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Townhall...
Will the Buck Ever
Stop on Obama’s Desk?
By David Limbaugh
6/14/2011
If I’d heard the following words, instead of reading them, I might have
assumed they were being delivered by a President Obama impressionist on
“Saturday Night Live.”
But the words were from Obama himself in his latest weekly radio
address. “I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic
problems,” he said. “But the truth is we didn’t get into this mess
overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight. It’s going to take
time.”
Obama has repeated this line ad nauseam ever since it became impossible
to deny that reality had shattered his arrogant guarantee, more than
two years ago, that he would keep unemployment below 8 percent if we
would just pass his $800 billion “stimulus” package.
At the same time, he also introduced his phantom metric of “creating or
saving” 3.5 million jobs -- a device that was as bloated with sophistry
as Bill Clinton’s verbal gyrations with the word “is.” Though the claim
is as improvable as it is immeasurable, our sustained horrendous
unemployment levels nevertheless render it insultingly ludicrous on its
face.
Obama apparently has no plays in his playbook other than to call for
more government intervention and further blame his predecessor. He
believes economic growth can only be rekindled through government
intervention at the direction of his band of central planners.
So what type of grandiose government plan does he have in store for us
now? He has proposed -- and been met with fierce opposition to --
further “stimulus” bills and a separate high-speed rail program that he
is convinced we need even though the American people and the states
disagree.
Undeterred, he’s pursuing other government programs to stimulate
economic activity, such as smothering oil drilling in the Gulf,
extending unemployment benefits, promoting quixotic alternative energy
sources and new automobile emission standards, higher tax rates for the
evil rich, a government takeover of health care, further bailouts for
Greece, and obstructing entitlement reform. Oh, wait, those wouldn’t
stimulate the economy.
What about Obama’s Ivy League economic advisers, who know how to make
an economy hum -- the theoretical, classroom widget-centered economy,
that is. Not the real world. For in the real world, they’re fresh out
of ideas and full of excuses.
Instead, they just keep quitting -- not amid the shame they’ve earned,
but in counterfactual triumph -- and returning to their cushy jobs in
academia, where on their obedient blackboards they map out compliant
economic models “proving” that government spending would trigger those
fabled multipliers and cause their phantom economies to explode.
Meanwhile, back at the real White House, Obama dithers and points
fingers. Oh, yes, he perfunctorily apologizes from time to time for not
making jobs his first priority, but then he continues not to make them
his first priority, until it’s time for the next speech to blame Bush
again. And so it goes.
Increasing numbers of economic analysts are warning that our fiscal
condition is even worse than that of Greece, which has become the
metaphor for national bankruptcy, but Obama persists in lusting after
the European socialism “ideal.”
Reasonable people, unshackled by the poisonous class-warfare mentality
that has Obama imprisoned in a no-growth straitjacket, realize that we
have to decrease government regulations and cut taxes if we want to
rejuvenate the economy. Even Obama’s former White House aide Larry
Summers is calling for tax cuts for that purpose. But more urgent
components of any recovery plan are dramatic spending cuts and
entitlement reform.
President Obama is correct that it has taken a long time to get into
this mess. And without question, it will take a long time to pay down
the national debt. But he’s wrong that it should take a long time to
reverse the economic malaise we’re in, unless he means as long as we
continue with his anti-growth policies.
It’s time for him to man up and quit pointing scapegoating fingers at
George W. Bush. Upon inheriting an egregious economic mess and
unimaginable “misery index” from President Carter, President Reagan
didn’t proceed to blame Carter. He rolled up his sleeves and inside of
a few years had the economy soaring again.
Obama must declare a cease-fire in his war on business and the private
sector and abandon his pursuit of environmental nirvana. If he and the
ruling class would finally legislate into existence a comprehensive
reform plan, such as that proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan, to repeal
Obamacare, cut nonmilitary discretionary spending and income tax rates,
implement structural entitlement reform, and eliminate onerous
government regulations, we would see an immediate and profound
reduction in the crippling anxiety that envelops this nation over our
uncertain future. We’d see a genuine explosion in consumer confidence
and economic growth that would make Obama’s further scapegoating
utterly moot.
Read it at Townhall
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