Obama’s Policies Are Gutting the Middle Class
It was more than a little disconcerting to watch President Barack Obama pretend to be a friend of the middle class in Kansas on December 6, and to watch the press lap it up as if it was the gospel truth. The record shows that Obama’s and his party’s policies, plans, and proposals have done more harm to the middle class than any administration in my lifetime.
One of Obama’s core claims is that the policies of the past, coming from largely Republican administrations espousing and carrying out conservative ideas, are what brought the economy to the brink, and that those ideas and policies must never again be considered.
Setting aside for the moment the fact that those ideas and policies were often not conservative enough, Obama’s historical revisionism is about as brazenly dishonest as it gets. After all:
- I don’t recall the Community Reinvestment Act, which over several decades morphed into a sledgehammer forcing banks to act against their own interests or face endless litigation at the hands of ACORN-like groups, being a Republican or conservative policy.
- I don’t recall current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s determination to make mortgage financing available based on ethnicity instead of ability and willingness to pay when he ran the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton something that Republicans or conservatives cheered.
- Finally, I don’t recall the systematic undermining of the market for mortgage-backed securities undertaken by Democratic Party cronies who ran the frauds by design known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac having Republican or conservative approval. While it’s true that Fan and Fred had some RINO defenders, none of them — and for that matter almost no one else in the country besides Democratic insiders — knew that for fifteen years, Fan and Fred “routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring,” presenting them as being of higher quality than they really were. As a result, mortgage-backed securities holders unknowingly bought hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of junk.
The housing and mortgage lending messes, which were almost entirely the creation of Democratic Party policies and Democrat apparatchiks’ backroom scheming, are what brought the economy down. It certainly wasn’t the straw-man, “on your own” mindset Obama chose to demonize in his speech.
The principal economic policy features of the quarter-century stretch Obama wants to send down the memory hole were tax cuts (with booming tax receipts, which the smarties said would never happen) and at least some regulatory restraint (but really not enough). The president claimed that this set of policies “doesn’t work. It has never worked.”
Horse manure. Until things came to a head in housing, as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out on December 7:
The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation … was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. Reaganomics worked. But Obama acts as if that generation of steady growth … never happened since it doesn’t fit into his disingenuous narrative.
Once we were in the mess, the policies the newly-elected Obama chose to get us out were the ones which so obviously failed to get us out of serious difficulty in the past — which leaves Obama’s seriousness about wanting to get us out open to question. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s statist “solutions” for the Depression never brought unemployment below 12% during the 1930s. Similarly, three years of round after round of Keynesian stimulus, Keynesian money-printing, and unprecedented Keynesian deficits, combined with previously unseen regulatory excesses, have left the private sector’s output smaller than it was almost four years ago. We still have supposedly grown men and women on the left who continue to claim, during the worst recovery since World War II, that the best form of economic stimulus is continuing to give money to those who aren’t working.
We’ve had a chance to see what the policies Obama said would work will continue to bring us if sustained. It has not been pretty, especially when compared to the analogous Reagan-era time period:
- In the 29 months since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has added a bit less than 2 million seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs. Federal government employment is virtually unchanged despite substantial job losses at the postal service, while previously bloated state and local governments have shed over 550,000 jobs. During the first 29 months after the last full quarter of the Reagan-era recession when the workforce was about 25% smaller, what “doesn’t work” brought us over 7.3 million additional jobs, including more than 400,000 in the public sector.
- During the nine quarters after the most recent recession ended, the economy has grown by 5.5%. During the analogous nine quarters under Reagan, what “has never worked” caused the economy to grow by 14%, a full 2-1/2 times faster.
- The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate since the most recent recession ended has gone from 9.5% to 8.6% — and November’s reading had many disturbing “going Galt” elements underlying it. The comparable drop during the Reagan era? From 10.1% to 7.2%, over three times greater.
- The economy’s cadre of temporary, seasonal, and part-time workers continues to swell. Incredibly, the economy had only 417,000 more full-time workers in November than it did at the end of the recession. The comparable Reagan-era period saw 6.9 million full-timers added. Employers are avoiding and will continue to avoid adding full-time help as long as they can until they see whether the malaise known as Obamanomics will get another four-year run, and whether the monstrosity known as ObamaCare survives court challenges.
Slow growth, out-of-control regulation, and chronic uncertainty have caused millions of the unemployed to stay that way, making them even more unemployable with each passing day. Millions of others are seeing their skills underutilized. Team Obama’s gutting of the middle class thus far has been quite effective. Give ‘em four more years, and they might just finish the job, all the while pretending to be the average American’s best friend.
What disturbs me is not knowing;
Is Obama simply stupid and cannot deduce what is going on with his policies, making him genuinly confused as to why recovery has not begun yet…
Or
Is he deliberately trying to destroy the Economy to create the conditions wherein he can take the country on an Extra-Constitutional course, similar to what Venesuala is going through?
Oh, he’s not stupid.
And even if he is, Puppetmaster Soros isn’t. We all need to study Soros if we want to be forewarned of the dirty tricks that will be flying fast and furious in 2012.
“…similar to what Venesuala is going through?”
Considering the adulation bestowed by his press, and Peggy Joseph, I can only deduce Option #2 to be the case.
He is not stupid and your comparison to Venezuela is right on the money. Many of his minions openly praise Chavez, Mao, and the like.
Mr. Blumer is also correct in pointing out that the leftist policies regarding the housing and banking industries are responsible for the ailing economy. The evidence for that is plain, the reasoning behind this analysis is simple and the leftists understand it all very well. The reason they keep espousing the same failed policies is because it gives them opportunities to steal. They are thieves and liars plain and simple.
