But the Conquered, or their Children, have no Court, no Arbitrator on Earth to appeal to. Then they may appeal, as Jephtha did, to Heaven, and repeat their Appeal, till they have recovered the native Right of their Ancestors, which was to have such a Legislative over them, as the Majority should approve, and freely acquiesce in.
-John Locke

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Operation Lead Or Get Out Of the Way

From Today's WaPo we get clever things like this:
“What will matter most to Americans of all backgrounds boils down to this: the President is fighting every day to provide economic security for the middle class and to make the economy more fair, while the Republicans want to double down on policies that led to the challenges we face,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail.
This is in reference to Obama's campaign Operation Vote.  That's right - the incumbent President has a facet of his re-election campaign titled "Operation Vote."  It is designed to get people to...vote.  Presumably it is focused on getting people to vote for Obama. I suppose this would be the time to make a joke about about Operation Vote's biggest hurdle being the challenge of overcoming the results of Obama's policies and lack of leadership on every front - it's like his campaign is working towards an opposite result than that of his actual presidency!

Operation Vote is really an attempt to rally minorities to the polls.  Obama is calling on minority voters to help bail him out; he says he needs their help so that he can continue to help them.  Because he's been doing such a great job of helping Americans thus far.  Obama has been raising the cry that "there are those in Washington who are working against me."  Interesting.  For 2/3 of his current term, Obama enjoyed a House and Senate that were both controlled by the Democrats.  Were they working against him, or were the policies enacted during that time just crap?

But that's not the point of this post.

Economic security for the middle class. Let's look at that for a moment.  Forget that this is all tied into campaign rhetoric - all Obama knows how to do is campaign, but since he is President I think it's fait to view his rhetoric as his actual policy.  What is economic security for the middle class?  (Remember - by singling out the middle class and impliedly juxtaposing it against the upper class one is not necessarily engaging in class warfare - one is merely inciting class warfare; Obama is cooly above all things.)  Economic security is probably most easily defined as JOBS.  If you are part of the middle class, the most important aspect of your economic security is your continued employment.  Obama should be bragging about all the things he has done to help shore up employment opportunities in America.  Except that he can't.  Corporations are sitting on tons of cash right now; banks are sitting on tons of cash as well.  No one hiring and banks aren't lending because of all the uncertainty surrounding Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, an EPA that is drunk with power, etc.  Obama is chocking the life out of american business.  These are the companies - large and small - that employ the middle class.  The middle class is NOT made up solely of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other government employees.  We can't simply raise taxes on the wealthy and expect the resulting revenue will fund all the middle class jobs.  Look at the cost per job of every stimulus-created job - over $200,000 per job, and those jobs don't pay $200K!

But there's a deeper issue here as well.  Obama loves Warren Buffett.  He listens to that hypocrite, but ignores one important aspect of Buffett's teachings.
The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislatures. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation, or pays no income taxes during years of 5 percent inflation.
 All of the Fed's attempts at stimulus, particularly the QE measures, are directly aimed at raising inflation.  Obama wants to reduce our debt by manipulating the currency and devaluing the dollar.  Actually another way of writing that sentence could have been to say that by devaluing the dollar, Obama is working towards his goal of destroying the american economy.

If Obama really wants to help the middle class remain employed and able to save money, he would be far better served to abandon his policies rather than create a sub-group of his campaign aimed at playing the race card in the hopes of getting voters to forget what they already know.

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