Mortimer Zuckerman has written a stellar article that comprehensively summarizes the vapid, out-of-touch reign of the current American president. Here’s a key section:
Since the president is the one who represents all of America and all Americans, the buck stops with him rather than with the Congress. It is the president’s job to offer a coherent program for the twin threats of a static economy and an unsustainable explosion of our debts and deficits. But the only core issue on which he took a clear position in the recent debt-ceiling negotiations was that it would have to include new taxes on the wealthy—and he didn’t even hold to that.
He made the politically tested and calculated statement that if you raise taxes on billionaires and millionaires you could solve the problem. This is not so. Even for those who support higher taxes on the wealthy, as I do, we must remember that we have an income tax system in which fully half the “taxpayers” pay no tax at all, and n which the variety of loopholes cries out for a real reform of the tax code. Even if the government instituted a 100% tax on both corporate profits and personal incomes above $250,000 per year, it would yield enough revenue to run the government for only six months. Why? Because under Mr. Obama’s presidency, government spending has swelled to 24% of GDP from 18%.
It’s The Spending Stupid…. In this article Obama and his crones have proposed regulations concerning accomodations and living conditions for foreigners employed as “goat herders” inside the USA. The regulations will cost an additional 38B and will be passed down to the consumer. Obama Batshit Crazy Empty Suit. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45722
We have the same problem here in Canada. Canadians in “The True North Strong and Not Free” suffer under a stack of over 500,000 PAGES of Rules, Laws and Regulations, that is equal to a stack of paper that is around 10 stories high. The civil servant paper shuffler can not even reach the PAGE with an extension ladder. This adds a regulatory burden to the taxpayer and consumer of over 110B each year and is growing each year. This is a part of why TAXES now consume more of the average Canadian Families pay cheque than Food, Clothing and Housing combined. We have way too much government. One of the worst offenders is the Municipal level of government. They operate in stealth mode adding regulations by-laws and rules at a frantic pace. For example it now costs an additional $19,000 dollars to build a home in Edmonton, this just to cover all the rules laws and regulations put in place by leftwing retards in Municipal Government. These are the same Leftwing Retarded Mayors and Hog Troughers who continually have their hands out crying now for more Federal Tax Dollars to bail them out. People need to have a way to hold the Municipal Leeches to account. People need to challenge them all all the time…
I have no problem with a surtax on people who make over ten million per year. Since they seem to be all Democrats.
Unfortunately, Obama’s definition of “super rich” seems to be people who make 200K and have never seen a million dollars in one place outside of the movies.
Over 50 percent of Americans don’t pay any taxes!
I read that crap everyday..
Well guess what?
The poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four.
Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.
The articles need to say:
The frucking Democrats have put 50 percent of the American people into poverty,
and they would love to pay their frigging taxes but can’t pay their bills..
And guess what the Black population is living under?
But they voted for him and them..
Enjoy!
Like an article stated the other day – try building the Hoover Dam today. It wouldn’t happen. Try getting anything done today is near impossible with all the regulations, fees, environmental “impact studies”. Nothing is built new anymore from the ground up, it is renovated, because new regs would kick in raising costs.
No wonder China is booming. I read somewhere, that wages are a saw off after shipping costs are put in the mix, I don’t know if I trust that, but…. I don’t think companies run into the obstacles in China that they do here in North America.
When a liberal understands that there isn’t enough taxes that can fix the deficit, you know Obie has lost.
“…getting anything done today is near impossible with all the regulations, fees, environmental “impact studies”
Leda at August 25, 2011 8:26 AM
Aye. Here’s one for you:
US Congress approved the construction of the ALCAN Hwy. in Feb. 43.
Fourteen months later the first truck convoy completed the 1390-mile trip on the new road.
Now-a-days it would take longer than that to get approval to build 100 yards of new sidewalk.
Things were leaner and meaner in the bureaucracies back then.
At some point the liberal leaning voters of the USA will realize that their leaders are actually saboteurs, and that liberal voters have been their useful idiots since the Great Depression.
Hopefully that will happen before the statue of Martin Luther King that looks like Chairman Mao is switched for an actual statue of Chairman Mao.
Since I’m daydreaming of the impossible, wouldn’t it be lovely if all the stupid, STUPID sons@b1tches would finally realize that individual freedom works and central planning doesn’t?
