in the private sector with big salaries, full benefits, and pensions are over. We've all seen where those kinds of jobs get you as a business owner -- in Bankruptcy Court or surviving on government welfare like GM and Chrysler. Or in the case of government itself -- completely insolvent, but surviving by ripping off taxpayers and fraudulently running printing presses at the Fed all day and night to print money by the trillions.
Unfortunately, small businesses don't have the power to impose taxes or print money. So unlike government, we'll just have to cut employees and run lean and mean.
It has now become clear that, outside of the burgeoning field of Census takers, there will be no major increase in new jobs for years to come. Outside government, Obama has created a wasteland of economic ruin and depression that looks much like the landscape of Mel Gibson's first movie "Mad Max." Without a printing press in Obama's world, you're just plain out of luck.
The days of believing the Obama propaganda about a jobs recovery are over. The trillion-dollar corporate handouts (neatly named "stimulus") may have kept big business in the money for the past 18 months, and artificially propped up the stock market, but small business is the real canary in the coal mine.
My small business-owning friends aren't creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees. And many business owners are making plans to leave the country. In a high-tech world where businesses can be run from anywhere, Obama has a problem. His one-trick pony -- raise taxes, raise taxes, raising taxes -- is chasing away the business owners he desperately needs to pay his bills.
And:
By Fareed Zakaria
Monday, July 5, 2010
The American economy is sputtering and we are running out of options. Interest rates can't go any lower.
Losing more than jobs
Obama's CEO problem
The Federal Reserve recently reported that America's 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets. By any calculation (for example, as a percentage of assets), this is higher than it has been in almost half a century. Yet most corporations are not spending this money on new plants, equipment or workers. Were they to loosen their purse strings, hundreds of billions of dollars would start pouring through the economy. These investments would probably have greater effect and staying power than a government stimulus.
But government spending can only be a bridge to private-sector investment. The key to a sustainable recovery and robust economic growth is to get companies investing in America. So why are they reluctant, despite having mounds of cash? I put this question to a series of business leaders, all of whom were expansive on the topic yet did not want to be quoted by name, for fear of offending people in Washington.
Economic uncertainty was the primary cause of their caution. "We've just been through a tsunami and that produces caution," one told me. But in addition to economics, they kept talking about politics, about the uncertainty surrounding regulations and taxes. Some have even begun to speak out publicly. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, complained Friday that government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. The Business Roundtable, which had supported the Obama administration, has begun to complain about the myriad laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington.
Most of the business leaders I spoke to had voted for Barack Obama. They still admire him. Those who had met him thought he was unusually smart. But all think he is, at his core, anti-business. When I asked for specifics, they pointed to the fact that Obama has no business executives in his Cabinet, that he rarely consults with CEOs (except for photo ops), that he has almost no private-sector experience, that he's made clear he thinks government and nonprofit work are superior to the private sector. It all added up to a profound sense of distrust.
Some of this is a product of chance. The economic crisis forced the government to expand its authority in dozens of areas, from finance to automobiles. But precisely because of these circumstances, Obama needs to outline a growth and competitiveness agenda that is compelling to the business community. This might sound like psychology more than economics, and the populist left will surely scream that the last thing we need to do is pander to business. But the first thing we need is for these people to start spending their money -- soon. As a leading New York businessman who publicly supported Obama during the campaign told me, "their perception is our reality."
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