#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.
#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobsthat have been "created" in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.
#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.
#540 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.
#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks. Today, it is 36.6 weeks.
#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans "not in the labor force" soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.
#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
#9 When Obama was elected, the homeownership rate in the United States was 67.5 percent. Today, it is 65.0 percent. That is the lowest that it has been in 18 years.
#10 When Obama entered the White House, the mortgage delinquency rate was 7.85 percent. Today, it is 9.72 percent.
#16 When Barack Obama entered the White House, there were about 32 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 47 million Americans on food stamps.
#17 At this point, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened in our history. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
#18 When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $1.85. Today, it is $3.53.
#19 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#20 Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse.
#21 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#23 In 2008, that total amount of student loan debt in this country was 440 billion dollars. At this point, it has shot up to about a trillion dollars.
#24 According to one recent survey, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
#25 During Obama's first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.
#26 The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.
#27 According to the Survey of Income and Program Participation conducted by the U.S. Census, well over 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.
#33 When you break it down, the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama's first term comes to approximately$50,521 for every single household in the United States. Are you able to pay your share?
When I hear Obama or any on the left talk about championing the "middle class," at this point I become near homicidal. The low information voters who put this man back into office need to be given a choice - get informed or get sterilized.
I still stand in mystification that Obama was able to be reelected after proving himself utterly incompetent to run the American economy. At any rate, this from Mort Zuckerman in the WSJ on the "economic recovery" that isn't:
In recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.
The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government's Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are "jobs." No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.
That's just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.
The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.
At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees. . . .
What's going on? The fundamentals surely reflect the feebleness of the macroeconomic recovery that began roughly four years ago, as seen in an average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters at a miserable 2%. That's the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Over a similar period in previous recessions, growth averaged 4.1%. During the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, the GDP growth rate dropped below 2%. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP for four consecutive years. The misery is not going to end soon.
ObamaCare is partially to blame. The health-insurance law requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker. Under the law, a full-time job is defined as 30 hours a week, so businesses, especially smaller ones, have an incentive to bring on more part-time workers.
Little wonder that earlier this month the Obama administration announced it is postponing the employer mandate until 2015, undoubtedly to see if the delay will encourage more full-time hiring. But thousands of small businesses have been capping employment at 30 hours and not hiring more than 50 full-timers, and the businesses are unlikely to suddenly change that approach just because they received a 12-month reprieve.
These businesses' hesitation to hire is part of a larger caution among employers unsure about the direction of government policy—and which has helped contribute to chronic long-term unemployment that shows no sign of easing. . .
That brings us to a stunning fact about the jobless recovery: The measure of those adults who can work and have jobs, known as the civilian workforce-participation rate, is currently 63.5%—a drop of 2.2% since the recession ended. Such a decline amid a supposedly expanding economy has never happened after previous recessions. Another statistic that underscores why this is such a dysfunctional labor market is that the number of people leaving the workforce during this economic recovery has actually outpaced the number of people finding a new job by a factor of nearly three. . . .
The policies underlying all of this economic train wreck are clear: Obamacare, increased taxes, an insane corporate tax structure complete with massive incentives for companies to keep money earned overseas out of the U.S., and strangling regulations. The only thing that has kept our economy growing at all has been the very dangerous fed policy of printing money and buying up its own debt. What little recovery there has been is not built on economic fundamentals, it exists on a fed created debt bubble that invites future inflation on a grand scale. We will be cleaning up this mess for decades.
Bottom line, the only people who could possibly vote for the lefties like Obama and his ilk are, on economic issues at a minimum, utter and complete idiots who could not successfully turn a profit on a lemonade stand.
The Democrat's convention, characterized by Mitt Romney as a "celebration of failure," now has brutal reality for its bookends.
First there was the debt clock ticking over $16,000,000,000,000 on day one of the DNC. It is another step on the march to becoming Greece. Any question of the import of this was highlighted by the Democrat's refusal to acknowledge this dangerous milestone at any point during their convention.