I once knew a former nazi-resistance fighter who, if you brought up socialism in conversation, would instantly become seething mad. His bald head and face would turn beet red and he would literally foam at the mouth. He would start pounding his fist and through clenched teeth would say “You cannot talk to dem! Dere is only one vay to deal vith dem!”
I certainly hope he was wrong. Looking at the large number of people on various blogs who regurgitate the moronic leftist talking points makes me very afraid.
jd, I’d say it’s BOTH:
“Smart/devious” enough for the Chavez-schtick, but
“incompetent” enough to 1) enforce Leftist policies, 2) see them fail, and yet 3) NOT learn from the embarassment (which otherwise would have been routinely paraded before him by the Media).
Of course, the media is complicit in all of this, such is their wont for a socialist state. Many (most?) of them have been to Europe and probably became fascinated by their expense-paid field trips to see how clean the streets were, how orderly all the people were and how all the laws were designed for “the peoples’ own good”.
Such is the shallow perception of a liberal news hack. And they couple that fascination with their own hatred of their own conservative Jewish or Christian upbringing (hippie rebellion) in order to fight against what they perceive to be wrong with the world. But as in the case of Gwen Eifel, Brian Williams, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher, and so many others, it comes across as the genuine arrogance and ignorance that it is.
Still, mainstream media news is slowly dying. The internet is picking up where truth-in-reporting left off some years ago. Again, this is why the socialists in this nation want to clamp down on it, they feel it is hurting their “message” which, if you look closely enough (or not) is simply filled with anger and hatred toward everything this nation ever did.
We have become a dysfunctional nation again, much the way we were in the 1960′s but with more and greater symptoms. At least in the 60′s there were still plenty of people who knew the hippie movement was bunk. Nowadays a larger percentage buys into the garbage and claims victim-hood or repression of some kind. The paradigm shift is very unsettling and of course, the current administration is fostering that shift and encouraging more unrest.
I’d like to think that just as it was Johnson’s undoing in the 60′s so it will be for Obama.
Very telling, also that faux economist Thomas Friedman openly envys Chinese’s controll, espousing the notion “we are too free” over here. Don’t forget our president openly lamenting his lack of Chinese style authority to get things done on his own and his naked misues of Exec. orders. And the government Union leader Andy Stern dancing prematurely on the grave of capitalism while prasing the Chinese economic model. I ran into the “we are too free” philosophy a couple of times more than 15 years ago, on these occasions both of these people were highly educated and employed in the banking world. Of course “being too free” did not apply to them, only the masses of asses. It is simply amazing to me to watch the media’s unbridled enthusiasm for the end of freedom as we(Americans) know it.
Why can’t he be both? He is evil because he is genuinely trying to hurt the middle class, because in his fantasy world the middle class is entirely a white ‘power structure’ and hurting them somehow helps “The Poor” (almost all ‘people of color’ in his fantasy world). BUT he also is stupid *because* he truly believes the idiotic worldviews fed to him by Marxist professors, fantasies which are demonstrably false. IOW, he is both stupid AND evil….It’s only in bad B movies that ‘genius’ automatically follows ‘evil’. BHO is an ‘evil moron’, or more aptly, an ‘evil affirmative action beneficiary of no more than average intellect’.
The Fabian in the White House is stupid, if you believe:
1)That being mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a CPUSA advocate, held no influence over him;
2)That his Dreams from his Father, who was an avowed anti-capitalist, and wrote a paper on “Our Socialism”, did not take hold;
3)That his time working hand in hand with the Midwest Academy, the New Party, Cooper Union crowd…was merely a matter of happenstance, and did not signal an affinity for the Cloward-Piven approach to dismantling the free market by overloading it and causing it to seize up…whereupon, the leftists could then takeover whole industries;
4)That sitting in the pew every Sunday in the James Cone, leftist black militancy rage fest, from his dear friend and mentor, Jeremiah Wright did not have an ounce of influence on how much audacity he could infuse into the free market system;
5)That George Soros and the shadow party have absolutely no influence over how to “adjust” the capitalist system, which in their view, needs an overhaul;
6)If you put no stock in the “you have earned enough”, “tax the “rich” and make them pay their “fair share”, REDISTRIBUTE wealth accumulated by others in order to “make things more equal”;
7)If dear friend Michael Pfleger’s minstrel rant on “yo daddy’s 401k” and “yo granddaddy’s 401k”…don’t really “belong” to them…it’s an unfair “grab” of wealth;
8)If you don’t believe that we are “enemies” of UNO and other race-baiting and ethnic warfare;
Because…if you DO believe that you would never launch YOUR political career in the living room of a man and a woman who plotted to murder our boys in uniform with nail bombs and their innocent dates…in fact, if you would never find yourself in ANY social situation with someone that despicable, that deranged, that criminal..then you might believe that there is intent behind some of the things you see.
Of course…it could all be coincidence too.
Obama is living proof that one can be stupid, evil, and completely delusional all at the same time. Contrast him with Biden, who is merely stupid and evil.
I’m going to go with both, since even Chavez knows that if you want to redistribute the wealth, you have to drill the oil (or gas, as the case may be).
You better believe it is the latter.
Obama is not crazy or stupid. His strange behavior can be explained by his base in the Democratic Party. He has to please constituencies with clashing interests, and he can’t do one thing without infuriating another element of those he wants to vote for him next year. I wrote about the base of the Dems here: http://clarespark.com/2010/04/05/is-potus-crazy/.
I don’t think Obama is stupid or that he’s trying to bankrupt the country. Rather, I suspect that like most statists, he doesn’t really believe that scarcity limits the state.
