Term Two: From Bad to Worse

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

First the good news: America has vast untapped reserves of conventional energy sources – petroleum, natural gas and coal – that could reduce energy costs and make the nation energy independent.

Our economy is cyclical and resilient. Left alone, it would recover – provided federal borrowing and spending are curtailed and regulatory burdens rationalized.

And the nation still has the best health care delivery system in the world.
The American economy overall, and especially its energy and health care sectors, have the potential to power job creation, economic recovery and prosperity.

Now the bad news: Voters just re-elected a president who opposes the development of domestic conventional energy sources, who has tinkered, spent, borrowed and regulated the economy into further decline, possibly into recession, and who has installed an unpopular health care takeover that will drive caregivers out of business, discourage research and development of new treatment methods, impose a score of new taxes and reduce coverage for seniors while driving up costs for everyone.

President Barack Obama’s first term is marked by fallout from his failed policies: the stimulus, massive new debt, inflation, a weak economy, declining household incomes, persistent joblessness, high gas prices and failed foreign policy. Understandably, Obama didn’t run for re-election on his abysmal record, but, if Obama has a second-term agenda, no one who voted for him has a clue what it will be.

One thing is certain: In his second term, Obama will inherit a mess left by … Barack Obama.

If the past is prologue, our economically illiterate president will ignore that greater than $1 trillion deficits cannot continue for four more years without damaging America and that the massive national debt, now approaching $17 trillion, must be controlled to prevent interest payments from taking over the budget – a budget that, despite a law requiring one annually, hasn’t been passed in nearly four years.

Using first-term spending as a new baseline, Obama will attempt to continue to borrow, spend, print (and debase to a point approaching worthlessness) more money, and set new records for profligacy and debt. Obama has run up $6,000 billion dollars in new debt in less than four years while, in the same time, GDP has increased by only $900 billion. The numbers reveal as fantasy the spending "multiplier effect" pumped by Keynesian economists.

Many full-time jobs will become part-time as employers avoid the penalties imposed by ObamaCare. More jobs will be lost if the tax increases the president demands are imposed on small-business owners filing as individuals. Government dependency will continue to grow and the benefits become even less affordable as more people drop off the tax rolls, increasing the number of American voters who have personal stakes in maintaining entitlements rather than preserving them.

Reform of unsustainable entitlements already in crisis – Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, – will be delayed for an additional four years. Unaddressed, these risk passing their tipping points and missing windows of opportunity during which they could be saved.

The across-the-board budget sequestration required by last year’s debt ceiling deal looms. If sequestration is imposed, there will be massive cuts in defense, along with the loss of many thousands of jobs, and, other than interest payments on the debt, immediate, uniform cuts everywhere in discretionary federal spending.

Who believes that Obama and congressional Democrats have the political courage to rationally and responsibly reconcile the inconsistencies and conflicting consequences of radical budget cuts, massive borrowing and tax policy? After all, Obama has already ignored the recommendations of the 2009 Simpson/Bowles Commission he assembled to address those issues, and there was no outcry to accept them among the Democrats who, at the time, controlled both houses of Congress.

Abroad, despite Obama’s campaign narrative, al-Qaida, its affiliates and ideological surrogates are still attacking and killing Americans. The Arab Spring, hyped by the administration as a positive development in the Middle East and North Africa, has turned into a tribal, Islamist winter. Continuation of Obama’s first term dithering will permit Iran to become a nuclear power, permanently threatening Israel and tipping the balance of power in an already unstable Middle East. If the Persian Gulf is in flames and our domestic energy sources remain untapped, America’s and the world’s economies could collapse.

By executive fiat, Obama has removed thousands of acres of federal land previously approved for natural gas development from America’s energy equation and, since re-election, authorized another three years of American membership on the United Nations Human Rights Council, an organization dominated by Third World kleptocrats and human-rights violators who object to Israel’s self-defense.

What could possibly go wrong?