We started hearing about it six months after President Obama’s inauguration. The new normal. You know, permanently lowered economic expectations. A downturn that never looked back. Or up. From here on out, consumers are living lean by spending a whole lot less. High unemployment is a fact of life. So are vast, bleak oceans of foreclosed houses, deserted strip malls and boarded up storefronts. The nation’s debt throttle is stuck in high gear. Taxes barely invented are already squeezing…
In a bizarre campaign speech last week, President Obama likened the economic recovery to slavery. “Slaves sittin’ around a fire singin’ freedom songs, they weren’t sure when slavery would end, but they understood it was gonna end.” He also compared the recovery to women “marchin for the right to vote” and workers “organizin’ for the right to organize.” His punch line was, “We are bringin’ about change and progress is gonna come, but you’ve gotta stick with me. You can’t lose heart.”..
Just like those pesky Romulan ships from the old Star Trek series, our economic recovery has an excellent cloaking device, making it invisible, too. It’s masked by recurring bad news in almost every economic sector. We’re all feeling the crunch. In the second quarter of this year, the net worth of American households fell for the first time since early 2009. The average household debt is 119% of annual income…
Today, Obama is announcing yet another big government push to get the economy off the dime. Just in time to try to turn back a predicted tsunami of voter rejection come November. Of course, getting the recovery really going would be a great thing for all of us, not just Obama. And we’d like to root for him, except he can’t pull it off. Why not? Businesses and consumers, not politicians, restore a healthy economy. There are things…
In the past ten days or so, President Obama sucked up a lot of airtime droning on about constitutional rights and the mosque near Ground Zero. But, his lectures amount to a zero because whether constitutional rights apply depends, not on Obama’s view, but on judicial review. He knows as well as anyone in America that freedom of religion, like other constitutional rights, is not absolute. If competing interests are strong enough, they can prevail…
We’re hearing it more and more now days. Entitlements threaten our national survival. They’re like a gargantuan poisonous spider trapping taxpayers, the economy, even our social fabric, in a web of taxes, spending and debt. The web seems unbreakable because it’s spun from threads of insatiable political greed so strong they threaten to destroy over 230 years of national prosperity. And we kind of ho-hum our way through it all because the debt, at least, is old news…
