What Everyone Knows
By Alan Caruba
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Does it
strike you odd that everyone knows the nation is deep in unsustainable debt,
millions are unemployed, et cetera, and yet those elected to the highest
offices in the land cannot seem to find an answer to this looming disaster?
Instead,
we are besieged hourly by news of charges flying back about the President’s
“position” and the House Majority Leader’s dismay. Millions of words pour forth
about Barack Obama’s insistence on increasing the rate that millionaires should
pay and the fact that it would barely cover the cost of running the government
for more than a few days, let alone the fact that they already pay over 40
percent of all the money collected from income taxes.
To add to
the absurdity, in June the Federal Reserve announced that the median net worth
of families had plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in
2007 to $77,300 in 2010. Need it be said that the largest drops occurred among
middle class Americans?
By midyear
2012, U.S. housing prices were down 35 percent from the peak of the housing
bubble. The official U.S. unemployment
rate had been above 8 percent for 40 months in a row.
The
statistics are very depressing and I will not burden you with what is a very
long list. I will, however, remind you that none of this can be solely blamed
on George W. Bush who had the misfortune of spending his final months of two
terms in office when the housing bubble burst.
The result
of that was the bailout of Wall Street and the banks with the exception of the
investment firm of Lehman Brothers. The big banks got gobs of taxpayer money,
but lots of small banks did not. As Obama kept reminding us throughout his
first term, he “inherited” the mess without mentioning that the mess came with
the job he relentlessly campaigned for.
There is
no one else to blame for the current dismal economic state of the nation except
Obama. We have had presidents who did a comparably bad job and they were all
“progressives”, the nice name for Socialists and even nicer name for
Communists. All believed that government was the answer and all were wrong.
What
everyone knows is that the federal government is too big, too expensive, and
too wasteful of our money. It is supposed to govern with the “consent of the
people”, but those in office tend to think that getting elected is all the consent
they need to keep doing the same stupid things.
Obama is
the quintessential Big Government believer. As far as he’s concerned there is
nothing that could possibly be cut from its operation and budget short of a
draconian “sequester” that will kick in on January 2. There is no problem that
cannot be solved by throwing more money at it. There is no more privileged
class in America than government employees.
The worst
part of all this are the lies being told about the Republicans who we are
supposed to believe have offered no suggestions as to what could be cut from
the budget. Here are a few of the forty items Rep. Paul Ryan suggested be cut.
You may remember him as the running mate of Mitt Romney. They are Republicans.
Cutting
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting subsidy would save $445 million
annually.
Cutting
the America’s Treasures Program would save $25 million annually.
Cutting
the International Fund for Ireland would save $17 million annually.
Cutting
the U.S. Trade Development Agency would save $55 million annually.
Eliminating
68 duplicating education programs would save $1.3 billion annually.
Cutting
the subsidy to the Woodrow Wilson Center would save $430,000 annually. Wilson
was the president who gave us the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
Cutting
the Community Development Fund would save $4.5 billion annually.
Cutting
energy grants to states for weatherization would save $530 million annually.
One of my
favorites is the $1.565 billion annually in subsidies to Amtrak, a railroad
system that has never turned a profit since it was created in 1971.
Rep.
Ryan’s proposed cuts would save more than $2.5 trillion over ten years.
As this is
being written there is a $2.2 trillion counter offer to the White House that
does not raise taxes on upper income Americans ($250,000 or more), but does
include $800 billion in tax reform, $600 billion in health care cuts, and $600
billion in other cuts in discretionary and mandatory spending.
If I was
President, I would move to eliminate the Department of Education on the grounds
that it has destroyed the quality of education in America, producing just
enough morons to get Obama reelected. I have no idea why we have a Department
of Energy when it has generally been federal government policy to obstruct any
effort to actually mine coal or drill for oil and natural gas.
And,
surely, I would close the doors of the Environmental Protection Agency which
has become the single greatest source of economic destruction in the history of
the nation.
But “we
all know that”, right?
We all
know that we are over-taxed and that lower rates, as in the days of Kennedy and
Reagan, would jump start the economy.
We all
know we are looking at a world of pain because the President refuses to even
negotiate with the Republicans. The best we can hope for is an end-of-the- year
deal to “kick the can down the road.”
By 2014
and the midterm elections, voters might decide to put legislative handcuffs on
Obama by electing a Republican-controlled House and Senate. They did it for the
House in 2010, but then forgot why. There are still left enough voters who
thought Obama was so “cool” they preferred to keep him in office instead of a
guy whose life has been a testament to success and clean living.
But we all
know that, don’t we?
© Alan Caruba, 2012
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