Is Obama for real? Is this the record he is claiming is so great and has established a record employment condition in America? And surely by now most Americans know that the unemployment number is hardly meaningful, given that it is low because so many Americans have given up on finding a job. The percentage of Americans working full-time is at a record low of 47.7%. Median household income has fallen in each and every year of the Obama presidency from 2009 - 2012. There was a small increase in median household income in 2013, but median income is still well below what it was prior to the Obama regime. As of 2013, median household wealth was only 60% of what it had been in 2007. This is the Obama legacy.
Obama claimed that energy independence is near. He deserves credit for this in that he did not succeed in applying the brakes on fossil fuel energy development enough to prevent the private sector from this great achievement. He did his best to prevent it, but he failed. We are supposed to give him credit for this failure.
Obama said, "Let's put more money back in the pockets of the middle class." I say let us leave more money in everyone's pockets and not take it in the first place! Sending our money to Washington and allowing politicians and bureaucrats to decide who will get a fraction of that money back is hardly the way to improve the lives of most Americans. It sure does improve the life of politicians and bureaucrats though. It improves the lives of some special interests who have great influence in Washington also, but this is at the expense of most Americans.
Obama called for equal pay for equal work. We really need to have government bureaucrats examining every business and determining what the work that contributes to the bottom line is and who is contributing what to that. I can only imagine such a bureaucrat coming to my laboratory and trying to make this assessment in a rational way. One brief visit and he will know exactly what each of my employees is worth. Hot diggity damn. It is so easy. Bureaucrats must be the best managers anywhere. They are truly a miracle. Oh, and if women are to be paid equally to men, are short people to be paid equally to tall people also? Are unpleasant people to be paid equally to pleasant people? Are good analytical report writers to be paid as little as bad report writers? Is the bureaucrat to make an accurate assessment of each employee's ability to sell our analytical services to a potential client when they call? Mind you, this bureaucrat is probably not going to take up residence for weeks as required to do this, assuming he has the business and scientific background to do this in any amount of time. Well, the fact that he works for government probably precludes any likelihood that he has such abilities.
Obama says that employees should have fair wages and be paid well for overtime work. Somehow he forgot to mention that employers should have fair income and overtime. Employees should have paid days off he says, but he says nothing about paid days off for those who risk their investments to create jobs for those employees. Somehow it is simply assumed that employers can both provide jobs and take on almost any costs related to employing people. The politician decrees that which will provide him more votes and the employer must deliver. Or, the employer shuts down his business, which is exactly why every year for the last six years more businesses have gone out of business than were started up. Not so many people want to start businesses in this environment either. This is a very important part of Obama's record on the state of the economy.
Obama wants to provide daycare tax credits. Never mind the national debt and the deficit. Never mind the fact that with so few people working full-time, many parents are home and able to care for their own children, except they have little income. Never mind that the burden of paying for the costs of this "free" daycare benefit will fall upon the record small fraction of the people who are employed full-time. Never mind that once government pays for daycare, it will likely want to regulate and control it even more. Of course Obama wants to move daycare services out of the private sector into the government sector. And we can be sure he wants it unionized.
Obama wants more Americans in unions. Of course, union leaders provide the Democrat Socialist Party with a very large fraction of their campaign contributions. Americans have plenty of opportunity to choose to be union members now, but in the private sector they have chosen to leave the unions in droves over the years. But, that free vote by Americans must be overcome by the Great Socialist Leader.
Obama wants to upgrade skills with 2 years of free community college. Community colleges are nearly free now. They are also very much like grades 13 and 14 in a government-run education system which is not providing a very good education. The inflow of money from the federal government for this additional subsidy will surely mean more control of education by the federal government. This is what we need, more government indoctrination of youth about how many victims we have in our society and how big government is the means to the end of their victimization as it attacks any group that is perceived as better off than some other group.
As tradition demands, the socialist called for more job training on top of the many tens of largely spectacularly unsuccessful training programs created over the years. Obama wants companies to train employees more and to offer paid apprenticeships at the higher minimum wage he is advocating. Obama has no concerns whatsoever for the cost of labor to businesses. In his world, organizations just naturally operate at a deficit forever. Never mind that the businesses in the private sector cannot do that.
Obama claimed great success in helping veterans get jobs. The fact that veteran unemployment is much higher than the general unemployment rate was not noted.
