Joel's Rant

It was quite a spectacle to see earlier this week, Barack Obama standing among a crowd of auto workers claiming his stimulus and bailouts saved the industry from disaster and even increasing their payroll by 55,000 workers.  Didn’t Joe Biden state not too long ago that the 8 million jobs lost since the beginning of the recession were not coming back?  Didn’t the government recently announce 3 million jobs “saved” or created yet unemployment grew from 8% in February 2009 to today’s 9.5% and that doesn’t include those millions that have literally dropped out of the labor market, otherwise the jobless percentage would be over 17%, also known as “depression era territory?”  And wasn’t it just this week that the Obama regime floated the idea of another jobs stimulus on top of the $862 billion stimulus already passed last year?  And why would unemployment benefits need to be extended beyond 99 weeks if jobs were actually being created?  Is that progress, or is that admitting disaster?

Actually, having bailed out GM to the tune of $55 billion ($7 billion approved during the Bush administration and $48 billion under Obama plus Obama’s additional $25 billion to Chrysler) I’d expect some auto worker jobs would be created, although at $1 million per job I’d judge that action to have been quite the failure.  And the Obama regime’s forcing GM to build and market their new electric car, the Chevy Volt, reeks of dangerous and politically motivated tidings to come.  Getting only 40 miles to a 3-hour charge (and exactly where does that increased electricity use come from if not fossil fuel power plants) and with a sticker price of $41,000 per unit, and on top of that being subsidized by the taxpayers to the tune of an additional $7500 per unit, you can see this also will be a complete and utter failure.  Who, besides a complete fool or rich democrat (or is that the same thing) , would buy a car like that?  Only the government would miss seeing this effort as a failure.  You’d honestly expect decisions like that to be made by the Soviet Politburo, but that’s what happens when government invades and coerces the private sector.  We can only expect more of this in the other industries being taken over or being invaded by the government. 

And these are the same people who plan to control your health care and tell you what you can and can’t get from your doctor.

If that doesn’t scare the shoot out of you try this.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, reports that the great nations and empires of the past were destroyed, and with the fantastic speed of only one or two generations, by ruinous debt and unsustainable ficsal policy.  As Ferguson writes, what are the implications for our country today? The most obvious point is that the fall of great nations are associated with fiscal crises, sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.  Sound familiar? 

Think of Spain in the 17th century; already by 1543 nearly two-thirds of ordinary revenue was going to interest to pay for the loans by which the Habsburg monarchy financed itself.

Or think of France in the 18th century; between 1751 and 1788, the eve of Revolution, interest and amortization payments rose from just over 25% of tax revenue to 62%.  With that, the Bourbon monarchy passed from triumph to terror with astonishing speed.

Finally, consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands, amounting to about 33% of the national GDP.  The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that a financially strapped and weakened Britain, beholden to the US for fiscal support, could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of their empire.

If you believe the United States is impervious to those disasters consider the fact that the Obama regime has run a deficit of $1.4 trillion two straight years in a row, about 10% of GDP, with more $1 trillion deficits for the next several years in the future.  Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32% to a projected 66% next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050. 

So how will our leaders deal with this extraordinarily dangerous situation?  By allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, thereby raising taxes on every person and every business in America that still pays taxes.  What that does is take money out of the private sector, where it is otherwise spent building industries, upgrading machines and equipment, providing dollars for research and development and thereby creating high paying jobs that expand markets and increase economic stability.  They’re also going to attack the energy industries and make it even harder to get credit and loans and eventually passing some form of card check to further cripple our ability to complete in the global economy.  And that doesn’t even include the coming VAT tax, wealth tax and potentially taking over your IRA.

Just look at how the stimulus money was wasted.  Look at how all the bailout money was spent.  Look at how Fannie and Freddie have been given, even with all we know about them, a free hand with no monetary limits to continue their destruction of the housing and mortgage industries.  It never ends.  
 
And isn’t it interesting that no matter how high taxes get, and how high the budget deficit gets, it is never enough.  Even with budgets now about $4 trillion each year, for some reason, there’s never enough money for everything.  It’s still not high enough.

How can any significant number of jobs be created when the US corporate tax rate, the second highest in the world, is 35% while the tax on small business is set to rise to 39.6% after January 1, 2011?  Small businesses, like your local pizza restaurant and barber shop, the job creating engine of America, will pay higher taxes than even billion dollar corporations?  How can jobs be created when the people with the money to hire workers will have that money stolen away by the government?

It takes 150,000 new jobs created each month just to keep the unemployment figures stable.  It would take 400,000 jobs each month for 3-years just to get back down to 8% unemployment.  What’s the chance that’s going to happen with this Marxist, anti-business, anti-capitalist, anti-free market, government in control of this country?

The answer is none; there is absolutely no chance that’s going to happen.  In fact, it’s going to get worse, much worse.  Even Ben Bernanke this so.  We’re already Greece.  And when we get worse than Greece there’s going to be civil unrest. 

And that’s all there is to it.