The Chumps Are Wising Up

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

In President Barack Obama’s America, responsible citizens who follow the rules, work hard and pay their bills, in full and on time, are chumps. The chumps are wising up.

America’s economic problems are simple: American politicians have spent, printed and borrowed too much money, incurred too much debt and forced American businesses and individuals to struggle with a massive federal register and an indecipherable tax code.

Both the register and the code are structured to reward special interests while saddling productive Americans with expensive mandates that subsidize businesses – including many incapable of competing in open markets – and support nonproductive but otherwise able-bodied citizens. We are governed by a president who is, like many in Congress, a financial adolescent who doesn’t think the law of supply and demand applies to United States currency and government bonds.

Obama’s brand of crony capitalism – special-interest tax deals, guaranteed loans, Obamacare exemptions, regulatory discrimination, subsidies and bailouts – affects everyone.

Businesspeople who took risks to build successful companies have watched failed corporations with workforce members of politically-connected unions being bailed out at the expense of senior creditors, taxpayers and more responsible competitors.

People who struggle to pay their mortgages have witnessed less conscientious borrowers receive special assistance. Formerly unemployed Americans who accepted lesser jobs outside their specialties to pay their bills see others who refused to consider more menial jobs receiving extended unemployment benefits.

Government tinkering in markets and society has eroded personal freedoms, ambition and opportunities and turned the traditional meanings of merit and virtue upside down.

Though still at serious risk, America has not yet dipped into another recession, but only modest economic progress – barely measurable in Q4, 2012 — has not improved the jobs picture. The small measures of progress in Obama’s fourth year are only "successes" when compared to his first three, among America’s worst.

Granted, Obama inherited a recession, and recovery always takes some time, but the recession officially ended in June, 2009. The larger issue today is why, compared to other post-WWII recessions, the onset of recovery has taken so long.
His excuses exhausted, Obama must accept responsibility for the slow recovery, if, indeed, we are recovering.

In slightly more than four years Obama has added $6 trillion to the national debt. Even using deceptive job numbers, official unemployment remains at about 8 percent. Gas prices are pushing $4 a gallon, and Obama’s health care takeover remains unpopular with a majority of Americans.

Its failure was so obvious that even his supporters have dropped references to Obama’s "stimulus," much of which was paid to mismanaged states and municipalities to cover budget shortfalls and prevent public-service union layoffs. More went to favored constituencies and politically-connected green failures like Solyndra. Only Obama’s pro-stimulus rhetoric was "shovel-ready."

But Obama’s greatest failure was to create an uncertain business climate. Facing the health-care takeover with no way to project future costs, businesses have been reluctant to hire new workers. To avoid Obamacare’s penalties, some are cutting employee headcount to below fifty and work hours to below thirty.
Many owners of small businesses, the engine of American job growth, fall into Obama’s targeted category of "millionaires and billionaires" whose taxes were raised in his pursuit of "fairness." None have missed that Obama reserves the right to define what is "fair," so fewer businesses are forming, expanding or hiring.

Obama’s party in Congress passed and the president signed Dodd-Frank, a financial-reform law that raises costs and discourages lending institutions from taking normal business risks to fund entrepreneurs.

Keeping faith with Obama’s generous union paymasters, the president’s National Labor Relations Board sued Boeing for opening a nonunion plant in South Carolina and has attempted to impose unionization through regulatory fiat. Employers uncertain of their exposure to union wage and benefits demands and work rules are understandably reluctant to hire.

Driven only by a robust business tradition, America’s miniscule "recovery" is occurring in spite of Obama’s policies. As Washington lurches from one phony funding crisis to the next, even Americans who remain open to logical, factual information about what, precisely, Obama has done to improve the economy see no persuasive evidence that he has tried.

The nation is in the very best of hands…

http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/03/op-ed_the_chumps_are_wising_up.html#incart_river