By John Hawkins
10/30/2012
"Look at the string of broken promises. If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.
Or remember when he said this: I guarantee if you make less than $250,000, your taxes won’t go up. Of the 21 tax increases in Obamacare, 12 of them hit the middle class.
Or remember when he said health insurance premiums will go down $2,500 per family, per year? They’ve gone up $3,000, and they’re expected to go up another $2,400.
Or remember when he said, “I promise by the end of my first term I’ll cut the deficit in half in four years”? We’ve had four budgets, four trillion-dollar deficits.
...We’ve got to tackle this debt crisis before it tackles us. The president likes to say he has a plan. He gave a speech. We asked his budget office, “Can we see the plan?” They sent us to the press secretary. He gave us a copy of the speech. We asked the Congressional Budget Office, “Tell us what President Obama’s plan is to prevent a debt crisis.” They said, “It’s a speech, we can’t estimate speeches.”
You see, that’s what we get in this administration — speeches — but we’re not getting leadership." -- Paul Ryan
"(Obama) said that by now we'd have unemployment at 5.4 percent. The difference between where it is and 5.4 percent is 9 million Americans without work. I wasn't the one that said 5.4 percent. This was the president's plan. Didn't get there.
He said he would have by now put forward a plan to reform Medicare and Social Security, because he pointed out they're on the road to bankruptcy. He would reform them. He'd get that done. He hasn't even made a proposal on either one. He said in his first year he'd put out an immigration plan that would deal with our immigration challenges. Didn't even file it.
...The middle class is getting crushed under the policies of a president who has not understood what it takes to get the economy working again. He keeps saying, "Look, I've created 5 million jobs." That's after losing 5 million jobs. The entire record is such that the unemployment has not been reduced in this country. The unemployment, the number of people who are still looking for work, is still 23 million Americans.
There are more people in poverty, one out of six people in poverty. How about food stamps? When he took office, 32 million people were on food stamps. Today, 47 million people are on food stamps. How about the growth of the economy? It's growing more slowly this year than last year, and more slowly last year than the year before.
...The president has tried, but his policies haven't worked. He's great as a speaker and describing his plans and his vision. That's wonderful, except we have a record to look at." -- Mitt Romney
Barack Obama is a small little man trying and failing to do a very big job. He has been one of the worst, if not the worst President in American history. Based solely on his performance, Barack Obama should be losing this election in a 50 state landslide. Yet, here we are going into the final week before the election and Mitt Romney is barely ahead in a nip and tuck race. Could that be because some people don't like Romney? Sure, but there's a lot more going on and no matter who wins this election, the Republican Party and the conservative movement need to start addressing the underlying structural issues that are allowing a mediocrity like Obama to compete for the presidency despite the fact that he's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's unworthy of the office.
1) Cheap Borrowed Money: On an intellectual level, most Americans may be able to comprehend that the country is in deep financial trouble, but they're not feeling the squeeze. Part of that is because Western Europe is having its own financial troubles and it's driving cheap borrowed money here, but it's also because the Fed is playing sleazy financial games to cover up our weakness. Interest rates are being kept artificially low and in 2011, the Fed bought 61% of our debt. So, we have a 16 trillion dollar debt we can't pay for, we're running a trillion dollar plus deficit a year, people from both parties say it's "unsustainable," and yet the public isn't being forced to make any hard choices at all. Essentially, the only thing of significance we've agreed to cut in the last four years is the military budget and both Obama and Romney agree those cuts will never happen. It's hard to convince the public that there's an impending crisis when Republicans are calling for tax cuts, Democrats are calling for more spending and everything seems to be humming along just like it always has.
2) A Style Over Substance Mentality: One of the great ironies of modern American life is that as the number of news sources Americans have access to have proliferated, news organizations have become more and more enamored with covering gaffes and clever put-downs to draw an audience in an increasingly competitive market as opposed to hard news. As a result, increasingly, Americans seem to be less willing or perhaps even less able to comprehend the crucial issues that confront the country. Barack Obama, to his everlasting shame, has taken full advantage of this trend. In 2008, his campaign was about "Change," "Hope," "Unity," and in 2012 it has been "Big Bird," "Binders," and Bayonets." If we become so shallow as a people that elections are primarily decided by trivia instead of the issues that will really determine the fate of our nation, then ultimately we’re doomed to fail.
3) A Left-wing Takeover of Colleges, the Media, and Hollywood: The Left has completed its "long march through the institutions" and now it owns Hollywood, colleges, and the mainstream media. People tend to notice Hollywood stars spouting off, but Hollywood is really effective because it habitually treats far left-wing beliefs as the cultural norm while Christian and conservative beliefs are almost always portrayed as backwards and mean-spirited. In our colleges, Communists, terrorists, and far left-wingers indoctrinate naïve students with a poisonous miasma of liberal beliefs. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media, from The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc., etc., etc. act as press flacks for the Democratic Party. Whatever story the Democrats want out there, they push it. Stories that are bad for the Left are either completely ignored or treated as insignificant. When conservative state legislators help fund public colleges that teach kids to hate them and conservatives watch TV shows, movies, and cable news networks that smear their beliefs over a morning paper that mocks God and looks down its nose at people with traditional values, it's no surprise the Left has a huge advantage. Vladimir Lenin once said, "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them," and today, conservatives are funding the very people who are hanging our country by the neck until it dies.
4) Racial Polarization: Democrats start every election with 90% of the black vote and roughly 65% of the Hispanic vote as a given. Some of this is based on issues. Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than other Americans to be poor and impoverished Americans are more likely to find the Democrats' offers of free goodies to be appealing. However, much of it is cultural and the fruit of the liberal strategy of falsely calling Republicans racist. In fact, that's pretty much the ONLY thing Barack Obama has had to offer to black Americans. They've gone backwards economically, illegal aliens have taken jobs that would have gone to black Americans, and Obama has fought against God's definition of marriage and school choice, both of which are popular with African-Americans. It's not much better for Latinos. Helping illegal aliens to stay here doesn't help American Hispanics; to the contrary, it hurts all low income workers and costs the middle class money. The only people who really benefit are corrupt business owners who get below market labor and liberal politicians who eventually want to turn illegals into votes. Yet, as long as the Republicans refuse to do serious outreach and liberals can keep locking up huge percentages of the vote just by crying racism, they'll keep getting a much larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than they deserve based on their performance in office.
5) Entitlement Culture: Because America has done so well for so long, we've started to embrace a "participation trophy" mentality. Instead of believing you should be rewarded for what you produce, many Americans have embraced a different concept that Thomas Sowell describes:
"One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements ’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
Large swathes of our society now believe that they are owed an education, medical care whether they pay for it or not, money and food stamps if they're out of work, free birth control, free government cell phones, help with their mortgage, and medical care and money for a decade or two after they retire. In the scheme of things, that wouldn’t be so bad except for one thing: What seems to be conspicuously absent from these beliefs about what people are "owed" simply for being American citizens is whether or not they’re ever going to pay enough money into the system to FUND all of these things.
Barack Obama has played on this mentality and he has pursued a strategic goal of making as many Americans as possible reliant on the government. Every American who works for the government, gets welfare and food stamps, or sees April 15th as a payday instead of a time to pay out, is likely to be another vote for the Democratic Party. It may be terrible for the country to build up an army of sponges, parasites and takers, but it’s good for the Democratic Party. Don't think that "The Food Stamp" President is unaware of that fact either.
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To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.
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