The Golden Age of Obama

Things are not all sunshine and roses in Obamaland. Back around the first of October, when it became obvious that The Messiah was going to win the election, the Dow took a 2,500 point dive. It hovered between 8,000 and 9,000 until shortly after he took office, and now, since he's had an opportunity to begin implementing his grand plans, it has tanked almost another 2,000 points. They say a picture is worth a thousand words...look at this chart of the Dow for the last year. It has lost fully 50% of its value since last May, and the downturn is obviously accelerating at a precipitous rate.

Had anyone asked a couple of months ago, I would have said that I thought 7,000 was the bottom - it couldn't possibly fall below that. Well, fall it did, closing today at 6,763. There is no reason whatsoever to think that we are finished yet. Experts predict that we will learn Friday that 700,000 jobs were lost in February. The Sears store up the street from my house, where my daughter works, informed their employees the other day that the store will be closing on May 31st. Many retail establishments are already struggling - by the Christmas season, which they all have relied on for decades to put the "in the black," so many people will be out of work that malls will look like ghost towns.

In the midst of all of this, we have a president who states, on the whitehouse.gov website, that he and his hapless vice-president "will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty and hunger around the world in half by 2015, and they will double our foreign assistance to achieve that goal." This will be paid for, of course, with taxpayer dollars which could have gone to those struggling retail establishments to help cut extreme poverty and hunger right here at home.

Obama and his Democrat colleagues have spent more money in thirty days than anyone in the history of this nation. They are throwing unfathomable amounts of our money at their pet causes, with no accountability and less judgment. I have been seeing ads all over the internet, prominently featuring pictures of The One, encouraging me to apply now for my grant - telling me that there is free money out there, thousands of dollars worth, that I can apply for and never have to repay. Just a few minutes ago, this landed in my inbox:

"Find out today if you are entitled!" Entitled? Entitled?! It's MY money...and my children's, and my grandchildren's, and...you get the idea. Tomorrow will mark the six week anniversary of the inauguration, and already I barely recognize my country. To those who remember the Carter years, they're going to look like a walk in the park compared to the Golden Age of Obama.

It isn't quite a shrug...

...but Atlas is getting restless. Great piece today from Investor's Business Daily:

Capital On Strike

Economy: Barack Obama won the presidency by vowing to bring "hope and change" to America. We've seen the change as the economy's deterioration accelerated. Now where's the hope?

In the three months since the election, the broadest measure of the stock market's value, the Wilshire 5000 Index, has plunged more than 30%, slicing over $3 trillion from Americans' wealth. Investors have walked away from investing, while businesses shut down factories and offices and slash jobs.

This is both highly significant and dangerous. Capital, bluntly put, has gone on strike. Those who own wealth are pushing it to the sidelines, as a young and inexperienced president tries to jam through the most sweeping economic changes in over 70 years.

[snip]

ABC News reported this week that many upper-income taxpayers already are planning to cut back on work and investments to stay under $250,000 in income — the point where Obama's punitive taxes kick in. No one wins from this, yet Obama seems oblivious.

For the first time in our history, we are no longer the perceived as the land of milk and honey.

This isn't the only warning sign. A new study asserts that some 100,000 highly educated, well-trained Indians now living in the U.S. will return home in the next few years. Ditto China.

Immigrant entrepreneurs are highly sensitive bellwethers of economic and social conditions. They know where the opportunities are — and where they aren't. They're voting with their feet.

[snip]

[W]hen taxes go up, regulations proliferate and the rule of law and private property protections are weakened, the economy will invariably suffer. This is a universal lesson of economic history, one we ignore at our peril. And yes, this is what's happening now.

No, we don't blame all our current ills on President Obama. He came in at a tough time, when many bad decisions had already been made. But he is responsible for what he's done since.

His stimulus package is little more than a down payment on a socialist economy. It raises taxes on the successful, brings back the welfare state, hands out favors and cash to friends of one political party, while imposing government control over the entire free market in ways that just a year ago would have seemed unimaginable.