And less than 12 hours after Obama's speech asking for reelection on his vision rather than his performance, the BLS has released a very bad August jobs report. It shows only 96,000 new jobs created. Note that it takes our economy creating approximately 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep us treading water, so this actually puts us on a downward trajectory.
And worse, even the 96,000 new jobs were dwarfed by the report that 368,000 people stopped looking for work. Because of that, the U-3 unemployment number was reported by BLS as 8.1% - an illusory .2% "improvement" over last month. But as AEI points out, "if the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.2%." Further, "if the participation rate had just stayed the same as last month, the unemployment rate" would have risen to "8.4%." It also means that the number of work age Americans working or actively looking for work is now at its lowest point in 30 years.
If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover. For every net new job created, nearly four Americans gave up looking for work entirely. This is more of the same for middle class families who are suffering through the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression. After 43 straight months of unemployment above 8%, it is clear that President Obama just hasn’t lived up to his promises and his policies haven’t worked. We aren’t better off than they were four years ago. My plan for a stronger middle class will create 12 million new jobs by the end of my first term. America deserves new leadership that will get our economy moving again.
This election is shaping up to be a real world referendum on post modernism versus objective reality that is there for all to see. What makes this so different then past years is that only willful ignorance can allow one to ignore the objective reality.
The third Monday in January is annually set aside to honor the most towering figure of our nation's civil right's movement. And his most eloquent speech was given in 1963, I Have A Dream. That speech was a stirring call for true equality. After opening by noting the promise of our nation, that "all men are created equal," near his conclusion, he said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The full speech is in the video below. Do watch it. His moving appeal to equality as the basis for our nation rings as true today as in 1963.
And there is this via Hot Air today from MLK's niece, Dr. Alveda King who asserts in the interview below that had her uncle lived to see today, he’d be considered a pro-life, social conservative.
What follows is reposted and updated from 2008:
(2011 Update) Three years ago, I wrote a post on race in America, surveying our history and pointing out the far left's bastardization of MLK's dream of equality for all. It is appropriate to revisit that post today. I predicted at the time that, with the election of Obama, we would fall ever deeper, and perhaps irrevocably, into identity politics and multiculturalism, moving ever farther away from realizing MLK's goal of equality. I was wrong:
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Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:
- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.
- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.
- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.
- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.
Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.
Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, their raison d'etre. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.
The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.
The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.
For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.
We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long laboured and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.
The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.
I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.
It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential. . . .
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When I wrote this post, I thought that electing Obama would take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path, strengthening in America the victim class mentality that defines the left. I did not count on the rise of the Tea Party, nor that the left would go all out with the race card in a concerted and transparent attempt to delegitimize the message of that grass roots movement. Instead of strengthening the victim class mentality, all indications are that it has had a contrary effect, exposing the device to much of America. It is a tremendous irony that Obama, a man whose promise to lead us to racial equality was always without the barest hint of substance, may well inadvertently lead us to that promised land regardless. As the race card loses its ability to stigmatize the far left's political opponents, it spells the beginning of the end to the victim politics of the left. When the last vestiges of its toxin are banished from our land, then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled, and all of our children will "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Update (2011): NiceDeb has a round-up of MLK posts, linking not only to this post, but also to a fine post by Michelle Malkin, asking the left to give the race card a rest on MLK Day. In it, Malkin provides an exhaustive list of the times the left has used the race card in the recent past, concluding with an essay from Jerome Hudson that appears at Human Events:
Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.
I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.
At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.
“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”
One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?
I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”
As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.
Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”
Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.
(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)
I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.
What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.
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Update 2012: It is a tragedy that the goal of MLK, a society where people are "measured by the content of their character and not the color of their skin," has been so distorted and hollowed out to be used as a political tool by the left. All of the most prominent voices of the black civil rights movement today - Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc. - invariably seem to be doing far more for themselves than for blacks as a group. Indeed, for but one example, there is Prof. Henry L. Gates who has made an entire, extremely well paying career at Harvard out of arguing for reparations from all whites to all blacks for the original sin of slavery in America.
