What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[4est_4est_Gump]

Or, as the philosophers of Zuccotti Park call them, the 1 percent. For Obama, these rich are the ones holding back the 99 percent. The “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class. If only the rich paid their “fair share,” the middle class would have a chance. Otherwise, government won’t have enough funds to “invest” in education and innovation, the golden path to the sunny uplands of economic growth and opportunity.

Where to begin? A country spending twice as much per capita on education as it did in 1970 with zero effect on test scores is not underinvesting in education. It’s mis-investing. As for federally directed spending on innovation — like Solyndra? Ethanol? The preposterously subsidized, flammable Chevy Volt?

Our current economic distress is attributable to myriad causes: globalization, expensive high-tech medicine, a huge debt burden, a burst housing bubble largely driven by precisely the egalitarian impulse that Obama is promoting (government aggressively pushing “affordable housing” that turned out to be disastrously unaffordable), an aging population straining the social safety net. Yes, growing inequality is a problem throughout the Western world. But Obama’s pretense that it is the root cause of this sick economy is ridiculous.

As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.

This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.

As for those structural problems, Obama has spent three years on signature policies that either ignore or aggravate them:

A massive stimulus, a gigantic payoff to Democratic interest groups (such as teachers and public-sector unions) that will add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.

A sweeping federally run reorganization of health care that (a) cost Congress a year, (b) created an entirely new entitlement in a nation hemorrhaging from unsustainable entitlements, (c) introduced new levels of uncertainty into an already stagnant economy.

High-handed regulation, best exemplified by Obama’s failed cap-and-trade legislation, promptly followed by an EPA trying to impose the same conventional-energy-killing agenda by administrative means.

Moreover, on the one issue that already enjoys a bipartisan consensus — the need for fundamental reform of a corrosive, corrupted tax code that misdirects capital and promotes unfairness — Obama did nothing, ignoring the recommendations of several bipartisan commissions, including his own.

In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!

Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.

This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chávez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation, and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?

Charles Krauthammer, NRO

 

[busybody..]

Boehner Calls the President’s Bluff

December 9, 2011 11:03 A.M.

By Douglas Holtz-Eakin






Jobs are the top priority. Republicans say it. Democrats say it. And most interestingly, President Obama says it.

From a policy perspective, this should mean that economic growth is the preeminent policy objective, trumping competing objectives. What, then, explains the recent performance of President Obama?

On Tuesday, he traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas to channel his inner Teddy Roosevelt. But instead of expressing TR’s faith in competitive markets and economic freedom, Obama unleashed an anti-success screed the must give pause to any entrepreneur tempted to expand, anycorporation sitting with cash on its balance sheets, or any bank tempted to make a loan. Why attack that which you need most?

Similarly, the president has steadfastly opposed moving ahead with the Keystone XL pipeline, a lock-solid job-creator that would also improve economic relations with the largest trading partner of the United States. Feigning a concern over unknown environmental implications — there is simply nothing to be learned over the next year — he has threatened to veto any legislative attempt to move ahead, even if it is paired with his proposed payroll tax cut.

He’s a one-man circular firing squad.

Fortunately, Speaker John Boehner has kept his eye on the jobs objective and will attempt to move through the Congress a bill that includes Keystone XL. Perhaps this will be he moment that finally reveals the president’s real motivation. Will he pursue the pro-growth objectives that presumably coincide with his need to have a stronger economy to get reelected? Or has he given up on the recovery and decided that the route to election is to divide America, pander to progressives, and relegate overall well-being to the back seat?

 

[busybody..]

This should shut the NIGGER UD's asshole shut

It wont

But

It should

A Mortifying Picture of the S & P 500


Words can be powerful. An image or, in this case, a chart, can be even more so.

The chart released by the Club For Growth shows the Standard and Poor’s (S & P) 500 Index in chart form, below: it reflects the status of the 500 leading companies in leading industries of the U.S. economy, capturing 75% coverage of U.S. equities, showing that President Obama’s third year in office is the worst of any president’s third year in office since S & P began keeping records.

Although much emphasis has been placed on the nation’s high unemployment numbers, less press attention has focussed on the tanking of the S & P 500 in this, the third year of the Obama Presidency. S & P has made this study since 1957, and released the third year figures for all presidencies beginning with Nixon’s in 1971.

As the chart below vividly illustrates, there has been nothing remotely comparable to present conditions in recent memory:



President

Year


S&P Return




Nixon

1971


14.3%



Carter

1979


18.4%



Reagan

1983


22.5%



Bush I

1991


30.6%



Clinton

1995


37.4%



Bush II

2003


28.7%



Obama

2011


1.9%


If I were the in charge of the Republican National Committee, I would plaster that chart on everything I could possibly afford, from babies’ t-shirts to billboards to national TV commercials during the Super Bowl to full-page ads in a few well-chosen newspapers — i.e., not The New York Times, or any newspaper owned by the New York Times Company.

I would do all I could to make sure every voter understands the sinkhole our nation and its economy is in, and urge voters to think of that chart and of the millions of jobless Americans on November 6, 2012 and every day between now and then.

