When last I wrote it was the middle of spring of this year (2011). I was sort of excited about the Orioles and very upset at the state of our nation. The economy was in the pits of despair, what with high unemployment and absolutely no sign of either signigicant hiring or significant increases in factory orders or the size of available inventories.
Many midsize firms were continuing to lay off workers. The administration maintained that a recovery, of sorts, was underway, and they were actually carping that some companies who could have hired were not. Though not said, the strong implication was that these employers were in league with the GOP and were not hiring to make the administration look bad. In otherwords, there were profits to be made and money to be earned for shareholders, but the respective CEO's and boards of directors were holding back to help the GOP in elections that were still 18 months away.
That is utter nonsense. Name me more than a one or two of ongoing business concerns that would forego profits and forego paying shareholder dividends simply to help their "friends" in the GOP. Has even one person come forward to say that this actually happened. No they have not. If that had actually occurred, people would be fired. No person in an American business has that power.
That the powers that be in the administration would intimate that, however, did not surprise anyone. These were the same folk who were suggesting giving businesses a one-time bonus for each new hire. In otherwords, companies that were not hiring would suddenly begin to do so to get this one-time bonus, a bonus that didn't begin to pay the first year's salary of anyone actually hired. You didn't need a business degree to know that this wasn't a good idea or even a workable one. These same economic advisers, of course, were the same ones suggesting new taxes on higher income folk. Sadly, small businesses - which always are the ones doing the most hiring - are in the same tax bracket as the upper income folk the administration wants to ramp up the tax rate on. So, in many cases the result would be that a business that got a modest hiring bonus would also find its tax rate going through the roof. Where is the logic in that?
I am not in the upper income bracket and likely never will be, sad to say. Even so, I hear obama and biden and reid and pelosi constantly speaking of shared sacrifice. The only ones called on to sacrifice, however, are always in the same income bracket, the so-called upper income one. The bottom of that bracket has been in free-fall. And no other group is "sharing" in the sacrifice.
The economic truth is this: there will come a point when the tax rate for the ones who are doing the work, doing the hiring, and doing the tax-paying, will quickly get to the point where even they will have little reason to work hard. If you spend the year running a business and earn, say, $1 million, and the government comes along and takes 75% leaves only a relatively small fraction of the profits left for the chaps who did the work.
Here is the hard reality facing the far left: they are finishing a several year period when they had complete control of the federal government; i.e., two years where they had complete control of the Executive and Legislative Branches of Government and working control of the judiciary, at least up to the Supreme Court, and two more years with complete control of the Executive Branch, one-half of the Legislative and working control of the Judicial Branch. With this rare opportunity they have force-fed the nation their legislative agenda: tax increases, socialized medicine, wholesale government spending at unprecedented rates and amounts, and many other legislative initiatives. But with all of these "changes," the economy remains in unchecked free fall. The left's control of the federal machine during the last four years and going forward is actually much more pervasive, as most have come to know. Obama's idea of appointing cabinet-level czars throughout the federal bureaucracy has resulted in wholesale rulemaking. These rules have put America's foot in the free market system in a virtual straight-jacket. Everyone wants a cleaner environment. Everyone wants to avoid species depletion, with its concommitant reduction in DNA diversity. Everyone wants oversight of financial markets. But no one wants these things at the cost of economic armagedon. American companies, forced to compete in a world-wide market, find they are playing with lead boots on because they are so hamstrung by these federal rules, often drafted by folks whose ideas never got close to realization under previous administrations, even the Clinton version. If you don't believe me, get a hold of the Federal Registry and compare the number and volume of new rules during the obama administration to any similar period of time in the past. The results may astound you.
Said in another more compact way, the Far Left got every bloody thing it wanted, and none of it worked even a little bit. The condition of the national economy is ten times worse than it was when obama took office. Even those in his camp are conceding that he cannot run for re-election on his record. And the answer to the question always asked during federal election campaigns - are you better off or worse off than you were four years ago? - has a resounding answer that no leftist worth his salt wants to hear.
The campaign strategy being hatched by obama's operatives appears to attempt to mimick the one used by President Truman in immediate aftermath of World War II: blame everything on the Congress. In keeping with that idea, he came up with this piece of legislation which, in campaign stop after campaign stop across the nation, he called a jobs bill. It wasn't. It was a lie to say it was. This bill - which only reid would sponsor in the Senate, was nothing more than another round of stimulus spending. The bill was so unpopular, with elections looming, that not one single congressman or congresswoman would sponsor it in the House, not even pelosi.
And yet, the minute the bill failed in the Senate obama blamed the republicans for hindering the economic recovery. Recently obama gave lip service to the certain economic necessity of cutting federal spending. But when it came time to put the pedal to the metal, he flopped back into the far left clubhouse and, instead, proposed more spending. The late historian, Barbara Tuchman, wrote an illuminating book some 25 years ago entitled "March of Folly." In it she recounted instances throughout history where a government has pursued a policy it knew would not work, until that pursuit morphed into the end of that government.
It might be well for obama to read that book, instead of golfing.
