Turning voodoo into rocket science

The idea that there are people who actually believe that governments create wealth and political leaders who claim that we can spend our way to prosperity using borrowed money has always fascinated me. After all, there is plenty of empirical evidence going back to the founding of the nation that gainsays these conceits. Yet every so often a perfect storm of voter credulity, hatred for the incumbent and misguided idealism combines to create governments like the one currently running the nation. That’s how America wound up electing a cabal of socialist politicians bent on “fundamentally changing the face of America,” whether Americans want it changed or not. And of course, today all political change involves economics, which brings me to the realization that what passes for economics in Washington these days is a lot closer to faith healing than it is to that time honored social science.

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The Historic and Unprecedented Mess Obama is leaving

The Obama Administration is spending money at a velocity that’s several times greater than the highest expenditures during the Bush years and in the process is running deficits that are on an order of magnitude three times greater than Bush’s. Yet the Obamites keep talking about “the mess left by the previous administration.” What will the next administration (and possibly several others after the next) say about the mess Obama is leaving as he and the Democrats drown the American economy in a an ocean of debt? An amazing fact about the world economy is that up until the early 1900s inflation was virtually unheard of. But with the advent of the Progressives in the persons of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and others, economic tampering and regulation of industry became a fact of life. Back in those days, the Progressives were different from today’s Progressives, in that the 1.0 and 1.1 versions were raving racists and proponents of eugenics. Come to think of it, today’s 2.0 version appears to be just as racist with ideas just as kooky as those advanced by their philosophical forebears. Much of this administration’s economic policy is now being hatched behind closed doors and the key consideration does not appear to be how to benefit the country as a whole, but how to benefit favored friends of the administration. As such, public sector unions are reaping huge benefits at the expense of taxpayers who pay their salaries. More and more Americans are waking up to the smell of burnt coffee, as the Obama political agenda seeks to evenly spread the misery by spreading the wealth. The net result of punitively taxing “the rich” is the disappearance of jobs, as it is the investments and risks taken by those with money to invest that ultimately results in the creation of jobs. As jobs disappear more Americans will awaken to learn that the administration is much more concerned about adhering to its leftist/progressive ideology than whether or not the economy is providing sufficient employment. What’s more, any money that government spends is existing money that’s taken out of the economy, keeping it from the hands of entrepreneurs, who would use it to create new wealth.

Currently nearly 20% of the American economy is under assault

Currently nearly 20% of the American economy is under assault, as the Democrats seek to socialize healthcare nation-wide under the guise of “reform.” The promise is lower costs, improved outcomes and no more Americans without health insurance. But the reality of health “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will ultimately turn doctors into bureaucrats and patients into inconvenient drains on ever sparser resources. Here’s a question few seem to be asking in this debate: where will health innovations and medical inventions come from under socialized medicine? The proposed cap and trade legislation in the form of the Waxman-Markey Bill is another economic initiative that will impose huge costs on Americans with no apparent upside, even if it does reduce America’s “carbon footprint”. President Obama is pledging that under his initiative America’s carbon output will be reduced by 85% by the year 2050. If this turns out to be the true, it will only be so because America’s standard of living will be on par with what it was in 1875. The precipitous drop in the Democrats’ popularity among voters is entirely due to the fact that they’re attempting to turn their kooky notions into law. Every day more and more Americans are resolving to resist the insanity the administration is attempting to ram down their throats in the name of progressivism. While the Democrats consider themselves the high priests of an esoteric scientific discipline, real people are seeing them for what they are: an obsessive cult with delusions of relevance.