Read the whole thing.

You say you want a revolution.....

Thirty days. Four weeks and two days. A day short of one month from inauguration day, and already there is talk of revolution...and not just among right wing, obscure bloggers. Glenn Beck is firmly convinced that we are headed for a deep depression followed by revolution, and today, from the trading floor in Chicago, rousing cheers for the idea of a new "tea party" -- throwing derivative securities into Lake Michigan. The video is from a most unlikely source, CNBC, so I can't post it, but you can view it here.

I have to be honest. I find the idea of a second American Revolution somewhat appealing. When I think about all of the bad laws, entitlement programs, incomprehensible tax code and crooked politicians that we need to get rid of to return this country to some semblance of what it was intended to be, it just seems easier to bring the whole thing crashing down and start over. In my heart of hearts, I do not believe it's possible to reverse the course we are on any other way. Even with Reagan at the helm there was negligible progress. The Republican welfare reform of the Clinton years was just eradicated with a single stroke of Obama's pen. With each successive administration the problems grow larger, never smaller. The debt has ballooned to unfathomable levels, and we face the very real possibility of doubling it over the next four years. Where is the breaking point? When do we stand up and say, "NO MORE!"

I think it's close. Closer than it has ever been in history. My daughter and I recently took a beginner's handgun class. The class was taught by a wonderful woman with a list of sharpshooter credentials that was amazing. She told us that she used to teach the class a couple of times a month, maybe once a week, but, since the last election, she is teaching it almost every night of the week, and is booked for more than two months in advance. I read stories regularly about how much gun sales are up, and the media is trying to convince us that it's all people who already owned guns and are buying more, fearing new constraints on our Second Amendment rights. If that's the case, why are there so many people enrolled in a beginner's handgun class? How terrible is it that, in the United States of America, the greatest nation on earth, millions of citizens fear the loss of their rights - or worse - enough to buy and learn to use handguns? The cover story is the fear that guns will be regulated or taxed, and thus much harder to obtain, so we have to get them now. Deep down, I believe most of these people have thought, at least in passing, about the possibility of needing to defend their families in the event of anarchy.

On blogs and forums, commenters advise each other to stock up on survival supplies and ammunition, to be prepared for whatever may come. The fear is palpable. These are not people who would ever, under ordinary circumstances, contemplate violence. They are music producers and investors and housewives and computer programmers who have been paying attention and do not like the change they sense on the horizon. Case in point - just now, while writing this, I received an email from my old hairdresser. The message?

When the citizens of the freest nation in existence feel like that about their government, something has gone badly wrong. And it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine righting it through peaceful means.

So, how bad could it be?

This is America, right? The land of the free and brave, the land of plenty where even the poor have more than the wealthy in many countries. We'll bounce back from this economic downturn in six months, right? Maybe.

Peter Schiff thinks there's a good chance that we won't, at least not if we continue on our present course.



Now I sincerely hope he's just paranoid.

Bait and Switch Strong; Economy, not so much

The White House began a concerted campaign to lower expectations for the stimulus bill on the Sunday morning news shows today, Reuters reports. No surprise, of course - this is becoming a predictable pattern for the new administration - build up wild expectations to reach the desired goal, then immediately set about deflating them.

One section of the article caught my eye. Recall that Obama plans to sign the monstrosity into law in Denver on Tuesday:

Obama faces a new potential flashpoint next week when two Detroit automakers, General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC, must reach agreements with the United Auto Workers labor union to restructure themselves.

Talks between GM and the union broke down on Saturday. Chrysler's negotiations with the UAW are also deadlocked.

Axelrod made it clear the White House would not intervene in the situation until after Tuesday.

Why? Why would Axelrod feel the need to "make it clear" that they would sit on their hands until "after Tuesday?" What is the relevance? Perhaps the comment is taken out of context, but I can't help but wonder what union boosting poison lurks in the 1,100 pages of garbage that is about to become the law of the land.

For the record, I sincerely hope that I'm just paranoid.