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Obama-Loving
Media Spin the Economy
by Larry
Elder
May 21, 2012
National
Public Radio’s Kai Ryssdal recently talked about the weak economy. His
guests,
two reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times,
acknowledged the
obvious — that the economy is underperforming.
Yet, in the
20 minutes of my sitting and listening in the car in bad Los Angeles
traffic, I
heard no one mention the words “President Barack Obama.”
Time
magazine, in a cover story on the economy, called the current economic
recovery
a “97-pound weakling.” It informs us that our sluggish economy is now
driven by
broad, virtually uncontrollable worldwide economic trends. Only once in
this
lengthy article did Time mention Obama — and only to say that
Republican
presidential challenger Mitt Romney “plans to use the economy as a
hammer
against President Obama.”
That’s it.
The President, Mr. Hope-and-Change, you see, is powerless to do
anything about
the economy. None of that “the buck stops here” stuff for him.
Investor’s
Business Daily writes that our neighbor up north sees things
differently: “The
Obama administration and its economic czars have flailed about for
years,
baffled about how to get the U.S. economy growing. In reality, the
president
need look no further than our neighbor, Canada, whose solid growth is
the
product of tax cuts, fiscal discipline, free trade and energy
development.
That’s made Canada a roaring puma nation, while its supposedly more
powerful
southern neighbor stands on the outside looking in.”
Canadian
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said: “Creating jobs and growth in our
economy is
our top propriety. … We are creating the conditions for businesses to
successfully compete in the global economy by investing in Canada and
creating
jobs and growth for all Canadians. Through our government’s low-tax
plan … we
are continuing to send the message that Canada is open for business and
the
best place to invest.”
What about
the economies of our 50 states? If Obama is powerless to do anything
about the
economy, surely the states alone are at least as impotent?
But low-tax
states outperform high-tax states. Seven states have no personal income
taxes
(PIT) — Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and
Wyoming.
Two states tax only income on interest and dividends — New Hampshire
and
Tennessee. The average state and local revenue growth of these nine
states from
2000 to 2009 was 81.53 percent.
Average
revenue growth in the nine states with the highest PIT rates — Ohio,
Maine,
Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, California, Oregon, Hawaii and New York
— was
44.88 percent.
Similarly,
gross state product growth from 2001 to 2010 averaged 58.54 percent in
the nine
states with no PIT versus 42.06 in the nine states with the highest PIT
rates.
Remember,
our leftist president once told ABC’s Charlie Gibson that he wants to
raise
capital gains taxes — even though Obama conceded that historically
higher
capital taxes lead to less revenue. Then why raise rates at all, asked
Gibson.
“For purposes of fairness,” said then-Sen. Obama.
This is a
president determined to “spread the wealth” to deal with “the gap”
between the
top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. To the Occupy Wall Street
protestors,
this is a president who said, “You are the reason I ran for office.”
This is a
president who said, “I do think at some point you’ve made enough money.”
This is a
president who blames the Wall Street/housing meltdown on greed. As the
see-no-Obama-on-the-economy Time magazine article puts it: “We got into
the
housing mess because we used our homes like ATMs to cover up the fact
that
neither incomes nor jobs have grown as much as they should have in the
past two
decades. It was a myth we all bought into, from the policymakers who
pushed the
idea of an ownership society fueled by debt to interest-rate-lowering
central
bankers who kept the music playing to individuals who took the
mortgages they
knew they couldn’t afford.”
This is the
Obama version of events. Greed. Lack of oversight. Government policy
had
nothing to do with it. Banks just suddenly and for no reason started
lending
money to people they knew could not afford their mortgages.
Time
magazine makes no mention about the central role played by laws like
the
Community Reinvestment Act. Nothing about the government-built and
government-supported behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which
changed the rules
so that “underrepresented” borrowers could buy a home, too. The
government told
lenders to lend to high-risk borrowers — or else. What, or else? The
government
actually threatened fines and held up prudent bank mergers if one or
both sides
did not sufficiently “lend” to borrowers who, under normal
circumstances,
failed to qualify.
NPR,
however, took the pretzel-twisting in defense of Obama to an even
higher level.
When the disappointing first quarter numbers came in, NPR’s Scott
Neuman
actually asked this question: “Common sense says high growth rates are
good and
slower, more modest ones are not so good. But is that always the case?
After
all, the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the early 2000s helped bring on the
recession, as people borrowed and spent their way to prosperity.”
So bad
economic news is actually good economic news. Four more years!
Source:
FrontPageMag
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