If giving a speech entails fixating a microphone and teleprompter in front of a mollycoddled, petulant adolescent, who in turn uses the microphone and teleprompter to propel accusations and prevarications because he can't have his way, then Barack Obama and his teleprompter gave a speech on the debt ceiling June 29, 2011. The speech emanated a child throwing a public tantrum, desperately trying to reconcile the fantasy world of cartoons and failed progressive ideologies with the harsh reality in which the world exists.
Obama's hemorrhage of a prosaic intellect and déclassé character, captured with his halting and vacillating elocution, was aimed at the very tax breaks he gave corporate jet owners with his stimulus package he neither read nor knew what it contained, and also which has yet to stimulate one sector of the economy.
His speech was an ananemic and exhausted attempt to pit American against American, citizen against business, children against corporations, rich against poor, and the fail-safe progressive platform of us against them--the same tired and failed ineffective class warfare scheme that is used time and time again. He mentioned the tax loopholes six times for corporate jets-- loopholes he created--and now it is these very tax breaks he assures us will be the destruction student loans, food safety, and the prediction of the weather. He attempted to paint a picture of corporations holding fists full of dollars via his loopholes, when in reality the tax break is only an accelerated depreciation on the corporate jets. He has a steady record of vilifying and mischaracterizing an industry for political expediency, and this time he is assailing the aviation industry for votes. Barack Obama has repeatedly demonstrated that he is pathologically incapable of grasping the political, intellectual, and ideological requirements to lead the most rudimentary enterprise.
The catalyst of his tantrum is the $5 trillion he has added to our national debt, and his insistence on adding an additional $2 trillion to a debt that is already un-payable, for which his pitch has been that all the spending programs he has added will reduce the debt; rather than reign in the government's uncontrolled spending, he has identified a villain and needs the country to believe by increasing the corporations' taxes, more money will pour into the government coffers and he will have slayed the villain for the sake of the defenseless proletariat.
The tax cuts I'm proposing we get rid of are tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, tax breaks for oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners. Before we ask our seniors to pay more for health care, before we cut our children's education, before we sacrifice our commitment to the research and innovation that will help create more jobs in the economy, I think it's only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.
Yes indeed, he is going to eliminate that tax break for all these "millionaires and billionaires.” You know the fat-cat type; by eliminating the itemized deductions of those "millionaires and billionaires" making $250,000 per year, which is primarily all small business owners, the tax revenue will fill the government coffers.
Obama is taking class warfare to unparalleled heights, playing the dirtiest trick of them all, the weather and food cards: "It might compromise the National Weather Services. It means food inspection might be compromised." No president, no liberal progressive leader of this county has been as abjectly detached from reality. Obama is either suffering from acute psychosis, or it is very apparent why he won't release his college transcripts.
Obama said, "Call me naive, but my expectation is leaders are going to lead." We have had bad presidents, corrupt presidents, ineffective presidents, great presidents, but Barack Obama is the first president with a pathological inability to lead. He has taken a nuanced backseat on every crisis he has turned his back upon.
Barack Obama and progressives have a deleterious disregard for history. As George Santayana said regarding those who do not heed history's lessons, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The progressives' pathological disregard for intelligence, commonsense, and historical data for the implementation of their historically insolvent ideologies has always been a bewildering genetic defect. Barack Obama is a banal and unimaginative servant to this ideology. History has taught us a lesson on taxing items and industries of the wealthy. President Bush tried it last after breaking his "read my lips" pledge of no new taxes with his Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 on November 5, 1990.
The genius of this liberal grift concocted by Ted Kennedy and George Mitchell was to wring an extra $9 billion from the rich. A 10% luxury tax was applied to automobiles, aircraft, jewelry, furs, and yachts costing over $100,000. It was a given the rich would just continue buying and paying the extra tax. Unfortunately, the liberals violated the most fundamental economic principle of supply and demand. The tax made the high-end yachts too expensive, so the demand dropped. America's short history is fraught with industries decimated by government intervention for the sake of a buck. The consequences of the yacht industry and its employees by this one act of trying to soak the rich:
- Anticipated $9 billion in tax revenue over five years.
- The expected revenue the first year was $1.8 billion.
- First year tax revenues were only $97 million, only 5.4% of first year expectations.
- Why? The rich stopped buying yachts, at least in the U.S.
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Yacht and luxury boat sales dropped 70% in 1991 and all boat sales dropped 18%.
- Boat manufacturers filed bankruptcy, and an estimated 25,000 people lost their jobs because of the tax.
- The government paid $24 million in unemployment benefits from the lost jobs.
- The Treasury Department stated that the luxury tax revenue of $97 million would not cover the lost income tax from the unemployed workers and lost tax revenue from the manufacturers that filed bankruptcy.
- The evil rich did buy yachts, just from other countries.
The liberal scheme to tax the rich backfired with dire economic repercussions and was repealed in 1993 after only two years of costing the government money by taxing the rich.
The irony and just consequences were that Ted Kennedy's state of Massachusetts and George Mitchell's state of Maine were the hardest hit, as were primary yacht and luxury boat builders.
There are principles, fundamental principles, which govern economics that cannot be manipulated without consequences, regardless of the desires of any particular ideology. Barack Obama has violated almost every conceivable economic principle available and the economy is suffering as a result. The $1 trillion stimulus package was going to keep unemployment under 8%. While unemployment was 7.3 % at the time of the stimulus, and after $666 billion, it is at 9.1 and hemorrhaging jobs each month. The stimulus package has not created any net jobs of relevance outside the public sector, and what few jobs it has created, private and public sector, cost $666 billion, or $278,000 per job for an estimated 2.4 million jobs, according to the numbers just released by his very own White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. Jeffery Anderson of The Weekly Standard stated that just cutting a check for $100,000 to each of the 2.4 million alleged created jobs would have saved taxpayers $427 billion. This assumes of course that all these jobs were created by the stimulus package. Of course the White House has sharply rebuked these numbers by Obama's handpicked Council of Economic Advisers. Next stop for his advisers, or Economic Czars, is under the bus.
The moral: stick with principles, history, and economic common sense. If spending is out of control, and revenues are maximized, and you can't pay the bills, cut the spending, and if your revenue stream consists of only one half of the country, start shaking down the half that do not pay taxes. And when voting for a President, ascertain if he understands just a modicum of economic fundamentals; an elementary grasp of U.S. history, a working knowledge of the Constitution, and a discernible dash of character would not hurt either.
