A Look At The Obama Economy

YOU THINK? After three years of a lackluster Obama administration a resurgent Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) starts her presidential campaign with the rousing war cry “it's the economy, stupid.”

That's what James E. Carter & James C. Miller III think. They look back from 2011 and a lackluster economy.

Drawing heavily from his 59-page Blueprint for Change, the new president and former freshman legislator called upon Congress to increase federal spending by more than $300 billion annually and to shift more of the tax burden onto “the rich.”

Ah yes. Works every time it's tried. Tax the rich to feed the poor.

Only this isn't the Middle Ages in which feed grain taken from the rich landowners might possibly help the poor. Today we are talking about taking the investment money of the rich--money that could be invested with entrepreneurs to create jobs--and sluice it away on government programs, the programs that have done so much to turn the working class into the non-working underclass.

The combination of profligate spending and higher tax rates created a substantial drag on the economy. It didn’t help that President Obama has presided over one of the most protectionist administrations in decades. Three years into his presidency, Obama has yet to sign a single free-trade or trade-liberalization agreement. That, plus his efforts to “fix” and “renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have cast a pall over prospects for significant growth in international trade.

Oh well, at least it kept the rich from making too much money.

That's the liberal line. But usually--almost always--it is the poor that suffer most when the economy turns south. That's because people with power and people with money have the resources and the power to take care of themselves in a downturn.

Even liberals have the power and the resources to take care of themselves. But the working poor, the folks with marginal skills and marginal finances get hammered.

But then Democrats like Sen. Obama really don't really care about bitter God-and-guns working class people any more. They prefer voters to stay on the liberal plantation, depedent on liberal programs for everything.

Let them learn Spanish, says Marie-Antoinette Obama.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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