Obama's Inaugural: A Sanitized Leftist Agenda That Ignores the 16.468T Debt Gorilla

The biggest surprises of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address were its brevity and absence of personal pronouns. Delivered with passion, Obama presented his leftist agenda embellished by feel-good  words like patriotism, constitution, brave soldiers, and America the greatest country on earth. He interjected some lip
service to risk taking and individual achievement in passing, but his main message never swerved from the fact that we need bigger and more invasive government.

Obama’s soothing code words, assertions, propositions, and contradictions probably flew by an audience that went away thinking: Who could object to what he said?”

I required a careful reading of the speech transcript to piece together his liberal agenda of communal action, universal positive rights, redistribution, equal rights, and anti-business sentiment. His address lays out a blunt in-your-face, take-no-prisoners program that half the American people reject. And that is a problem.
As with health care, Obama urges that his agenda be enacted with great urgency: “Decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay.” The obstacles are great. The community-organized voices of the people must overcome the resistance of those on the other side of the aisle who “mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.” The President and the people “have the obligation to shape the debates of our time.”



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"Wall-Street-Bonus" Lew to Replace "Tax-Avoider" Geithner at Treasury

 

Barack Obama vilifies both “Wall Street speculators “who pay themselves big bonuses when times are bad” and the  greedy top Two Percenters who do not pay “their fair share” by exploiting tax loopholes.  With such strongly articulated views, his nominee for Secretary of Treasury, Jack Lew, and his current Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner, appear to be unlikely choices for such a sensitive cabinet position.

Jack Lew collected over two million dollars for his short stint at the collapsing Citigroup. Tim Geithner, whose earnings placed him in the top two percent,  conveniently forgot to pay a substantial portion of his taxes. Although the sums of money involved in the Lew and Geithner cases are small, they are of enormous symbolic value. They show that Obama is prepared to accept behavior from his closest associates that he  demagogues for others in his public persona.

Lew’s confirmation hearings will explore his stint as CEO of Citigroup’s alternative investments group from January 2008 until he lined up a new job in the state department before the end of the year.

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Too Big To Fail Banks Crumble Before Greedy Federal Government In Mortgage Deal

The $8.5 billion mortgage settlement agreed to by ten major banks on January 7 reveals, once more, the coercive power of government to expropriate assets from businesses judged guilty by public opinion without proof of legal wrongdoing. Eligible home owners  will receive from hundreds of dollars up to $125,000 -- another case where the government “throws a little money at everyone and hopes the problem will go away.” (New York Times The Foreclosure Disaster).

Following a familiar pattern, ten accused mortgage lenders caved to demands of the Office of the Controller of Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve rather than face the wrath of the regulators who rule over them. In violation of basic legal principles, settlement funds are to be distributed in small portions to all who had the potential to be harmed, not in proportion to actual damages. Such an arrangement is akin to distributing Hurricane Sandy Funds to all residents of the affected states on the grounds that they could potentially have been harmed, whether they were or not.  

So much for the rule of law. 

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A One-Percenter Gives Far More than He Takes (George Mitchell is More Transformative Than Barack Obama)

Few have heard of George Mitchell, other than energy industry specialists and residents of The Woodlands – a model city Mitchell designed and developed from scratch north of Houston. But when history is told, Mitchell will have transformed the energy industry, the economy, environment, U.S. foreign policy, and geopolitics more than our self-declared “transformative” President. It is ironic that President Obama may owe his re election to a successful entrepreneur-risk taker, unappreciated in Obama’s world as one of those lucky people who “didn’t build it on their own.”

Obama’s lexicon automatically places Mitchell among the greedy one-percenters, who refuse to “give back to society” what they owe. Mitchell, however, has given back a thousand or a million fold. The federal government could pay him billions and still be in Mitchell’s debt. It was Mitchell, whose entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking, and perseverance gave us the fracking revolution.
Fracking is Mitchell’s achievement (more than any other single person), not that of the government’s roads, schools, and ports, as the President would like us to believe.

Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames tell George Mitchell’s story in their Freedom Manifesto, required reading for the right and left alike. They write of Mitchell’s fifteen year quest to develop hydraulic fracturing:
“In the 1980s, energy experts believed that the supply of natural gas was dwindling. This concern spread to Mitchell, a Houston-based independent energy producer…..to look for ways to replace his critical reserves….The problem was that (gas) was locked in shale, the extremely dense layer of rock under Dallas and Forth Worth.”

Despite skepticism from all sides,

“Mitchell persisted, working for fifteen years at his own expense. The result was an enhanced version of a technique called hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – that extracts natural gas by expanding natural or man-made fractures in rock.”

The 86-year-old Mitchell, the son of a Greek immigrant, father of ten, and self-made man, ranks as the 347^th richest man in the world. Demanding that a George Mitchell “give back” implies he took something that was not his. Not true at all. Mitchell’s $2.4 billion wealth is a pittance compared to the value he added to society.

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Politics or Ideology? Obama's Curious Indifference to Trillion Dollar Deficits

It is official. The CBO in its January 4 press statement (The “Fiscal Cliff” Deal) declared that Congress’s January 1 agreement will “produce (ten year) deficits that are smaller— but only by $0.7 trillion to $0.8 trillion.” Thus we face annual deficits of $920 to $930 billion even, in the unlikely case, that sequestered spending cuts go into effect and Obama Care’s costs come in on target. Continuing as is means trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

Even five years of trillion dollar deficits are unsustainable: At normal interest rates of 5 percent, almost all personal income tax revenues would go to pay interest, which would exceed expenditures on social security! Only the Fed’s Bernanke’s incessant quantitative easing conceals the mess we are in.

As we barrel down the road to fiscal ruin, Obama shows no interest in reforming the entitlements that are driving the crisis. He demagogues those who propose to control discretionary outlays, and he diverts blame to others: “Everything would be fine if the rich pay their fair share,” he repeats, while knowing the U.S. taxes its rich more heavily than any other country.

Obama’s indifference to the looming debt catastrophe could have two explanations (We rule out that Obama cannot do arithmetic. He claims he “can do the math.”)

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Republicans Must Play to Win the Long Game

Barack Obama is dead set on an entitlement state of European proportions financed with trillion dollar deficits. When the deficits become unsustainable, he or his successor must either impose massive tax increases on everyone or dismantle Obama’s signal achievement: an “Entitlement America” that guarantees everyone a “decent standard of living.” Obama hopes that when the day of reckoning comes, the American public will be so hooked on entitlements that they will grudgingly accept higher taxes – a questionable proposition.

If Obama had come clean with the American public on his intentions, Mitt Romney would be President of the United States.

Obama won the election by falsely claiming, among other things, that our fiscal problems would be resolved if the rich just paid their fair share. The fiscal cliff skirmish showed otherwise, to no one’s surprise. To cite an influential Obama supporter: “Raising rates on the top 2 percent was never going to be enough anyway.” (I thought taxing the top 2 percent was supposed to solve our problems.)

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