Enjoy your 17-day vacation in Hawaii, Barry. The country is doubtless better off the further you are from your desk in the Oval Office. Three years of your sitting there have yielded the opposite of hope. That would be despair.

 

[unregistered]

 

[NeverEndingMe]

But Obama is protected so the MSM will assist his reelection by not mentioning it.

and Taxes & entitlements are the only way out of the recession!

after all, Government is the 1%

 

[busybody..]

Hey CLOWN

Yes, YOU

NIGGER SHITTER SAVAGE (he who does not care)


read

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/09/obamas-epa-skipping-a-few-steps-on-climate-regs/

I know, its a LIE and MEANS NOTHING.................


I think Im gonna call you Lizze

After teh cops in Lisbon

 

[JohnnySavage]

Hey CLOWN

Yes, YOU

NIGGER SHITTER SAVAGE (he who does not care)


read

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/09/obamas-epa-skipping-a-few-steps-on-climate-regs/

I know, its a LIE and MEANS NOTHING.................


I think Im gonna call you Lizze

After teh cops in Lisbon

Wait a minute… the EPA is supposedly in the process of reviewing more than a million comments from citizens, energy producers, workers and everyone else. There allegedly isn’t a decision yet. But somehow Barack Obama already knows the outcome? Was this question ever seriously being looked at, or was it a fait accompli before the first screams emerged about the lost jobs to come and the strain on the energy grid, particularly in Texas and adjoining states?

Ms. JAZZ SHAW apparently skipped the class in 9th grade Civics where most children learn about the obligations of the Executive branch to comply with the orders of the Judicial branch.

These things are very fundamental to our form of government and I find it shocking that an internet reporter from a site called HotAir doesn't seem to understand these things.

Probably went to a public school.

 

[unregistered]

 

[JohnnySavage]

The comments are for show, their minds are already made up, having been dictated by hairy people in California.

They were directed by a U.S. District Court Judge.

The judge said, "We've had this Clean Air Act for almost 40 years now. Isn't it about time the EPA wrote some regulations to implement it?"

A rather reasonable question, I think.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[islandman]

The comments are for show, their minds are already made up, having been dictated by hairy people in California.

Who are the "hairy people in California"?

 

[RobDownSouth]

Who are the "hairy people in California"?

Vetteman has devoted his remaining years, like many aging lower middle class white males who never really amounted to anything, to re-fighting the 60s.

...it's called "Hippie Punching".

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

Your residual 60s hallucinations notwithstanding, I did amount to something, and the environmental policy of the American left is being written by the decrepit hippies of the 60s era, now ensconced in the halls of the EPA.

Patently false. You never amounted to anything.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Your residual 60s hallucinations notwithstanding, I did amount to something, and the environmental policy of the American left is being written by the decrepit hippies of the 60s era, now ensconced in the halls of the EPA.

Your environmental positions shock me, considering you seem to enjoy the out of doors.

I grew up in Appalachia and I remember the streams running red with mine wastes and the forests dying from the acid rain. Prior to the environmental regulations of the 70s the hills were full of scars from strip mining and the rivers were dead. The rivers are clean now and acid rain is a thing of the past - 100% due to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

It seems a bit of an overstatement, but do you want to go back to the way things were then?

 

[unregistered]

 

[JohnnySavage]

Don't ask me dumb questions Johnny, I am an outdoorsman. I put my money where my mouth is when it comes to the outdoors. I live in the strictest environmental state in the union where business has been destroyed by environmental overreach. So I know what the states are capable of. Environmental law can be enforced at the state level. We do not need a huge collection of business hating Marxists at the federal level using the environment to drive the country into economic chaos. Let the states handle it, nobody wants to drink dirty water, despite the bullshit of the left.

So in the 70s West Virginia could have told Ohio to stop polluting the Mountains with their power plants?

 

[unregistered]

 

[JohnnySavage]

Would they do it today?

No need to. We have national standards now and the environment is much cleaner because of it.

 

[Disgustipated]

Don't ask me dumb questions Johnny, I am an outdoorsman. I put my money where my mouth is when it comes to the outdoors. I live in the strictest environmental state in the union where business has been destroyed by environmental overreach. So I know what the states are capable of. Environmental law can be enforced at the state level. We do not need a huge collection of business hating Marxists at the federal level using the environment to drive the country into economic chaos. Let the states handle it, nobody wants to drink dirty water, despite the bullshit of the left.

Once again, tubby... the EPA was created, signed and enacted by your boy Nixon. Own it. Not even that traitor wanted to drink dirty water.

 

[garbage can]

Once again, tubby... the EPA was created, signed and enacted by your boy Nixon. Own it. Not even that traitor wanted to drink dirty water.

Err what was traitorous about Watergate??

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g79/jbravo688/3652639975_b5391c7123.jpg


Thanks for quoting Lil' Luke Garby. He'll never elevate himself to true Chihuahua posting status here at Lit; Yes, he has left home and dropped down to Earth to make his mark on the world, but despite his pitiful efforts he'll never be anything except a little dingle berry getting pulled around by his betters.

More scat references from our local closeted coward.

 

[unregistered]