And as I pointed out in a post a few days ago, in taking stock of what the Civil Rights Movement and the Obama administration have achieved through today:
. . . Blacks should be waking up to a hard lesson - that the left wing promises sold to them, the separatism and victimhood, they are all empty. And on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right.
. . . The black middle class has been growing steadily since 1955. But that middle class is under full frontal assault from Obama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times, the median net worth for black families has plunged 83% under Obama. Black unemployment has risen to 16.2%, and only 56.9% of black men over the age of 20 remain in today's workforce. According to the Censsus Bureau, the poverty rate for black households in America today is at a staggering 27.4%. As the Sun-Timessummed this up:
Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.
“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”
Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”
And indeed, it should be noted that Obama's most recent decision to decimate Army ranks will likewise severely restrict another historic avenue for black advancement to the middle class. In the Army, 27.7% of the enlisted ranks are filled by blacks.
[The second way in which the modern civil rights movements has wholly failed the black community is in education, and particularly] the horrid state of public education in the inner cities. Is is, as Juan Williams has called it from the left, "the key civil rights issue of this generation." And as Thomas Sowell has opined from the right, "Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow.."
Both Williams and Sowell also agree that the single biggest hurdle to improving education in the inner cities is the power of teachers' unions. The left stands shoulder to shoulder with all public sector unions - teachers' unions in particular - because they provide much of the economic base for Democrats. And indeed, Exhibit one in trying to win the black vote on this issue is Obama who, at the start of his administration, ended the DC voucher program for DC's inner city youth, while at the same time he enrolled his children in the area's best private school.
. . . One of the things that is long overdue is some Republican re-thinking — or perhaps thinking for the first time — about the approach that they have been using, with consistently disastrous results, for trying to get the black vote.
The black vote was once consistently Republican, from the time of Abraham Lincoln to Herbert Hoover. Even after Franklin D. Roosevelt won over the black vote to the Democrats, it was not considered remarkable when Eisenhower got a higher share of the black vote than any Republican president in recent times has.
It may be years before Republicans can again get a majority of the black vote. But Republicans don’t need to get a majority of the black vote. If they get 20 percent of the black vote, the Democrats are in trouble — and if they get 30 percent, the Democrats have had it in the general elections.
One of the great travesties of the past half century has been how the far left has fully sewn up the black vote. It was LBJ's championing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - over the objection on Constitutional grounds of Barry Goldwater - that cemented the black vote for Democrats. Since then, blacks have regularly voted near 90% for Democrats.
The Democrats have been able to accomplish this by treating the blacks as servile victims permanently entitled to special treatment. Democrats substituted a brand of soft racism for the hard racism that was historically the hallmark of their party. And as we see today, that faustian bargain has worked out much better for the hard left than it has for blacks in our society.
But that house of cards is crumbling before our very eyes. Quite literally, all of the stars are aligned for conservatives to make a real push for the black vote. Blacks should be waking up to a hard lesson - that the left wing promises sold to them, the separatism and victimhood, they are all empty. And on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right.
The first star in alignment is jobs. The black middle class has been growing steadily since 1955. But that middle class is under full frontal assault from Obama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times, the median net worth for black families has plunged 83% under Obama. Black unemployment has risen to 16.2%, and only 56.9% of black men over the age of 20 remain in today's workforce. According to the Censsus Bureau, the poverty rate for black households in America today is at a staggering 27.4%. As the Sun-Times summed this up:
Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.
“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”
Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”
And indeed, it should be noted that Obama's most recent decision to decimate Army ranks will likewise severely restrict another historic avenue for black advancement to the middle class. In the Army, 27.7% of the enlisted ranks are filled by blacks.
The second star in alignment is the horrid state of public education in the inner cities. Is is, as Juan Williams has called it from the left, "the key civil rights issue of this generation." And as Thomas Sowell has opined from the right, "Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow.."
