Logos of the Bogus

An Ideologue With No Ideas

Posted by Bernard Hall on Feb. 7, 2010 | 2 comments

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President Barack Obama claims he is not an ideologue. He came to office with an agenda in mind. He promised the American people hope and change. However, the American people had a different idea of what hope and change meant than President Obama.

Obama turned out to be more of a progressive than the American people thought. First of all, America believed it needed a new direction because of a faltering economy. Unemployment was rising and the GDP was falling. Now, after a year, we are still uncertain about the direction of the economy. The number of jobs is falling as is the unemployment rate. Not sure how that works-one would think that these two figures would be inversely related.

It has been a year since we passed the $787 billion stimulus bill. It was designed to stimulate the economy and to create jobs. The number of jobs it is created is debatable. At best it is created only government jobs and very few if any private-sector jobs. The Obama administration claims that it has saved somewhere between thousands and 2 million jobs. Of course there are no hard and fast rules of how these jobs are counted. Perhaps this is why some jobs get counted twice or even five times. One thing we can be sure of is that creating census counting jobs is not going to give us long-term economic job stability.

Let's ask the question; What has Obama accomplished in this first year? Health care reform? No. Thank goodness for that one. What was sold to us as covering more people, holding down costs, and making health insurance more affordable has turned into buying the votes and bribing a few senators to get their vote in order to pass the bill in the Senate. If this bill was going to be so great, why was all the wheeling and dealing done behind closed doors in order to get the minimum number of votes needed?

Cap and Trade? No. Again, they goodness for this one too. What is designed to curb pollution on a worldwide scale has morphed itself into higher energy taxes in the name of creating green  jobs. What is a green job? And how will they be counted? Again, this will only result in higher taxes and higher energy costs for all Americans. Is this progress? If it doesn't reduce any pollution, that's okay because the government needs the revenue to continue its spending binge.

Fiscal responsibility? No. President Obama begins every fiscal responsibility speech by blaming George Bush. Well, George Bush is not president anymore and Barack Obama needs to begin taking responsibility for his own fiscal mismanagement. It was under Obama's watch that trillion dollars was added to the budget deficit by spending more TARP money and re-spending the tarp money then needs to happen. After all, the economy is coming out of the recession because of the success of the stimulus bill. That's what the administration keeps telling me anyway.

Increasing federal spending by 84% and then imposing a freeze on spending is a gimmick. How can the lectures on fiscal responsibility be taken seriously when one day the president says we are spending too much and the next day he is ready to forgive all the student loans. And why the special treatment to students who get government jobs? Their loans are forgiven 10 years earlier? Gosh, Pa, this wouldn't be another payoff to the unions, would it? The entry-level government jobs tend to be union jobs.

Tripling annual deficits and then promising to cut them in half by 50% doesn't sound like hard decisions are being made. As a voter, I thought I was being promised fiscal responsibility the whole time. Hope and change wasn't explained as payoffs for unions and trial lawyers. But that is what was delivered. Yes, often as is hard to remain a person of principle amid a large opposition. I will agree that it is much harder to do what is right versus what is most popular. But what is right, must be right for America. What is being done cannot be based on a political agenda. Especially if the political agenda is based on an ideology of bad ideas.