If Obama is searching for a sound economic strategy, all he has to do hire Paul Krugman and then do the exact opposite of what Krugman suggests.
Why not call him:
President Is-on-paid-Vacation-and-cannot-be-available-for-comment
Seems he wants to run the USA like he “ran” the Harvard Law Review.
Fred said: “Seems he wants to run the USA like he “ran” the Harvard Law Review.”
I disagree Fred. As Pres. of the Law Review he swanned about and did nothing, because he didn’t care about the paper one way or the other.
As Pres. of the USA he’s determined to BREAK it. Hence the direction of spending and policy.
This Presidency boils down to his first year in office for me. The Stimulus that wasn’t actual stimulus, but a pork pay-off for the 2008 election; and, forcing the HC bill through Congress likely killed the economy and BO’s Presidency.
I can’t help but think that BO is akin to S.Dion and was duped by Reid & Pelosi as Dion was duped by Layton and Duceppe. “With friends like that…”. This guy never had a HOPE. Ironic eh?
“Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay.” Kinky Friedman.
In another excerpt from his new book in today’s NP, Steyn nails it again.
Bambam had a Kenyan father, was initially raised in Hawaii (which, while in the US, is probably the state most unlike the rest of the US, including Alaska), and then raised in Indonesia. He doesn’t care all that much about American problems, because he doesn’t see himself as an “American”, he thinks he’s a “citizen of the world”. No wonder he seems bored by the job at hand.
Just as every other job he had was just a stepping stone (i.e. not a job to be actually done – “Present” – but something to polish the resume), so he views the Presidency as a step to something greater – President of the World, no doubt. God help us all.
Boy, that Kinky Friedman has a way with words.
LOL!!!!!!
Posted by: RFB at August 25, 2011 7:10 AM
Quite right re: municipal govt’s. Here in Mission, BC, they painted bikes on designated bike routes, and put up signs also indicating bike route. What they didn’t do was anything involving actually putting in a bike lane. The road itself stayed the same. No new shoulder, no lines seperating bike and car traffic.
It was just big make-work that does diddley-squat for bicyclist safety.
And don’t get me started on annual dog registration fees…
Posted by: Leda at August 25, 2011 8:26 AM
Bingo! I’ve made this very observation on numerous occasions. The regulations involved in the most simple of projects are obscene. And yes, Hoover dam would never get off the ground today.
Eh, never attribute to cluelessness what is better explained by malice.
And the winner is Joe with the Kinky Friedman quote!
Nick nails it!
Eh, never attribute to cluelessness what is better explained by malice.
Posted by: nick at August 25, 2011 2:41 PM
Watched ‘bama on Yankee news 2 nights ago.
He looked lost, tired, and sick of the job.
Defeated.
About the 250k (now 200k) base for increasing income taxes, in an article about Ban Ki Moon and the UN the other day I may have spotted something (or not) – seems Cabinet postions top out at $199,720.
Jamie – the ALCAN highway was simple…
They approved the Manhattan Project in January 1942. They had to complete the basic science, developed, three technologies to separate uranium isotopes, built three full scale plants to do so, engineered and constructed the world’s first nuclear reactors at Hanford, WA, including the worlds first spent-fuel reprocessing plant to recover plutonium, and designed and built two different nuclear weapons and tested one of them by July 1945… 3.5 years to invent, design and build the most complicated project in history. Employed north of 400,000 people at peak, in the middle of a war.
I agree with so many of the comments above. Spending is out of control. Demographics are not in anyone’s favour. Taxing only 50% of the population will never work (think bell curve). Government is too big. Regulations are so over the top that growth cannot happen naturally. Cutting the entire military spending of the US – TWICE – still wouldn’t balance the books these days and would only result in massive amounts (more) of unemployment within the Military/Industrial complex.
There is only one way this will end. Badly. By default. By bankruptcy. By tying spending to income (which will be horrifically low).
I’m not looking forward to the next 10 or 20 years.
Jamie – the ALCAN highway was simple…
Posted by: Taliesyn at August 25, 2011 7:33 PM
So, may we conclude by your use of the past tense that you concur with Leda’s post?
“…getting anything done today is near impossible with all the regulations, fees, environmental “impact studies”