Both Williams and Sowell also agree that the single biggest hurdle to improving education in the inner cities is the power of teachers' unions. The left stands shoulder to shoulder with all public sector unions - teachers' unions in particular - because they provide much of the economic base for Democrats. And indeed, Exhibit one in trying to win the black vote on this issue is Obama who, at the start of his administration, ended the DC voucher program for DC's inner city youth, while at the same time he enrolled his children in the area's best private school.
Then there is the third star in alignment. Black Republicans are starting to gain a wide voice. When groups like the Black Caucus or the NAACP play the race card now, there are black conservatives like LTC Alen West to respond. And the message of West and his ilk to their fellow blacks is quite literally to runaway from the Democratic plantation.
And finally, the last star in alignment is the race card. There was a time when throwing the race card ended all debate, sending the one whom the card was aimed at ducking and running for cover. For a host of reasons, that is no longer true today. The race card is near bankrupt - though that won't stop the hard left from playing it while there is still any life in their bodies. The race card has been the key to their rise to power. Its bankruptcy spells their death knell. Indeed, expect the race card to fly fast and furious when Republicans seriously vie for the black vote.
For their part, as Republicans vie for the black vote, they must heed the warning of Dr. Thomas Sowell:
There is no point today in Republicans’ continuing to try to win over the average black voter by acting like imitation Democrats. Those who like what the Democrats are doing are going to vote for real Democrats.
Indeed, in the current climate, there is no reason to pretend to be anything other than a conservative Republican when addressing the black community.
It is doubtful that we will ever see again the stars aligned so favorably for breaking the Democrat's stranglehold on the black vote. But according to people close to the issue, it would appear that there is virtually no top down attempt being made by the Republican Party to court the black vote. This from PJM:
Timothy Johnson is the chairman and founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation. He is less than impressed with the Republican Party’s outreach efforts:
I’m a past party official, so I can speak from in house party politics. The short answer is the party sucks at it. That’s the bottom line. The party when it comes down to the black community is doing a terrible job, and is still doing a terrible job.
Johnson said that the GOP may have done a little better under the leadership of Michael Steele, but the current leadership has simply given up on getting black votes:
I have candidates who are honest with me and they say, “Tim, I’ve had people tell me ‘Don’t worry about the black community.’” That pisses me off. When they are honest with me and say, ‘Tim, we’ve been told, ‘Don’t worry about going to the black community, they’re not going to vote for you anyway,’” that’s a bold faced lie. You don’t know who I’m going to vote for. I’m an American.
That is just unforgivable. The opportunity is here for a long term shift in the political calculus in favor of the right and very much for the betterment of black Americans as a whole. It just remains to be taken like the low hanging fruit that it is.
Let's go over some of the eye-opening facts about our gas and oil industry:
- Oil Prices: The major oil companies do not set the price of oil. That price is set independently by traders based on world supply and demand, the strength of the dollar, stability in oil producing regions, and weather events, among other factors.
- Oil Usage - Transportation: Per the DOE, oil accounts for 94% of the energy used in our transportation sector.
- Oil As Our Single Largest Source Of Energy: Per the DOE, oil is our single most important source of energy, accounting for 35.6% of all energy consumed in America. In comparison, solar and wind, added together account for less than 1% of all energy consumed in the U.S. There is a reason for that. Wind and solar energy are vastly more inefficient and costly than oil, gas and coal. They are not commecially viable without substantial subsidies.
- Profit Margin: While oil companies' profits may be vast, that is because their volume is vast. America uses over 20 million barrels of oil daily. The actual profit margin across the oil industry averages less than 6 cents on the dollar. By comparison, Obama's favorite crony capitalist, GE, has a profit margin nearly 33% higher.
- Oil Companies & Taxes: The oil and gas industry is a cash cow for government. Oil and gas companies pay, on average, more than 40% of their profits in taxes. To put a number to this, over the past three years, the oil and gas industry has paid over $242 billion in taxes. Obama's favored business, GE, paid no taxes last year.
- Oil Companies & Jobs: Domestic gas and oil companies play a huge role in our private sector, supporting "9.2 million U.S. jobs and 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy."
