Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Recovery?

As the President bounces back and forth across the country trying to reinvigorate his base he has taken a new approach. It is one which is creative and novel. It has never been done before. It is most definitely thinking outside the box. It may not even acknowledge that a box exists. It is visionary and revolutionary. Wait a second, strike "revolutionary". That word has too much negative context when applied to Obama policies.

Ronald Reagan won an election against an incumbent President with a cogent question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The incumbent had successfully ceded the Panama Canal to another nation, allowed our strongest Middle-East ally to be overthrown and our embassy staff to be taken hostage, and managed the economy into 21% inflation and 18% prime interest rates. The election was a landslide.

The Bamster likes to compare his leadership to other Presidents and surprisingly they are often Republicans. We've heard him raise the Lincoln legacy as being similar to what he is doing. Somehow that one never quite has the ring of authenticity but in a society with little historic knowledge, he gets away with it.

He's used a Reagan comparison before as well. That is even more ludicrous. The believer in American exceptionalism and free market success was not the slightest bit like the current incumbent. So maybe the new Reagan linkage is going to be the ticket for the Bamster to ride.

He doesn't ask the question that Reagan asked. He answers it. He's begun to tell people they are worse off than they were four years ago and that's why you should give him another four years in the job. He just hasn't been able to get enough stimulus dollars to his base and he hasn't really driven the successful into poverty yet. If we give him more time, he can finish the job.

Bleeding Jobs Increases Pace

Someone needs to point out to Ben Bernanke that the recovery isn't in danger of faltering, as he testified before Congress yesterday. There has been no bloody recovering in the first place. Throwing money into government make-work projects and continual threats to regulate businesses out of profitability are not productive policies.

Promising tax cuts to people who pay no taxes and proposing massive punitive taxation on those who actually hire workers is not effective either.

3 comments:

drjim said...

The standard cry of every socialist...."But we need more time, and everything will work out".
Yeah. Right......

Anonymous said...

"Trust me, I'm with the government."

Ed Skinner said...

Only somewhat related to this post, I'd like to ask you to develop a list of "Really Good History Books." These would be books you have read that you found to be particularly informative, very readable and not overly prejudicial in coverage. You have a following, through this blog, and at least one of that group, myself, would follow-up such a list by reading some of them and, with curiosity tweaked thereby, following the thoughts to other books, perhaps less readable but with a broader content.
For example, "Miracle at Philadelphia" about the framing of the US Constitution was, to me, a "seed book" that provoked enough curiosity to get me through (most of) The Federalist Papers, and to ultimately provide a very thorough founding in the basis of our political system. (Hopefully it will survive the current abuses and then next President will steer things back toward that document's goals.)
Regardless of such a book list, I will continue to read and enjoy your often thought-provoking posts.