Just Another Trite Populism Stump Speech Filled with Prevarications and Obfuscations of Fact.
by Robert Janicki
On Tuesday night, President Obama defiantly gave Americans the single
finger salute as he vowed to veto any legislation that diminishes
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank or his unilateral amnesty action done through the
stroke of a pen with an Executive Order.
Obama tried to paint an
economic picture embellished with a rosy glow of unreal accomplishments
from a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and
booming energy production.
The economy has had the
slowest recession recovery in 70 years. The American economy is still
in a fragile state and has not returned to the growth rate of previous
recession recovery periods.
The claim of
shrinking deficits is only true in the context of Obama having run up
the deficit greater than any other president before him and only now has
deficit spending begun to slow down.
Industry
has grown, not because of Obama policy, but despite the crushing
policies of Obama's agencies inflicting onerous and costly regulations
on American industry.
Finally, booming energy
production is due to the private sector which has increased crude oil
and natural gas production 67% on private and state lands compared to a
measly growth rate of only 6% on federal lands. And even that growth
rate on federal lands only occurred because of private lawsuits brought
against the Obama administration in federal court forcing federal
regulatory agencies to do their job of approving oil and gas leases on
federal land according to federal law.
Again,
Obama perfunctorily injected several personal homilies of Americans in
distress as he does in his major speeches. The SOTU speech had the same
humdrum feel of his many campaign stump speeches of the past.
President Obama did not lay out a cogent and coherent plan to bring
along America into the inevitable future it will face either
domestically with the economy, the area of foreign relations or national
security in the face of the greatest challenge to American liberty and
freedom with Islamist terrorists around the world.
Obama
once again played the divide and conquer game of pitting the wealthy
against the middle class and the poor, by calling for raising taxes on
the wealthy to redistribute their wealth, as if the wealth of America is
static and the wealthy have stolen wealth from the poor and middle
class to attain their "unearned" wealth in the form of tax loopholes
like capital gains compared to "earned" income of the working class.
What
liberals refuse to acknowledge is that without the wealthy investing
and putting their wealth "at risk" of losing value, there would be
little economic growth in America. Wealthy Americans are rewarded only
when their risks are overcome by good business decisions in the private
sector. The working class does not have the same risk, since their
reward is an immediate return for their labor and cannot be recalled
should their employers fail to make a profit.
Raising
taxes for any purpose at a time when the American economy is still in
such a fragile state borders on malfeasance of Obama's leadership.
Obama's plan, like all historical liberalism, is to raise taxes, borrow
more money and then to throw that money at the problem of income
disparity. Basically, Obama is seeking to reward his constituency at
the expense of the producers who foot the bill for his delusions of
Marxist socialist wealth redistribution.
With
Obama, it's always more "cowbell" government spending over and over
again. With a Republican Congress, I expect there will be no "cowbell"
spending, the likes of which we have seen in the past six years.