- Reinvesting Profits: Exploring and exploiting new sources of oil is a time consuming and very expensive process. For instance, Exxon, in the first quarter of 2011, made an after tax profit of $10.65 billion. Of that, Exxon invested "$7.8 billion into capital and exploration."
- Our Trade Deficit & Foreign Oil: We are, today, transferring vast amounts of our wealth outside of the U.S. to purchase foreign oil. Approximately 62% of our monthly trade deficit comes from the purchase of foreign oil.
[A]bout 1.5 percent of the shares of oil companies are held by the officers and board members of those companies. That is comparable to other industries. Similarly, if you look at who is holding the other 98.5 percent of the shares, more than 60 percent is being held by either mutual funds or the companies that manage large portfolios for pensions. There is another 9 percent that is held directly by pension plans and insurance companies and foundations. . . . . What do you say to people who are critical of oil and natural gas industry earnings? Aren't they really being critical of the benefits that are going to millions of American consumers and retirees?
Mr. Shapiro: Those earnings go to two places. They go to the dividends and the value of the stock that is held by pensions and people saving for their retirement. That comprises the overwhelming majority of the ownership of these companies. The other place where oil and natural gas company earnings go is into investment. The oil and natural gas industry has enormous investment needs. . . . That is the other place those earnings go. They go to the retirement plans of both average Americans and certainly the beneficiaries of the major pension plans in the country. They are public employees or auto workers and the earnings also go toward investments that generate returns in the future.
What all of these facts mean are that oil companies are huge industries that, in a myriad of ways, play a very critical role in supporting our economy. Moreover, nothing is going to replace our oil usage at any point in the forseeable future. Yet, with gas prices rising and the oil industry showing huge profits in the last quarter, the left wants to show they are doing something about gas prices - by punishing the oil industry. Specifically, Obama and Harry Reid propose removing "big oil's subsidies." And in reality, this is merely the latest in Obama and the left's much larger war on our domestic oil and gas industry.
George Will recently opined that the ideology and politics of the left are "untethered from the facts." Will, noting the left's substitution of wishful thinking for plans based in reality, chalks this up to deep historical ignorance. Will is half right. The other reason the left's politics and ideology are "untethered from the facts" is because the left are at least as intellectualy dishonest as they are historically ignorant. The actions of Obama, Reid and the left, to demonize and attack our oil and gas industry because gas prices are rising is merely the most recent proof.
The first deceit of the left is that the oil and gas industry receives no subsidies. Rather, what they receive, and that which Obama aspires to remove, are four tax write downs, three of which - domestic manufacturing tax deduction, percentage depletion allowance, and foreign tax credit - are available to every manufacturing entity in the U.S. The only way in which oil companies are treated partially different than other manufacturing entities in the the U.S. is as regards:
Intangible drilling costs -- According to CNN, "[a]ll industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year."
So when Obama says he wants to take away all of "big oil's subsidies," what he is really saying is that he wants to single out our oil and gas industry for unfavorable tax treatment as compared to all other manufacturing concerns in America. He wants to treat them as a pariah and steal more of their profits.
It is hard to imagine a plan more "untethered from reality" or more cynically designed to gain political advantage, irrespective of the expense to our nation. Basic economics dictate that this plan will negatively impact our economy.
Singling out our domestic oil and gas for special, unfavorable treatment will reduce domestic oil production, it will increase our trade imbalance, it will cost us private sector jobs, it will harm the pensions of millions of Americans, and it will result in rising gas and oil prices to the consumer. Charles Krauthammer does a great job of skewering Obama and the left for the intellectual dishonesty inherent this ostentatious push to punish our oil and gas industry:
Ultimately, this proposal by Obama and the left is going nowhere, simply because there are too many Republicans in Congress to allow them to get away with this insanity. Were this the only attack on our oil and gas industry from Obama and the left, perhaps it would be no big deal. But the reality is that Obama is waging war on our oil and gas industry very effectively by other means.
