Barack Has a Record

American Thinker

Every  Obama speech is fraught with lies and half-truths.  He relies on his belief  in the ignorance of his audience, and that Americans are too lazy and soft to  recognize his dishonesty.  When your record is abysmal, you can’t tell the  truth.

Obama,  hasn’t a clue on how to fix the economy.  Instead, without ideas, he copied  Teddy Roosevelt’s 100-year-old speech in Osawatomie.  With Barack Obama, it’s always  yesterday’s answers to today’s problems…and this is the man they told us was a  genius.  The president maintains that the rich get richer by making  everyone poorer.  Ah…bitterness and envy, the illegitimate stepchildren  of hope and change.

The  fix, of course, is higher taxes, but when the taxes to pay for ObamaCare go into effect in 2013 and the Bush tax cuts expire, everyone’s taxes will increase — not just  the highest income brackets.  People in the top 1%, while earning 17% of  the nation’s income, already pay almost 40% of all taxes and are scheduled for  an almost 20% rise even before the president’s proposed  increases.

The  tax on capital gains will rise by 33%.  This is a tax on the sale of assets  purchased with after-tax income and held for a specific period of time.  A  lower rate promotes long-term investment;  economists understand this, and every time the rate has been cut, revenues have increased.  Yet Barack Obama would raise the rate in the  interest of fairness.  The nation doesn’t need investment; that  would just provide jobs, and the country doesn’t need jobs.  Besides, a  higher rate on investment income makes a good slogan, and it “fits well on a bumper sticker.”

The  president now regularly runs $1.5-trillion deficits and has spent almost a  trillion dollars of stimulus funds rewarding political backers such as unions,  government employees, and crony capitalists.  It’s not that he cares for  any of them.  These people financed his 2008 campaign and are now paying  for his 2012 campaign.  He is bankrupting America for no reason other than  his own re-election.

He  wants to spend $1 billion on this election.  Disregarding the $800 million  he spent in 2008, this is more than all the previous presidential elections  combined.  It won’t be cheap buying all the votes he’ll need in 2012 to  overcome his failure as president.

Despite  what he says, Barack Obama is the original fawner to the fat cats.  He has  gotten more money from Wall Street, union bosses, and crony capitalists than anyone.  For him to position himself as a  class warrior, doing battle against an entrenched elite, speaking truth to  power, is ridiculous.

In  addition, the extra taxes the president demands will not go to deficit  reduction; he wants the money for more spending on his vision.  His first  stimulus provided dozens, if not hundreds of jobs.  If the nation would  just give him more money to spend, we could be out of the eternal Obama  recession in under a thousand years.  Pass the bill now; we can’t wait.

The  Record: Energy

Some  claim that the president has no energy policy, but that’s not true.  It  consists of allowing no new sources of oil, natural gas, or coal, while  curtailing existing supply.  He has restricted drilling in the Gulf, on  land, and off our coasts.  The Gulf alone lost 40,000 jobs when the president decided to shut down  oil production after the BP oil spill.

He  postponed the approval for Keystone XL Pipeline until after the election (surprise, surprise).   It would have connected Canadian oil from the tar sands of Alberta with  refineries in Cushing, Oklahoma and Nederland, Texas, while creating 20,000  direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs.  Eventually, it would have provided  America with over a million barrels of oil a day.

He  is removing coal-fired plants, responsible for 50% of America’s electricity, from  production, while the EPA wages war against “fracking” to prevent the nation from exploiting America’s  vast natural gas resources.  The president’s plan is to replace this energy  with…nothing.  After all, if you can’t triple electricity bills and the  price of gasoline, his green energy pipe dreams will never come to  fruition.

He  has relentlessly promoted electric cars, sinking billions into  battery-makers.  Sales of the Chevy Volt are on fire.  And why wouldn’t they be?  The vehicle  costs only $40 thousand and can travel almost 40 miles before needing a  charge.  That $40 billion of taxpayer money dropped on bailing out the UAW,  Chrysler, and GM was worth it.  Soon we’ll all be driving electric cars, or  pushing them when the batteries die.

Justice

This  administration’s Fast and Furious program deliberately armed Mexican cartels in order  to bolster their case for stronger gun control, resulting in the deaths of  hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American.  Eric Holder, the  “my  people” attorney general, shows no remorse.  Why is it  racist to call Obama the worst president ever?  Yet when the president  shows little to no regard for the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, it’s not a  problem.  After all, they’re only Mexicans…right?  It’s not like  they’re his people.

Private  Enterprise

Barack  Obama, the anti-capitalist, has pursued Gibson Guitar with passion unseen in the president, except on the  golf course.  The administration raided the small manufacturer  and seized their inventory, claiming not that they broke American law, but that  they broke foreign law.  Even though India, the country in question, says  no laws were broken.

After  stacking the NLRB with the recess appointment of former SEIU lawyer Craig Becker, Obama set his sights on Boeing, the nation’s largest exporter.  His objection  was the $2-billion plant the company built in South Carolina, a right-to-work  state.  This didn’t sit well with the president’s union backers; Boeing had  to be taught a lesson.

Both  companies could have avoided all this by building their factories in  China.  If additional jobs created are not union jobs, the president feels  that America doesn’t need them.  Even union jobs in fossil fuel production,  like drilling for oil or coal-mining, electrical production or building the  Keystone XL Pipeline — well, America doesn’t need those,  either.

Employment

The unemployment rate has recently declined 0.4% to 8.6%.  For the  president, this is a huge personal victory, as well as vindication of his  economic policies.

While  the economy needs to add around 180,000 jobs a month to stay current with  population growth, the nation added 120,000 jobs in November, a marked  improvement over recent months.  Many are seasonal positions that will  disappear after the holiday, but at least these are real jobs, not mythical  “saved” jobs.

At  the same time, more than 300,000 Americans left the workforce, having exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, or stopped looking for work.   Once this happens, they are no longer counted in the official unemployment rate,  so the rate drops.  This brings workforce participation in the Obama  economy to 64%, the lowest in decades.

Forget  about the 5% unemployment rate of George Bush’s jobless recovery from a few  years ago — if more people would do their patriotic duty and simply stop  looking for work, we could push the rate down to near 0 and not only rejoice in  the leadership of Barack Obama, but also provide millions of potential  volunteers for his re-election campaign.

After  all, it’s not like they have anything else to do.

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