Townhall...
Obama
Scolds Nation: You’ve Gotten
Soft
By Larry Elder
October 6, 2011
“The
way I think about it is, you
know, this is, uh, you know, a great, uh, great country that had gotten
a
little soft, and you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge
that we
needed over the last, uh, couple of decades. We need to get back on
track.” --
President Barack Obama.
The
gall is breathtaking, even from a
man who as a presidential candidate said, “We are the ones we’ve been
waiting
for.”
This
from a President who, in
chastising the rich, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made
enough
money.”
This
from a man who, during the brief
time he actually worked in the private sector, represented a black
woman who
accused a bank of redlining her out of a loan. The proximate cause of
the
housing bubble and meltdown is the notion that the “underrepresented”
deserve a
home, whether or not they qualified under traditional lending criteria.
This
from a man who told a Toledo
plumber that government should “spread the wealth around” by taxing
“the rich”
and giving the money to others, because “it’s good for everybody.”
This
from a man who blasts any
suggestion that young people just might be capable of investing a
portion of
their Social Security contribution into an account that they manage.
Former
Congresswoman and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, in
opposing
the idea, fretted for those who lack “the knowledge and the
wherewithal” to
handle the responsibility.
This
from a flip-flopper who initially
opposed the 1996 welfare reform -- legislation that resulted in a 50
percent
reduction in the welfare rolls, and without a corresponding increase in
teen
pregnancy. Then-state Sen. Obama called President Bill Clinton’s
support of the
federal bill “disturbing,” and a year later -- on the Illinois state
Senate
floor -- he said, “I probably would not have supported the federal
legislation.” A decade later, when presidential candidate Obama was
asked if he
would have signed or vetoed the ‘96 reform bill, he repeatedly dodged
the
question, insisting that he looked to the next 10 years, not the past
10 years.
Then his campaign began running ads touting the reduction of welfare
cases made
possible by the 1996 reforms.
This
from a man who blames corporations
for “shipping jobs overseas,” yet shows no concern for the high
corporate tax
rates -- rates that would be unnecessary were the federal government to
actually stick to the handful of duties permitted by the Constitution.
This
from a man who thinks it’s the
government’s job to “invest” in “green jobs of the future” because the
private
sector cannot be trusted to take risks.
To
the extent America has gotten
“soft,” Obama can’t mean working hours. The average American works
longer hours
than other people in the industrialized world, including the Japanese,
the
Germans and the British.
Nor
does Obama, by “soft,” mean the
growing and unsustainable reliance on government. In 1900, government,
at all
three levels -- federal, state and local -- took about 10 percent of
the
American workers’ pay. Today, if one assigns a price to unfunded
federal
mandates imposed on the states, government’s take approaches 50
percent. Obama
and his party encourage government growth and expect Americans to
depend on it
for health, welfare and retirement. These are, they tell us, “human
rights.”
So,
let’s recap the President’s
playbook...
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
|