The Socialist Failure of Obama---Obama Channels Hugo Chavez, Shows Why He Can't Lead On The Economy

Obama Channels Hugo Chavez, Shows Why He Can't Lead On The Economy


Really Mr. Obama is this all your offering to us now???? That is it??????Can't i have more than a modest savings or will you not let me now in YOUR country ???
a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure a retirement.”





 On Tuesday, President Obama went to Osawatomie High School in Kansas to deliver an address framing the economic issues for the 2012 election.  He was following in the footsteps of turn of the century “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke at that same site 100 years ago to rail against big corporations and the privileged, while calling for “fair play” for ordinary Americans.

But the speech only showed why Obama can’t lead America on the economy.  Instead of leading us forward into the modern economics of the 21^st century, he keeps reaching back into the economics and politics of old – the failed Keynesian economics of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, the disastrous stagflation of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, and the supposed promise of progressivism 100 years ago, before the demonstrated failures of Marxism worldwide in the 20^th century.

He drew a picture of America as a struggling third world nation, saying at stake today “is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure a retirement.”  He explained America before his coming as “Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before.  But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t.”

This sounds more like Indonesia, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua.  But it is not America “long before the recession hit.”

He explained the roots of the problem as,

Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.

This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy.  Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and hence wages and standards of living.  Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.

He identifies the solution in the speech as increased government spending as the foundation for rising prosperity.  He says,

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world.  That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do.  They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity.  But today Obama tells America “It doesn’t work.  It’s never worked.  It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

Instead he tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as the model that works.  But American economic growth is not suffering because of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country.  It is suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every policy that would free the economy to produce and boom.  Under such Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a reliable energy grid like a third world country.

And of course, essential to that essential infrastructure spending, Obama tutors us, is to increase tax rates on the nation’s investors and job creators.  He said in Kansas on Tuesday,

“But we don’t have unlimited resources.  And so we have to set priorities.  If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values.  We have to make choices….Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing?  Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country?  Because we can’t afford to do both.  That’s not politics.  That’s just math.”