One must first believe in scarcity, i.e. that there is less of stuff than people want, before one can believe most of what economics teaches, particularly opportunity cost. Just about every statist I’ve ever talked to or read seems to deny that scarcity limits the state in any way, such that there’s no economic limit to the amount of money that the state can print, borrow, tax or spend. All limits on the state are politically imposed for partisan reasons, and the economy seems to grow or shrink as the politicians decree.
Imagine how you’d think about economic policy if you believed as Obama does. Your stimulus would have worked better if only it had been bigger, so what you need is another one just like it. Never mind that the first stimulus was designed to maintain the rapid growth of the public sector over the last decade and not to stimulate demand going forward. You want a green economy and jobs? Just borrow billions from the Chinese and throw them at green energy companies. In the meantime, turn the regulatory screws on the carbon energy sector to put them out of business; there’s plenty of money to throw at their soon to be unemployed workers. Oh, and don’t worry about the cost of energy on business; companies will simply have to cut their profits and executive perks to make up the difference.
Now, why is there economic inequality? Because greedy rich people hoard their money to keep it away from the poor so that they’ll suffer? No. Scarcity does not limit the state, ergo there can only be poor people if the state doesn’t borrow or print enough money to spend on them. Therefore, economic inequality isn’t a feature of human nature but one of politics, and Obama’s politics provide the remedy.
Obama would heal us if we let him, but we’re too darn ignorant and stubborn and bigoted and religious and ensnared in our false class consciousness to acquiesce. Isn’t this what the left have preached these past three years? Indeed, and the sermon relies on one article of faith: Scarcity does not limit the state.
He is following the Clover-Piven stratgedy.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
That stratgedy is trying to overload the public welfare system to ultimately bring us into complete socialism. But he can’t come out and say that, too many in this country would rebel against him. So he pretends to work for the middle class while working against them at every turn.
This is what redistribution of wealth is all about. The rich have more so they will always survive, the poor can’t be gutted because they have nothing of value but ah, the middle class ( these days middle class means those above the poverty line and making less than 250,000 a year whether they run a business or both adults in a family work). They can be nullified. They can be controlled, manipulated and taken advantage of.
While this is a broad brush I think it is true that the rich by and large aren’t religious in nature. They have depended on the “arm of the flesh” for a long time. Even those with inherited money don’t see the need to believe in anything greater than man. The poor by and large also don’t head off to church as a rule. They prefer to get their help from an entity that doesn’t expect them to do anything for it. Most churches expect those who get help from them to do certain things and not do others. Most people don’t want anyone putting limits on their behavior.
The middle class though, these are the church goers, the tithe payers, the tax payers, the family raisers, the savers, the spenders, the engine of this country and the world. There was a very interesting book out years ago which sought to remind us that world wide there are many more poor nations and many more poor within nations than producers and with industrialized nations approaching zero population growth, there are soon going to be too many who don’t produce as opposed to those who do. What then will happen to those who are the non producers when there are no longer those who take care of them, fund their towns, aid their countries to feed their people?
Here in this country we’ve already seen, thanks to the occupy movement, what happens when people throw away self sufficiency and personal responsibility and embrace the Nanny state. The chaos, the anarchy, the lawlessness of occupy camps with their violence, danger and destruction shows what life is like in a liberal utopia. Without laws and morals civilization will sink into the abyss. Most of us who are thinking individuals do not want any part of this. Hence the approval rating of Obama and Congress. If he keeps it up there will be a rise in consumer spending…….
at the torch and pitchfork stores at least.
Religious devotion is independent of wealth (or lack thereof). Please allow your stereotypes to be abused by the Left.
Like all European-style far-left politicians, the last thing Obama wants is a strong middle class with lots of job opportunities. He wants everybody poor and dependent on the Federal government, just like the way it is in Europe. Then he can still sink even more money into the Federal bureaucracy, growing it and having even more people dependent on it. But what makes Obama even more disgusting, even more reprehensible, is that all of the welfare states in Europe are failing right now, right before his very eyes. They are all bankrupt and scrambling to find ways not to default on their bonds (which they will, by the way). Yet seeing all this evidence that the European welfare state will not work, seeing all this evidence that not only will it fail, but also take down millions of people with it, Obama STILL wants to pursue this goal. That makes hime either a committed socialist (maybe even a communist), or just unwilling to admit that everything he’s been fighting for his whole life has been wrong. My bet is that it’s a lot of both.
so at this point in time there is still a 40-something percent of people who think the O is doing a good job and will vote for him. If that amount of voters are willing to stand with him after everything that’s happened in the last 3 years, then you can pretty much give up on the US as we have known it
I have to agree, his floor of support is going to be there no matter what. It is frightening to see this stategy of the left play out, by growing the dependency class over generations while dumbing them down at the same time. Despite my hope for this next election I’m concerned about a third party movement from the right that might put him thru with Clinton level support.
It all makes sense once you know in your heart that the destruction of our democracy and replacement with an oligarchy are his goals. If you start with that as the desired result and work it backward, he is following an obvious and logical set of steps towards those goals.
It’s the ultimate irony that he can blame our destruction on the party that has tried to stop it. Apparently he can have his cake and eat ours too.
Obama is neither stupid nor brilliant. He is a mediocre con man who sold his soul to the evil genius George Soros.
The admiration of the Left for Western Europe’s welfare states is unbounded. Paul Krugman keeps praising them for having created “the most humane societies in history”; Jeremy Rifkin wrote an entire book predicting that Europe would be the next superpower (he ignored Asia).