While Obama recently claimed credit for increased oil production in America under his watch, that was the height of hypocrisy. To the extent that there has been a slight uptick in production under his watch, that is because of expansions of oil drilling on private lands in North Dakota, South Texas and West Texas. Further, these figures have been bumped upward by the opening of BP's deepwater Thunder Horse well. That well was leased under Reagan, the exploratory well dug under Clinton, the well set under Bush, and production only now coming to full flow. In sum, Obama had as much to do with the increase in domestic oil production on his watch as he has had to do with the daily rising and setting of the sun.
To the contrary, as stated earlier, Obama is warring quite effectively on our domestic oil drilling. He is doing so, on one hand, by severely restricting the availability of public lands and coastal regions for exploration and drilling and, on the other hand, by limiting permits for such activities:
In 2008 there were 2,416 new oil and natural gas leases issued on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land spanning 2.6 million acres. In 2010, under the Obama Administration, the number of new leases issued dropped to 1,308 and acres leased dropped to 1.3 million. The total onshore acreage leased under the Obama Administration in 2009 and 2010 are the lowest in over two decades, stretching back to at least 1984.
There is also, of course, the permatorium on drilling in the Gulf, though at least a few drilling permits have recently been issued. The effects of Obama's war will be with us long after Obama himself is but a distant, very unpleasant memory in our national consciousness.
What makes this war on our domestic production, with all its attendant negatives for our economy, all the more mind boggling is that Obama has promised to significantly finance Brazil's development of their own oil industry. That is inexplicable - though of course it does bear noting that George Soros has a substantial investment, close to $1 billion, in Brazil's oil industry.
Fortunately for our nation, Obama's war on our domestic oil production is something that we can change at the ballot box. But there is also another front in the left's war on oil and gas - one that wholly bypasses Congress and the ballot box. I am referring to the radical environmentalists who have been given keys to the courthouse under our environmental laws. They are seeking new ways daily to bring our nation to its knees by hitting the off switch on oil, gas and economic growth.
One of their well honed methods is to request that a species be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Once whatever little beastie is then declared endangered, any and all human activity that effects that beasties's habitat becomes enjoined. So for example, California's Central Valley, which but three years ago was a thriving bed of agriculture, has seen its irrigation water shut and is today "Zimbabwe West." The reason - a law suit brought under the ESA to protect a 3 inch fish with no commercial value, the Delta smelt.
And then there are the law suits charging that carbon dioxide is a pollutant for which emitters are liable. Their ultimate goal is to have the courts take over our nation's energy policy. Whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant and whether it is causing "global warming" are scientific questions very much at issue and that courts are unqualified to answer. Even assuming arguendo that CO2 is a pollutant causing global warming, what to do about it is a political question with massive ramifications for our economy. It is not a question to be decided by our Courts, but by our elected representatives.
Yet our federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down - none of whom are scientists - has shown an avid willingness to hear and decide such cases. The EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant today under the Clean Air Act because five members of the Supreme Court felt qualified to pass judgment on this issue. Moreover, enterprising lawyers have brought suits against power companies under a nuisance theory because they are contributing to carbon dioxide in the air. These law suits are currently in the court system. If the lawyers succeed, the Courts then become the single most important arbiters of energy policy in America. On top of this, we have seen in the past week NASA's Jim Hansen, the "Bernie Madoff of climate science," file lawsuits with children as the plaintiffs seeking to have courts take complete control over our energy policy in the name of Global Warming.
While Obama's attempt to punish our domestic oil and gas industry for daring to make a profit is not going to go anywhere, his and the left's larger war on that industry is "untethered from the facts." We are all going to ultimately pay the price. I am praying that we are able to elect someone in 2012 who is both capable of articulating a coherent energy policy and who is able to take our courts and the radical left out of the business of deciding our nation's energy policy.
New orders for factory products tumbled much more than expected in May, posting their sharpest drop since the depth of the recession and their first decline in nine months, a government report showed on Friday.
Ignoring all of the above, Obama claims that, this year alone, "government" created "600,000 private sector jobs." That is laughable.
