Hope And Change: Obama’s Assault On Accountability
We have to be extra careful these days. Stupid salvos are flying everywhere. They’re being fired from the Obama hope-and-change artillery in a barrage that makes Shock and Awe look like aw shucks. You know, Obama’s focused efforts to fulfill his over-and-over-again promises that things are going to be different. Trouble is, his ‘different’ means leveling everything and everyone. Take from achievers. Give to the lesser accomplished. In the process, he’s flattening out our system of economic rewards like a bulldozed landscape, with individual accountability being one of the biggest casualties.
From a prosperity perspective, it doesn’t get much dumber than what Obama is doing. Penalizing success. Rewarding mediocrity. Once he’s poured mediocre over everything, what’s he going to do for an encore? His taking from the rich and giving to everyone else depends on the rich supporting everyone forever because there’s no spending reduction in sight. The rich don’t get to keep their money, of course. They just need to keep slaving away so the Government can take it. But, the economy depends on those same people investing that money, not in the Feds, but in businesses and spending it as consumers. Why is the fact that the rich are disproportionately important to the economy such a hard pill for him to swallow?
Just a few months ago, Obama’s economic reason for increasing unemployment benefits for up to 2 years was to jumpstart the economy immediately. See, folks down on their luck have to spend money as soon as they get it. So, putting billions of dollars in their hands means more consumer spending, which spurs business growth and gets hiring firing again. Presto, employment springing from the unemployed.
It sounded stupid then and, no surprise, it’s turned out to be stupid. There’s been zero GDP growth and a net employment loss since the June 2 retroactive date of the benefits increase. Of the tiny gross job gain, the overwhelming majority is unskilled labor. That’s some of the worst economic news in wave after wave of disappointment over the past two years. Obama can give all of the political speeches he wants. Not one word in any of them can change the fact that capitalist economies do not grow from the bottom up. They grow from the top down. When the top is cut down instead, growth dies. The take-from-the-rich gravy train never leaves the station.
Then there’s Obamacare. The law that had to pass before we could know what was in it. Well, we’re starting to understand that it’s chock full of rewards for unaccountability. But, unaccountability comes at a high price, which falls, unfairly, on everyone. For example, gone are the good health premium discounts. Instead of being rewarded for healthy habits, you get to pay more than your fair share of healthcare costs. Gone is your ability to decline healthcare insurance, a frequent choice of the young and healthy. After all, someone has to pay for the much higher healthcare costs under the Government-defined program, whether you use the services or not.
Meanwhile, other folks can eat their way to an early grave, and the rest of us out of house and home, with no penalty. Nearly two-thirds of adults in our Country are either overweight or obese. These people are much more likely to develop conditions such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and a gravy boat load of other maladies. So, as they raise healthcare costs along with their knives and forks, the burden falls on everyone. Then there’s the problem of people paying no premiums at all. Individuals in that circumstance use the healthcare system 20% more than those who pay premiums because there is no incentive to be prudent. These examples are just the tip of the cost inequity iceberg called Obamacare.
Are we really this far past our prime? Can we truly get behind a guy who’s trying to rip achievement from our economic fabric and replace it with a patchwork of entitlement? That’s a very threadbare wardrobe indeed.
See you on the left-side.