Ignoring how many times Europe has pleaded for the U.S. to bail them out–two world wars, the Cold War, the Balkans crisis, the current euro crisis–they want the U.S. to “catch up” to how Europe does things.
“Humane” costs money, apparently too much: what sense is it to economically and demographically bankrupt Europe to support being “humane.” Reality itself is not humane, kind, evil, greedy, or cavalier but it must be acknowledged as having the final say in these matters for good or ill cuz in the end the whole system will fall. Poor people are a fact of life and eliminating them by overspending revenue might eliminate the entire society and in the end make things far worse.
You can’t keep printing money and pushing it here and there as a stop gap forever; eventually the piper has to be paid, like it or not, sense of order satisfied or not. There is this weird faith in Europe that systems cannot fall but with unprecedented populations and more coming, we are in unchartered territory here and one can’t but think a war of some kind is on the horizon where one might least expect it.
Rich and corrupt politician operate right out in the open in Europe as in the U.S. and take their money and run with no regard to the future of the system they are gutting. This old generation is passing off bankruptcy, hunger and a potential for street violence to the future.
If you characterize OWS in a more generic light, it is happening in Israel, across parts of the middle east and in Europe and America and it is all based on economics. Simply put, there are too many people in the world and many of them are overwhelming what are right now shaping up to be what would’ve been the last sanctuaries of productivity and some modicum of law, order and sanity. That is all threatened now. And add the UK: they are about to go through a big economic bump.
The Left regards the entire period from 1981-2008 as a historical aberration, a temporary speed bump on America’s long-term inevitable leftward drift toward European-style democratic socialism.
It’s therefore important to them to paint that entire period as horrific. And as we all know, they’re real good at distorting history and shoehorning history into their own left-wing morality plays.
In Obama’s very large crew, social standing is the most important thing and reality takes a back seat. Thus you have racist policies that are not racist and which bankrupt the country besides, all because the Marxist influenced sense of order is observed.
Immigration continues unabated into the UK though unemployment is at a 17 year high and a similar situation exists here in the U.S. because they’ll vote for the Dems; eventually there’ll be no customers as Amazon’s writer’s meltdown adequately symbolizes – it’ll be all sellers eating grass.
The politically correct machine simply keeps rolling on its own momentum and it has no connection or reaction to reality. The Left and their world view is killing the West by slow suicide and our Constitution has been gerrymandered into a suicide pact when it is observed at all.
Otherwise law and oaths are simply ignored by an entire range of entities from sanctuary mayors to the Dept. of Justice which should change its name to “Europeans Must Pay”, EMP, because the DOJ and its ilk are frying the inner workings of America by punishing success and rewarding failure by gender and skin color. Killing the Goose that laid the Golden egg is also fulfilling the Left’s sense of order and unwitting desire for suicide since the most hated institutions in America are the very ones that made America great decades ago.
This is all done without regard to track records or reality but with a heavy regard for a faith in equality where there is no sign of it, in fact quite the contrary. In the end liberalism is a throwback to a church dominated medieval civilization since pigs fly and angels sit on shoulders when it comes to the Rainbow Coalition. In this sense, a melding of church and state is a de facto presence within America and the religion is political correctness with a dash of Marx.
There is no success and failure in the view of the Left but only the exploited and the exploiters as OWS portrays in spades. OWS doesn’t protest specific entities but a devil they demonize by holding medieval exorcisms in public squares across the country as if they are idiot peasants and Madame DeFarge analogues. By attacking any and all rich people and corporations, the OWS is essentially trying to find out how much a witch weighs. By the tenets of politically correct pedagogy, if the witch sinks she is innocent since failure is success.
Look at Obama’s base of support in the Northeast corridor and west of the Coastal Range on the Pacific side. These are the areas with the most unequal distribution of income in the US with the middle class eviscerated and forced to move. The whole Democratic coalition now is wealthy white professionals who do not really care if their tax rates are raised to Clintonian levels as long as women can get abortion on demand and gays can get married and lower class minorities dependent on the government. Obama is trying to take what has lead to dominance for Democrats in places like NY and CA and apply to to the nation as a whole.
obama is following the FRD model: regulate everything and massive spending. Its having the same result. The rich get richer, the poor stay the same,and the middle class is devastated. Throw on top massive lawlessness with his open borders, Fast and Furious, and his illegal and massive EPA and other regulating agencies. Its the culmination of 70 years of federal instusion into the enconomy and the results aren’t pretty. Many people are suffering, but don’t they always in centralized regimes? They’re just viewed as casualties for the “Cause”.
If you take the liberal fascism case to it’s logical end, we middle class types are too independent, too intractable for the central planners to deal with.
We are the kulaks of the American economy and culturescape. We are being systematically destroyed by a government captured by neo-stalinists.
I no longer believe that this latest exercise in economic famine is an accident. Just as in the Ukraine in 1931, this result is the product of an intentional program that has at it’s core, only politics. All famine is political.
It is no coincidence that the same organ of disinformation and subterfuge that workled to hide Stalin’s genocide against the Ukrainians is also providing cover for Obama and his controllers in this latest attempt by the left to destroy free enterprise. The NYT, a century and a half of sedition and treason.
We are the 47%.
You are absolutely right. Those of us in the middle class are the only ones who have a stake in traditional model of limited government, individual liberty and responsibility, and individual ingenuity. Neither the very rich nor the poor care if these things exist at all. The middle class is the only thing standing in the way of the leftists achieving their dreams.
I am sure that a mindreader would detect that Obama is completely absorbed in finding a correct approach to improving our economy.