The reality is that we have hemorrhaged over 8 million jobs since this recession began. As to Obama's arrogant assertion that he has created 600,000 private sector jobs - the government cannot create a single private sector job. What the government can do is twofold. One, government can direct funding for government contracts to the private sector. But Obama has gerrymandered that process by freezing out non-union businesses that make up 92% of the private sector.
Beyond such government contracting, government can only create the conditions effecting the entire economy that will help or hurt private sector employment. As near as I can tell, there is nothing that Obama has done to positively effect the economic environment. To the contrary, his massive increase in spending and entitlements, with the promise of more taxes and entitlements to follow, are creating the conditions for economic malaise. Indeed, Obama is directing our economy on a downward spiral of historic proportions. The graph below shows current job losses in comparison to previous post-WWII recessions:
So how is the left attempting to address this mismanagement of epic proportions? Beyond the fantasies spun by Obama, there is the effort to paint Republicans as heartless for refusing to sign yet another blank check to extend unemployment benefits. It is actually rather comic, between Nancy Pelosi claiming that unemployment benefits are the best method to increase employment to Harry Reid, et. al, screaming that the Republicans are intransigent and unfeeling while it is they themselves that are refusing any deal:
Congress adjourns this week for the July Fourth recess without having passed a bill to extend unemployment insurance benefits to 1.3 million people who started losing them this month.
Democrats have been painting Republicans as unsympathetic to the long-term unemployed who will be unable to collect benefits, but Democratic leaders have rejected several offers by the GOP to vote for the bill if at least some of it is paid for.
"My concern is that the Democrats are more interested in having this issue to demagogue for political gamesmanship than they are in simply passing the benefits extension," said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who offered a deal that was rejected by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Democratic leaders were quick to attack Republicans for opposing the benefits, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling their opposition "just cruel" and "contrary to what our country is about."
Republicans, meanwhile, stood firm in their argument that extending benefits should not add to the deficit.
Voinovich told Reid he would vote for extending benefits if at least half of the extension could be paid for with unused money from the $787 billion stimulus package.
"I came to the table with a fair compromise, and the ball is in their court," said Voinovich, whose state suffers from a 10.7 percent unemployment rate. . . .
Obama should be doing everything possible to create the environment for private sector job creation. It goes without saying that his administration is on the opposite course.
Not only has the stimulus led to a massive number of new jobs, apparently its led to an Orwellian rethinking of the science of mathematics.
In 2009, the Obama regime told us that, without the stimulus, our workforce would shrink to 133.9 million jobs.
Well, 14 months into the stimulus, we now have 129.7 million jobs - not surprising really, since the stimulus was aimed at everything but the creation of new jobs in the private sector.
And yet . . . the Obama Administration, but a few days ago, claimed that the stimulus "created or saved" 2.8 million jobs.
So lets see . . . . 133.9 - 129.7 = 4.2 million less jobs . . . . [erase] . . . hmmm, maybe if I carry the 2 and divide by the square root of Obama's I.Q. . . . nope . . . . jeez, I just don't understand this new math . . . .
As Big Government points out, to get to the Obama administration's 2.8 million jobs created or saved, the administration had to subtract 7 million jobs from their 2009 baseline of what the workforce would been without the stimulus. That is new math indeed.
The reality is that, for all practical purposes, the only thing the Obama stimulus actually saved were public sector jobs and some very small, very limited jobs in the quasi-private sector that deal with green energy and/or that rely on government contracts. That means nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars that could have gone to stimulate the private sector was wasted. The vast majority of the jobs attribuatable to the stimulus are in the public sector that, itself, produces no new wealth.
Thus, in the words of that iconic American philosopher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "America's chickens are coming home to roost." The public sector, having survived a year on borrowed Obama-money, is now now facing deep cuts. So will the Obama administration begin subtracting those "saved or created" public sector jobs now getting the axe. Actually, even that doesn't begin to accurately reflect what the stimulus has cost the nation. That three quarters of a trillion dollars that mostly went to prop up the pulbic sector has to be analyzed in terms of the lost opportunity costs had we used the stimulus to help create permanent private sector jobs. Somehow, I think that it would take one hell of a lot of NewMath to make that number look good from the left's perspective.