Obama does not want a single pipeline, but he wants more infrastructure spending. How about allowing many pipelines to be built, not just one? Obama and the Democrats generally have been slowing down pipelines all over the country. The Bakken shale oil and the Marcellus Shale Oil and Gas formations are supplying more fuel than they are able to transport out through pipelines.
Obama wants more trade authority, but his own party is the primary opposition to new trade agreements.
Obama wants a Precision Medicine Initiative, but I thought he would have already eliminated disease all around the world as he pledged to do in his acceptance speech of the first Democrat Party nomination to run for the presidency. Apparently, Obama the Great Healer has not yet carried out this pledge.
Obama claimed we are a nation of laws. He said there is one set of rules for all. Somehow, he is not one of "the all," given his obvious violations of the ObamaCare and immigration laws. He is an exempted individual. The rest of us must surrender our individuality and be blanketed with smothering laws and regulations in his worldview. But he is the exception, because he swore he do his best to improve America when he became President. I thought he swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, which is the People's mandate for a very limited government that implicitly recognizes that there are only a few things government can do without infringing upon our individual rights and those individual goals for our personal happiness. But no, Obama thinks that it is best for America that he ignore the Constitution's limits on his power, on the scope of government power generally, and on the separation of powers.
He claims he wants a free and open Internet, despite his Federal Communications Commission making untiring efforts to gain more control over the Internet.
Obama say that Americans do not mind paying our fair share of taxes. We need to eliminate loopholes by keeping companies from investing abroad and rewarding those investing here he says. Well, yes more government control over businesses and their foreign investments is really likely to simplify the tax laws and make them more friendly to business prosperity! Never mind that much of the increased company investment in overseas operations is due to lower taxes there, less smothering regulations in many cases, no ObamaCare there, and the uncertainties to business investors of the arbitrary and capricious actions of a mad socialist in the White House.
Obama wants to tax accumulated wealth. So, we are to increase the death tax. Yes, no one should be able to pass the fruits of a lifetime of productive labor on to his children and grandchildren. That is just too awful to imagine. No, such successful businessmen should give up their wealth to politicians and bureaucrats who will, of course, spend that money more wisely than will the progeny of the wealth producer. Obama is sure of this. We are not to question this. We are not to think that many a businessman not able to pass on his wealth will stop creating wealth at an earlier age. We are not to understand that the individual right to the pursuit of happiness surely includes the right to the happiness of knowing that one has helped ease life for one's children and grandchildren. Socialists cannot understand this.
Obama wants to eliminate worldwide poverty. The only way we can help to do that is by creating the example of a nation that lives by the American Principle of limited government dedicated only to protecting the equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property (wealth), self-ownership (denied by ObamaCare), and the pursuit of personal happiness. To the degree that nations do this, they prosper.
Obama claimed 14 of the 15 hottest years were in this century. He had his NOAA and NASA GISS manufacture this data. Even the manipulated and forged data does not show anything like the increase predicted by the climate computer models that are supposed to be the basis for the claim that mankind is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming. In fact, while the temperature is supposed to be rising rapidly, it is stagnant. Flat. Going nowhere. Proving that the computer models based on what Obama has called the "settled science" are simply wrong. So, the "settled science," we must conclude, is wrong. So, the rational man does not have the concern Obama does about an impending climate catastrophe. Unlike Obama, the rational man will not take harmful actions against fossil fuels, those same fuels that have brought us close to the energy independence that Obama claimed was a strong point in our economy in this very speech.
Obama will responsibly shut down Gitmo by sending more of the detainees back to Yemen, whose capital has just fallen to violent, Islam-spreading terrorists.
Similarly, the rest of Obama's claims of success in foreign policy and defense are just too ridiculously inflated to spend further time pricking them with needles.
Obama wants a nation with a hugely dominant and controlling government sector and a weak, groveling private sector. He wants a nation in which no one has an individual nature. He does not want individuals choosing their own values. He does not want lone wolf individuals managing their own lives and pursuing their own happiness. No, he wants politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what our values must be and to micromanage our lives. He is sure that self-management is beyond our competence. He is sure that he and his allied Progressive Elitists will do a better job of managing our lives than we ourselves will. He is religiously sure of this, even though he does not know any of us. Can you imagine the unreality that soaks the mind of someone who is sure he is smarter than anyone else and so smart that he can manage the lives of 312 million or so Americans, none of whom he even knows?
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