“Let’s see now, if I hold the club face a bit more open and keep the left foot planted when starting my backswing and then resist dropping the left shoulder as the club contacts the ball….damn, I could get in another nine if I didn’t have to read that address to those schoolteacher saps at the NEA convention tonight.”
The housing and mortgage lending messes, which were almost entirely the creation of Democratic Party policies and Democrat apparatchiks’ backroom scheming, are what brought the economy down. It certainly wasn’t the straw-man, “on your own” mindset Obama chose to demonize in his speech.
I sincerely hope that whichever Republican eventually faces down Obama (in whatever debates The One™ agrees to expose himself to) relentlessly pounds on this point.
…his disingenuous narrative
To which Obama is entirely committed, the only type of commitment a Leftist understands.
…which leaves Obama’s seriousness about wanting to get us out open to question
Americans and America suffering economically lend perfect ballast to his narrative.
After last night’s debate,
it’s obvious that Newt can’t make that case.
Newt said that one of his guiding principles is that everyone in America should be able to own a home.
That is the mentality that led directly to subprime mortgages, to Fannie and Freddie insuring minority homeowners who couldn’t pay mortgages or who couldn’t put down more than 5% down payment.
And we know where that led.
We have learned the hard way that everybody should NOT own a home. Only those who have cash for a sizable down payment and who have a steady source of income.
Newt is like Bush 43 with his “ownership society” vision: Besotted with the idea of real estate as a basis for creating morally responsible families.
Sorry, it’s the other way around. Only those who are already demonstrably responsible should be able to own property.
I’m not going to parse Newt on the basis of past actions or behaviors.
I’m giving him some leeway. I listened closely last night to his defense of the work he did for Freddie Mac, as a private citizen.
Which does differ sharply from “the work” insider morons like Dodd and Frank did on behalf of propping up crazy and worthless Fan and Fred, which morphed into things like upping credit ratings (temporarily) just for purposes of making ridiculous home loans.
In the interests of his wide understanding of our history and our founding principles and in the interests of not being bored to death for another 4 years, I’m cutting Newt some slack.
You are a tool, just like Newton…good luck with your 4th wife!
I think, as a private citizen in 2007, Newt publicly endorsed both Fannie and Freddie, stating how much good they were doing. I will vote for whatever Republican candidate is nominated, including Newt. And I don’t care if Romney “flip-flops”. Any Republican will be better than Obama.
Obama never was middle class. He went from poverty to professor to president on a mysteriously accelerated curve without ever punching a time clock. The middle class, (which in so naming it, incites class discrimination)would be more of an object lesson, looked down apon from acedemia. He is an elitist, full of scorn, surrounded by little czars,leading from behind, jet-setting on Air Force One, campaigning $35,000 a plate dinners from millionaires and billionaires. Even Jimmy Carter could hold a Skill Saw.
When was he ever “in poverty”? When he was a child in Indonesia, with a step-father related to local royalty? When he was a child in Hawaii, attending a private school and his needs provided for by his bank executive grandparents? When he was an affirmative-action college student, still living off his grandparents and not expected to actually perform as a student? During his short-lived career as a lawyer? During his stint sponging off taxpayers as a “community organizer”? As a state senator? As a US senator?
Obama has always lived the life of luxury, particularly when compared with those he hates — working whites.
Thanks for the history lesson. When Obama was winning the election, there was talk about making a movie (starring Will Smith) about Obama’s life history; not so much of that anymore.
Obama has no credentials with the middle class.
Team Obama’s gutting of the middle class thus far has been quite effective. Give ‘em four more years, and they might just finish the job, all the while pretending to be the average American’s best friend.
That nasty bourgeoisie must be destroyed if Saul Alinsky’s revolution has any chance to prevail.
Ask Billy Ayers. Per an informant inside the Weather Underground…
25 million Americans might have be exterminated in service to the larger agenda
Ask that old biddy Frances Fox Piven or that arrogant, self-serving communist, Van Jones.
Frances and Van are deeply disappointed that their big deal Occupy Shtick (“it’s begun! it’s begun”) has run into some cold weather, some tired and upset city fathers, some pestilence, some drug dealing and, even, some death.
Damn.
You got that stuff right. The whole QWS was dreamed up by the fringe of the Boobily campaign (the communists) to give support to all of his recent rants about the rich needing to pay their fair share. And that was just a warm up. I am sure this street theater will provide a choral backdrop to the Obama campaign message, no matter what that message is, for the next eleven months. The communists are all in on this election cycle because they see Obama as the last big chance to impose their utopia on the world. Obama has been a God send (if you will) to the communists and their accomplices, the labor unions. The fight is on and the middle class will either have to squash these buffoons or face the reality of abject poverty while our communist betters have their utopia at the expense of all of us proletarians.
The “middle class” reference that really gets me is Hoffa’s. IBT President Hoffa routinely equates union membership with middle class. No one seems to challenge him on it.
The flaming leftists pin labels on things and no one, especially not the media,steps forward to, if not confront, at least explain what has been done. Another example is the 1% vs. 99%. The anti-Americans describe their interests as the 99% and no one questions.
Remember how Bam once described the middle class, those who cling to their guns and religion!
The Obama administration uses the same definition.
But the union people, government employees, teachers, professors, fireman, policemen etc. clearly ARE all middle class based on their incomes. It’s just that their hobby-horses and bogey-men are the opposite those of much of the rest of the middle class, which is non-union or small business. That is why the rhetoric on both sides is half true, at best, because the middle class is not just one thing. If a middle class citizen has a government job, then his/her view of taxes will be quite different from the views of those who do not have government jobs. This should be self-evident, but because this fact does not fit in with either side’s agenda, all sorts of half-true generalities follow.