But the "steady" figure of 9.7% unemployment itself hid more problems. The work force actually contracted yet again in February, losing a net of 36,000 more jobs. Perhaps more importantly, the Labor Dept.'s "broader measure of unemployment and underemployment rose to 16.8% last month, from 16.5% in January." Tom Blumer of Bizzyblogdigs deeper into the numbers and finds even more to be pessimistic about.
Were this a typical recession, we would have begun pulling out of it some time ago. We should already be seeing a return to normal employment levels. We are not because Obama is not working to restore America, he is working to remake it. Between health care, regulation of carbon, and a reworking of our financial regulations, Obama portends to work a sea change to America, with the federal government expanding its power over every aspect of society. And as Blumer points out, quoting a Heritage Foundation article, all of this has businesses hanging back:
The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs?
■ At one of President Obama’s many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
■ Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”
■ Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”
■ The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: “‘There hasn’t been one bankruptcy,’ he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they’re not — because ‘they don’t know what their costs are going to be.’” . . .
Unfortunately for America, Obama's efforts to rework our health care system ostensibly for economic reasons portends to be counterproductive on an insane scale. As Paul Ryan points out here, Obama's plan does nothing to bend down the curve of health care costs, and it understates by more than half what this monster will cost our country. As Krauthammer writes today, if Obama was truly concerned with the economic aspects of health care, then the single most important step he could undertake to bend down the cost curve of health care expenses would be to engage in tort reform. But Obama's health care plan is not about economics, it is about the accretion of power:
. . . Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill. . . .
It should also be noted that the CBO came out today with revised projections showing that, with Obama's massive spending, we can expect add a trillion dollars annually to our budget deficit over the next decade. This exceeds Obama's own ten year estimate by $1.2 trillion over ten years. It will mean a deficit in a decade that is near ten times the deficit left by the Bush administration and will top 20% or our GDP. Those are numbers that would make Robert Mugabe sit up nights worrying.
Lastly, there is Obama's latest plan to tax our financial institutions as a sort of punishment. Obama is selling this risible idea on a class warfare platform. As any student of Econ 101 could tell you, taxes on businesses get passed through to consumers to the maximum extent possible and, to the extent that they don't get passed on, then they manifest in other negative consequences for our economy. Today, the CBO actually has come out to explain it for those who are economically illiterate. This from Hot Air:
This only comes as news to people who haven’t worked in the private sector, of course — which means the entirety of the Obama administration and most of the Democratic leadership in Congress. It takes a CBO analysis for them to understand that increasing costs on businesses means increasing costs on their customers — or forcing them out of business altogether. This time, the CBO explains the impact of raising fees on financial institutions to the clueless:
President Obama’s proposed fee on the country’s biggest banks receiving taxpayer bailout money would ultimately result in costs to the firms’ customers, employees, and investors, a non-partisan Congressional watchdog said today. … But the Congressional Budget Office today warned that “the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government.”
“The cost of the proposed fee would ultimately be borne to varying degrees by an institution’s customers, employees, and investors,” the CBO said today in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley.
“Customers would probably absorb some of the cost in the form of higher borrowing rates and other charges, although competition from financial institutions not subject to the fee would limit the extent to which the cost could be passed to borrowers. Employees might bear some of the cost by accepting some reduction in their compensation, including income from bonuses, if they did not have better employment opportunities available to them. Investors could bear some of the cost in the form of lower prices of their stock if the fee reduced the institution’s future profits.”
The availability of credit – already a problem for some consumers and businesses – could also be limited by the proposed fee, the CBO said. . . .
Obama is leading us into economic oblivion at a sprint. The question in 2012 will be whether it is even possible to reverse the damage. Conservatives used to say tongue in cheek that Obama'sinauguration would begin Carter's second term. If only . . .
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