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Trickle Down Poverty

For all his talk about “spreading the wealth around,” Obama is really poised to spread dependence on a discombobulated bureaucracy.

by
AWR Hawkins

Bio

December 3, 2009 - 12:35 am

Throughout the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan practiced what was commonly known as “trickle down economics.” This was an economic philosophy based on the idea that cuts in domestic spending coupled with lower taxes freed up the wealthiest Americans to spend and invest their money as they saw best. In turn, their capital would trickle down to the middle and lower classes via an expansion of the private sector, the purchase of products, and the creation of jobs necessary to manufacture those products.

The result of trickle down economics, sometimes referred to as “Reaganomics,” was an unprecedented economic boom in this country during the 1980s and on into the 1990s.

As introduced in 1981, Reagan’s plan sought reductions in “regulation, government spending, marginal tax rates, and inflation” — the very things which are going to increase with President Obama’s anti-Reagan approach to our nation and our economy. In fact, less than a month after taking office, Obama actually described “‘trickle down economics’ as ‘bankrupt’ and [as] an ‘old, discredited’ philosophy that ‘didn’t work.’”

Instead of approaching the economy in a way that opens a door through which the poor can use their God-given talents to better their circumstances, Obama plans a state-run economy that will result in trickle down poverty. And for all his talk about “spreading the wealth around,” our president is really poised to spread dependence on a discombobulated bureaucracy.

And while some are just now realizing that “Obama and the Democrats in Congress are pushing the average American into poverty,” others knew we were in trouble from the moment Obama was sworn into office.

For example, after saying “thanks but no thanks” to an offer to join Obama’s cabinet a month after the inauguration, Senator Judd Gregg “warned [that] Mr. Obama’s ‘spend, spend, spend’ budget plans would leave the U.S. trillions of [dollars] in debt.” He also alerted everyone who would listen that the spending necessary to fund Obama’s expanding government at such a time as this would be untenable: “The scale of the administration’s spending plan in the midst of a prolonged recession [will] leave the next generation with a country too expensive to afford.”

What we must understand is that along with the debt Obama is creating comes a loss of freedom. This much is clear from a Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that “the huge deficits [Obama is creating] will [force] the U.S. … to borrow nearly … 6.5 trillion [dollars] over the next decade.”

A nation placing itself in a position to borrow from others for its own survival is doing nothing less than embracing servitude and chaos. Economist Michel Chossudovsky indicated as much when he predicted that Obama’s economic polices will lead “to social havoc and the potential impoverishment of millions of people.”

And Chossudovsky appears to be correct. Nationwide unemployment is now 10.2%, which is more than double the lows of 4.6% unemployment we saw under George W. Bush. And among homeowners with a mortgage, “more than 14% … were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of September.” Such levels of mortgage default represent “a record-high for the ninth straight quarter.”

But it’s hard to believe that the high unemployment or the mortgage problems are viewed as bad news in the eyes of the Obama administration. Sure, they act like it bothers them when the cameras are rolling and the president is reading from his teleprompter, but one might wonder if they want more and more people to fail so that more and more people look to government for their survival. As Rush Limbaugh put it on November 19, 2009: “This is exactly the agenda.  This is the point: Get as many people as possible depending on government.”

And it should come as no surprise that the majority of people being harmed from Obama’s policies are those who bought his “hope and change” mantra hook, line, and sinker. Thus, while the national unemployment rate is currently 10.2%, Rasmussen Reports shows that the unemployment rate among Democrats is 15% and among the politically unaffiliated it’s 14.2%. (The corresponding rate of unemployment among Republicans is 9.9%.)

So while Obama and his fellow socialists talk as if money taxed out of producers’ hands and given “to the government … will eventually come trickling down to the middle class and the poor,” the reality is that poverty is the only thing trickling down by employing  these twisted economic policies.

There’s a chance the taste of broadened poverty will wake us up, causing us to reverse course in favor of an economic policy that rests on personal responsibility once more. But we can be certain that if such a reversal does not take place soon, national poverty will prove but a step down the road to serfdom in the United States of America.

AWR Hawkins is a conservative writer who holds a Ph.D. in military history from Texas Tech University.
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