“….[public] unions, government employees, teachers, professors, fireman, policemen….”
Nice try, Dwight. It’s more than “half true” that the few are living off the taxes from the many (“rest of the middle class”), and that the salaries and benefits of the few are usually higher as a result of the limitless public funds available. And that the Democrats are primarily the beneficiaries of campaign contributions from the few, making the few much more politically powerful than the many. Half true? Don’t think so.
D-White prefers his food pre-masticated, enjoys a white Pick It Fence to sit on, and favors used ping pong balls to ruminate over. All delivered by the postman.
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Some of the pundits you see (even on Fox) doing things like trashing the notion of Voter ID cards in light of the so called “unfairness” it will inflict onto some people are actually being paid in service to the Democrat agenda of…”get out the vote, no matter what vote, illegal, felons, dead people, non-existent people, whomever, just get it out”…
Besides the plethora of Soros organizations, your ears should prick up and your cynicism meter shoot into the red when you hear “Think Progress” or “The Brennan (Brenner?) Foundation”.
In fact, you should just run your cynicism meter full time, as so much underground money has infused itself into alleged spokespersons, not to mention entire newsrooms.
“The economy’s cadre of temporary, seasonal, and part-time workers continues to swell. Incredibly, the economy had only 417,000 more full-time workers in November than it did at the end of the recession. The comparable Reagan-era period saw 6.9 million full-timers added.”
Keep those facts and comparisons coming, Tom, as painful as it is to read them.
I’ve been watching the temp trend throughout the “recovery” and the disproportionate increase is a strong negative indicator. As we all know, temp-seasonal workers are the first to be jettisoned at the slightest sign of a downturn. As you note, it’s a clearcut indication employers do not trust this sluggish economy, and that distrust is exponentially magnified by punative Obamanomics and the threat of ObamaCare.
If only Obama and Reagan were the only two variables here. One can argue that the loss of all the value in the housing market is a tougher nut to crack than Reagan’s overcoming Carter’s malaise. China is another wild card. The undeniable part is that the causative factors in booms and busts build up over time, before they reveal themselves to most of us. For example, if people buy fewer new cars for x years in a row, at some point people will need to buy a lot of new cars, somewhat regardless of their price.
I would posit that the recent American rhythm of booms and busts is that the Dems get us through the hard times, overstay their welcome and get kicked out when the boom is about to come. Their getting kicked out can also help trigger the boom, granted, as the money holders get “confident” and decide to invest. The boom grows, and then goes “poof” as booms do, and the Dems are brought in to tide us over. Sometimes a guy like GWB will have to start the process before a Dem can get in, and sometimes a Pres like Clinton will happen to be around when a dotcom bubble puffs up, but I think that the general cycle is as I have described it. The timing of the underlying economic cycles are harder to read, or more people would be rich. A Repub President may help trigger a boom…so, what the hell, I say ROMNEY!
Also, during the Obama administration household wealth has diminished more than 10%. I don’t know if Obama sees the middle class as the primary target or whether they are just collateral damage.
Either way, the productivity and integrity of a people is compromised and the growth of and dependence on the behemoth Jabba The Hutt increases.
Liberty is no longer inherent to the human soul and becomes the whim of the government bureaucrat.
Mission Accomplished
(over and out)
You know all us middle class types vacation for two plus weeks in Hawaii for Christmas, and that’s after the mini-vacation at Martha’s Vineyard?. And forgot to mention when the missus jetted off to Spain to be with friends while I got down with Okra for my birthday.
The truly poor ask for no help, they carry no beggar cups. Most can be seen leaning against a building or tree trunk, they are dressed in rags and they smell bad. Asking them if they need an ambulance will get no reply, but they will accept a few bucks if placed into their hand. Once they received the care provided by mental institutions, but pseudo mentally ill parasites filled those beds, sucked the resources of the institutions dry, harassed the truly mentally ill, and left the troubled no choice except to return to the streets.
Most people are unaware of government raids made on small-medium sized farms. Raw, organic dairy farms have had their healthy dairy products seized and thrown out. At least one farmer has been taken away in handcuffs! Many people in a desperate struggle to regain their health (or not lose their health) know how IMPORTANT raw, organic dairy is in the battle for health.
Businesses and jobs must be PROTECTED! The WAR against small-medium sized businesses must stop!
The new Animal Identification rule will act like a tax on every livestock animal that crosses state lines – something that happens THOUSANDS of times a day in the United States! This is incredibly hard on small-medium sized farms WHO CANNOT AFFORD THIS!
Family farmers and ranchers cannot afford additional paperwork and unnecessary expenses to please the industrial agribusiness lobby. We must stand up for our rights and the rights of farms! Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance is standing up for family farms and backyard livestock growers!
This is their internet address: http://farmandranchfreedom.org/
PROTECT American JOBS! PROTECT American BUSINESSES!
A cruel WAR is being waged on American BUSINESSES and American JOBS!
Americans must not be denied the human right to jobs and businesses!
FOXNEWS
Is Fed Raid on Gibson Guitar Company Enforcing Policy . . . or a Push to Target ‘Made in the USA’?
September 07, 2011
They are among the most sought-after musical instruments in the world.
Gibson is also a company that is proud to put the “Made in the USA” label on its instruments. While the company has lower-end lines that are made overseas, every guitar that bears the “Gibson” label is made in the U.S. by American workers.
Related Stories
Attacking U.S. Companies Is No Way to Create Jobs
Gibson: Feds Want Guitar Woodwork Done by Foreign Labor
Related Video
Gibson Guitar CEO: Don’t Know Why We Were Targeted
On August 24, armed agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Homeland Security raided the corporate headquarters and two factories of the Gibson Guitar company. The agencies took away 24 pallets of Indian rosewood and ebony, as well as a number of guitars and computer files.
