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Government Needs a Low-Obama Diet
By John Ransom
6/24/11

 When it’s gotten to the point that advertisers won’t be able to market milk to kids because of restrictions placed on them by the Obama administration, you know we’ve met more than just a crisis of confidence in the country. 

New regulations proposed by Obama’s FTC would prohibit putting a kid’s favorite athlete on a carton of whole or 2% milk within the next four years. 

Every day, people go to work across the country and try to figure out how to sell more products so they can keep their jobs, make their house payments and generally get on with the business of life. For the 70 percent of us who don’t draw government paychecks, that’s how we create economic certainty for ourselves and our families. 

Some of us sell houses and some of us sell milk. 

But right now, big, fat government is standing in our way- too wide, we can’t get around it; too tall we can’t get over it and it’s killing our economy. 

While there are a lot of proposals out there on how to get the economy going again, most of them have this fatal flaw: They assume that our problem is in not having enough money when in fact, the amount of money available in the “system” has never been greater. 

There’s just a bit shy of $2 trillion in ready currency available for spending according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  By every other measure too, there’s plenty of money for job creation. 

What the economy is missing is commercial loan activity or a willingness by corporate boards to part with cash. It’s missing those components because bankers and board members generally aren’t dopes when it comes to business decisions. 

Nope, we have enough money to get out of the doldrums. The problem isn’t liquidity. 

The problem is that we have way more Obama than our economy can stand. 

In addition to wanting to ban marketing whole and 2% milk, the Obama administration is also suggesting that we ban marketing peanut butter, whole wheat and whole grain breads, most soups, vegetable juice, cheese, oatmeal, canned vegetables, most yogurts, cereal bars, popcorn and pretzels. 

Apparently there’s a belief that kids are consuming huge amounts of oatmeal and whole grain breads while they watch yoga shows sitting on the couch, and, as a consequence, they’ve become fat. 

In an administration that’s turned doing nothing about the real serious problems of the country into a high art form- or at least a round of golf- they are also quite accomplished at creating solutions in search of problems. 

Certainly there are fat kids out there. But my kids aren’t fat and I really don’t know any fat kids either. And my guess is that if there are more fat kids today, it has a lot to do with not providing adequate adult supervision, rather than company advertising.  

In truth, the best diet we could impose on the country right now is denying the Obama administration both cash and regulatory authority. They’re the kids who could really use lots of adult supervision and even more slimming down.  

Not a day goes by that I don’t see several stories about how the administration is trying to either sue some business or impose new regulations on them. 

It’s absolutely impossible for business owners to make competent plans to hire people under the Obama administration. 

About the only person in the administration who seems to realize how hard it is the get new business is Obama’s new chief of staff Bill Daley, himself a former banker.  

“White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley took heat from business executives Thursday for the Obama administration’s regulatory expansions,” reports FoxNews. “Daley also said he didn’t have any good answers for some of what President Obama is doing and expressed frustration about the ‘bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.’”  

So stop it then. 

On Sunday it was a billion dollars or two and let’s shut down 18 existing power plants with the help of an eco-terror group WildEarth Guardians and an assist from the EPA; yesterday it was banning mining near the Grand Canyon by the wild-man of the West, Interior Secretary Ken “I-am-a-real-cowboy” Salazar. 

Next year it will be the imposition of Obamacare and the increasing costs the economy will have to absorb from it.  

You don’t have to look very far to find the jobs missing from our economy. 

Because the Obama administration has now thoughtfully printed some of them on the side of a milk carton. 

Read it at Townhall