“I think they’re taking the position that we should be shifting these jobs overseas,” says Bruce Mitchell, the chief legal counsel for Gibson.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/07/does-white-house-want-to-ship-jobs-overseas/
An inferior health care plan that no one wants and CANNOT afford to pay. The threat to jail and/or fine those who don’t purchase the government enforced plan.
Massive spending as if there is no tomorrow. Fighting wars we have no money for. Massive borrowing.
The Massive giving away of Billions of dollars every year to other countries, including the oil-wealthy Middle East, Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority organization who fill their war chests, build mansions and laugh all the way to the bank with FREE infidel money. Whilst in America, homeless shelters are filled to capacity; tent cities have sprung up all over the U.S. filled with desperate, jobless, homeless, neglected Americans.
Massive debt. The massive printing of paper money out of thin air to DELIBERATELY create out-of-control inflation. There is no question that the total DESTRUCTION of America’s economy is planned. The results will be horrifying. In the once wealthy and great nation of America, millions of Americans will become destitute, hungry and homeless with no money or resources to help them.
Organic, Non-GMO avocado, fruit and nut trees and berries must be planted in all of our nation’s cities’ and towns’ parks to help the many millions of Americans who will soon be in a desperate struggle to survive because of the frightening, highly destructive economic policies of our government.
Watch it. And weep for our great nation and people:
FALL Of The Republic – The Presidency Of Barack H Obama – The Full Movie HQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8LPNRI_6T8&feature=player_embedded
“The proletariat [lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled under-achieving, government-dependents] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois [middle class] individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Obama’s middle class amounts to his labor union supporters and nobody else. You labor union types had better wake up before the politburo doesn’t need you any more.
Historically, as countries have struggled to escape general poverty and political instability – as they have developed their own economic powers and values, as they have progressed from being simple geographical areas filled with many poor people and a very small and closed group of bosses – as they have developed into full-fledged nations with opportunities and empowerment for their people – one socioeconomic factor has stood out as being both an indicator of the success of that effort to develop, and as an important factor in continuing and expanding that development. That factor is the presence of a significant and stable middle class – “middle class” usually being defined, at the low end, as those people with an income high enough such that housing and a life-supporting diet are affordable and available for them.
Adding a middle class to a developing country provides, first of all, a set of stakeholders in that country – people of means who do well enough in their lives such that they have an interest in keeping their country’s systems in place. Having a substantial proportion of society within that middle class serves to empower that desire to maintain those systems – not only in democracies (in which the large middle-class vote brings decisive advantages in elections), but in non-democratic countries (where non-elected leadership is still more comfortable when the likely rebellious portion of the population is smaller than the supportive portion.)
A middle class also provides a buffer for a country. Poor people generally live on a day-to-day basis, trying to earn enough money so that they can all eat, and have a place to sleep, and have some security from physical danger. This is precarious; a loss of a few days’ wages for a poor person can be a matter of life and death. The loss of a few days wages for a country full of poor people can disrupt entire sectors of a country, cause starvation and a loss of housing, and topple governments.
A middle class of citizens will, by definition, have some surplus wealth left over from each day once it has purchased its food and shelter, and some portion of that surplus is usually kept as a savings buffer. In a country with a large middle class, an event that causes a general loss of wages for a short term will not necessarily cause hunger or displacement or revolution – instead, the people will reach into their savings to keep them going until the wage loss ends.
So, in the path of a typical country that is progressing in its development, we see that the growth of a true middle class of citizens is of critical importance to the ultimate success of that progress. A substantial middle class helps to buffer the day-to-day, short term effects of those bad events that periodically hit every nation, and it ensures that there will be substantial popular support for whatever economic and/or social systems are in place.
A substantial middle class thus makes for a more stable society. But, what if you specifically do not want your society to be stable? What if you would like your society to rise up in revolution against its leaders and its rules and its traditions? If the poor segment of society considers the current rules and values of that society to be unfair and unfixable, but there is a substantial middle class of people doing relatively well and feeling comfortable with its social rules and values, any revolutionary struggle on behalf of the poor will be opposed by that middle class.
Enter Obama. He considers our society – capitalist, republican, stratified by race – to be unfair and unjust in its treatment of the lower classes of people. To him, those in our very large middle class are agents of the upper classes, out of self-interest in maintaining their comfortable existence. The middle class, because it has its buffers and resources as well as its own traditions and values which encourage self-sufficiency and which foster the ideal of the possibility of upward mobilty – i.e., hope for the future – this middle class becomes the predominant barrier to successful revolution on behalf of the poor.
If Obama wants to reshape this country for the benefit of the poor and the unempowered, he needs to reduce the stability and inertia that the middle class both desires and provides. He needs those comfortable middle classers to lose their buffers and their safety nets and their feelings of empowerment and their appreciation for a system that has allowed them to “make it” in life, and he needs them to view the upper classes as their enemy.
So, no, he’s not acting stupidly, at least in a tactical sense. He’s reducing the middle class, which he needs to do in order to get his revolution going.
And, yes, he’s acting stupidly, in a strategic sense, because he wants a revolution that will take us into a social and economic order that has never worked for more than a small portion of any society that has attained it.
That he is willing to cause, for millions, the pain, disruption, and violent death that has always accompanied such radical revolutionary change says much about him. Add to that his unconcern for the vast damage that he is doing to the lives of millions through his economic, environmental, and social “executive-order” changes, and you begin to get a picture of who Obama really is.
“The sociopath is that truly self-absorbed individual with no conscience or feeling for others and for whom social rules have no meaning.” The sociopath pursues his own interests and goals with little or no concern for others – indeed, showing little understanding that “others” even actually exist.
I believe that B Obama is a true sociopath.
Do you consider firemen, police, teachers, government workers part of the middle class?
No. They watch over the Middle Class to make sure they don’t do anything too creative.
Faster than a speeding Mrs. President going to Hawaii,
More powerful than a Middle Class plumber
Able to leap the Congressional dome in a single bound.
Truth, Justice and the American Way.
But even the President of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked
They are Obama’s middle class since the vast majority of them belong to labor unions. Their leaders recycle taxpayer money back into the coffers of their favorite democrats and then bargain with those democrats for more raises to come from more taxpayer money..etc…etc…etc… and now we have a bunch of pretty useless slugs making far more money than the taxpayers who pay them, doing mostly unproductive work that won’t be missed even if it goes undone. So, in some very real ways, they have very little in common with actual middle class Americans. And before you try the crap about how bad we need all these people, try to remember that the real middle classes don’t get much in return for their tax dollars. Our police make a career out of cleaning up the messes after crimes have already been committed, our teachers spend their time brainwashing our children to be politically correct instead of teaching them anything useful, and our firemen spend most of their days back at the country club station honing their cooking, ping-pong, and fantasy football skills. And government workers? My home just got randomly selected for the, second year in a row, for the bureau of the census to ask me monthly questions about my work status, income and every other thing they can get me to tell them each month for the next 12 months. They even admit that only 60,000 residences in America get randomly selected every year for this honor. Let’s see, if there are 60,000 homes chosen out of about 80,000,000 in our country, the odds of getting your home chosen even once is about one time per every 1,300 years(about 16 lifetimes). Imagine the odds of being chosen two years in a row. The lottery gives far better odds. What the hell are they really doing? With government workers the question should be how many of these people are doing anything at all for the middle class?
OK, so there is a good middle class and a bad middle class; that is at least more precise. It would be interesting to know what per cent of the people in the income category defined as middle class are the bad ones.
Jim never said “bad middle class”. The word I would use is “privileged”. They get special compensation because they are a political voting block, favoring the Democrats who are continually amenable to increasing their pay and benefits, i.e., buying their votes.
BHO Is a diciple of Saul Aulasky and a graduate of the Daley machine in Chicago. Answer enough.
The Osawatomie Coincidence | @ Trevor Loudon’s New Zeal Blog
http://www.trevorloudon.com/2011/12/the-osawatomie-coincidence/
Sorry, the second site was not complete.
Never seen so much yapping from the sidelines as the comments above.
But why not; all you desperados need to do is win the White House back.
Good luck.
Meanwhile keeping yapping.
Another Obama campaign worker? Does Obama pay you to troll on this site? If not, you better ask for your share of that billion dollar pie because you don’t want to be sidelined. You haven’t mentioned anything you have done that doesn’t place you squarely on the same sidelines. If you have any actual ideas, put them out there so all of us sideliners can stand on the sidelines and dissect your obvious brilliance. Otherwise, shove off.
@#32 Mark Gee- thank you for demonstrating the intellect, the power and force of liberal argument- allow me to paraphrase your remarks so I may quote them as example:
nanny nanny boo boo
Sadly, in the Democratic Party, the term “Middle Class” is quickly becoming a euphemism for “unionized government workers.”
Democrats want to make Americans dependent on government largesse. In concert with teachers unions, which are busy extinguishing every trace of critical thinking, they are attempting to turn the entire American electorate into a dependent class with grievances, which only Democrats can counter.
In other words, Democrats want to do to all Americans what they have done to the blacks: return them to the plantation.
Republicans fought a Civil War to free blacks from Democrat slaveholders, but Democrats haven’t given up. In fact, they are now attempting to enslave all Americans.
Okay, this presidential experiment in affirmative action has failed. Let’s get a move on.
The author failed to mention that Clinton changed teh way unemployment is now reported, which would show thwat the numbers after the latest recession are much worse than reported, and not getting better at all.
Radiclibs are neo-aristocrats. Aristocrats loathe the middle class. It’s as simple as that. Madison, for me, defined the aristocratic mindset in the opening sentence in Federalist No. 57 — the “ambitious sacrifice of the many, to the aggrandizement of the few.” Our neo-aristocrats would maintain their superior position in society by dominating the rest of us, dictating to the rest of us, while, of course, detesting the lot of us. Aristocrats have nothing for the middle class…but chains. I write this as someone who has been pushed by libs out of the middle class into poverty, as evidenced by the food benefits I currently receive. And no, Mark Levin or Michael Savage, born Weiner, this does not mean I would vote for a radiclib. (I am grateful for their fulminating tone which has sent me back to NYC’s classical music station.) My hunch is that millions of people in poverty would support a conservative populist who would restore our founding legacy of government of, by and for the people. Gov. John Kasich — what say you?
Mr. Blumer is simply disingenuous when he blames the mortgage crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act. The Act did not require banks or other lenders to revise their lending standards, it only said that it was illegal to categorically refuse to lend in certain areas (red-lining). I would like Mr. Blumer or any other critic of the Community Reinvestment Act to show us even one example of a loan that was made to an otherwise ineligible borrower because of the CRA.
Now – Fannie and Freddie certainly did contribute to the mess because they were more than happy to buy up the junk that the lenders were peddling. At the same time, no lender would say they wished Fannie and Freddie hadn’t existed, as they served as useful idiots, taking on mortgages that the lenders should have kept on their own books.