The Cult of Barack Obama - Eight Questions to Help Identify Members

I’ve never quite gotten the cult of Che Guevara. Colleges across the country are crisscrossed with students wearing Che tee shirts and dorm rooms are decorated with Che posters. Sometimes if you ask the student wearing a Che shirt about him you’ll get a leftist screed worthy of Matt Damon’s bar scene in Good Will Hunting. They’ll talk about his “affinity for the poor”, that he was a doctor, and the fact that he fought against the American Imperialists and “Capitalist octopuses” who were abusing and exploiting the population of South America. Most of the time however they will simply say nonsensical things like “he fought for the oppressed” or he was a “man of the people”.

What you’ll rarely hear them tell you about, though, is Che the Communist, Che the murderer, Che the narcisist, or Che the sadist. You won’t hear them tell you about the thousands of innocent Cubans who were killed arbitrarily at Che’s direction, or by Che’s own hand. They won’t tell you about the economic morass his revolution brought to Cuba. They won’t tell you about the chaos he left in his wake.

Most people wearing Che shirts or sleeping under Che posters know nothing about Che Guevara but they know that he was larger than life and somehow being associated with him makes them cool.

Such is the nature of a cult. Cherry picking facts and ignoring those that damage the image of their idol. In the case of the cult of Che, it’s a pretty innocuous cult. Other than facilitating a hookup that one might regret in the morning or inciting a fisticuff on the student union, there’s not much of an impact on the wider world.

If only we could say the same about the cult of Barack Obama. His cult shares many of the characteristics of the Che cult: The posters. The tee shirts. The celebrity. Mostly though, the cult of Barack Obama shares the characteristic of its adherents knowing practically nothing about their deity. Ask Obama supporters why they like Obama and you’ll get things like “He is for the people” “He supports women’s rights”, “He fixed the healthcare system” or maybe “He got Bin Laden”. All of those points, like most about Obama, are either meaningless or simply wrong.

Being for the people or supporting women’s rights may make for a good sound bite, but they mean nothing in the debate over public policy. Does lowering taxes so that all citizens can take more of their money home count as being for the people? Does promoting a woman’s right to protect herself with a weapon count as supporting women’s rights? And as for Obama getting Bin Laden, a Facebook post recently summed that up nicely: Crediting Obama with killing Bin Laden is like crediting Nixon with landing on the moon.

And even those things they get right on the surface, they get wrong. They will say that unemployment is lower under Barack Obama, which it is, 6.2% today vs. 7.6%. That is true on the surface, but only because 11 million Americans have given up looking for work since Obama became president. Those people are not counted in the unemployment rate. Had they been counted the unemployment rate would be over 10% rather than 6.2%. They say he implemented Obamacare. This too is true on its face, but it’s a fundamental lie. Obamacare as it was signed into law has never been implemented. Obama has unlawfully given subsidies to tens of millions of people in conflict with the explicit language of the law. He has unconstitutionally given waivers and delays to tens of thousands of employers employing tens of millions of people so that the pain the law imposes won’t be felt until it’s politically expedient… for him. So, in reality, Obamacare as written has not been implemented, but Americans are nonetheless saddled with a dysfunctional system that has cost jobs and caused many people to lose their doctors, face higher costs and in some cases lose their insurance altogether. 

And the list goes on… The disconnect between reality and the fantasyland members of the cult live in is stark. But how do you know if a friend or loved one is a member of the Cult of Barack Obama? Well, like a mirror used to uncover a vampire, here are eight questions that might help you find out. (And remember, all of this is after Obama borrowed $5 trillion and the FED pumped almost $4 trillion into the economy.)

1) Is American household income higher today than it was when Barack Obama took office? No. Lower, by $2,500.

2) Are more Americans working today than there were when Barack Obama took office? Nominally yes. 146 million vs. 142 million, but as the population has grown by 13 million, a lower percentage of the population is actually working, 45.6% vs. 46.3%

3) Are there fewer Americans living in poverty today than there were when Barack Obama took office? No.  More are. 44 million in 2009 – 14.3% of the population vs. 48 million today, 15% of the population.

4) Are there more or fewer Americans on food stamps today than there were when Barack Obama took office? More. 47 million vs. 34 million.

5) Has the percentage of Americans with health insurance increased since Obamacare passed? No. 83.4% vs. 84.0%.

6) How does Barack Obama’s progressive recovery compare to Ronald Reagan’s free market recovery? Not well: 5.8% total growth over his first 5 years vs. 17.7% for Reagan’s.

7) Is Iraq better off or worse off today than it was when Barack Obama took office? Far worse.

8) Is the world a more stable or friendly place today than it was when Barack Obama took office? Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Venezuela, Honduras…  Not so much.

If, after going through these questions and answers your friend still supports Barack Obama, they are likely part of the cult. Just to be sure however, ask them why they still support him. If they give you logical, cogent reasons for doing so then maybe they’re just confused and there may be some hope for recovery after all. For the rest it might be time Google "intervention".

Unfortunately, while today Che’s cult is largely harmless, Barack’s has wrought a disaster on the American people and the world beyond. Like the objects in the mirror that are larger than they appear, we can only hope that the cult of Obama fizzles soon after he leaves office as the magnitude of his ineptness and his failures becomes clear.

$62 Trillion and counting... Uncle Sam's fantasyland

Dreams vs. fantasies. Dreams are a good thing to have. They inspire us. They generally have some connection with reality and are usually the kinds of things one can work at attaining or accomplishing. Fantasies on the other hand usually have very little connection with reality and even less likelihood of coming true. One might dream of making a million dollars or growing up to play for the Yankees, but one fantasizes about being Superman or achieving world peace.

With age, most of us begin to recognize that there is a difference between the two… So too is it with countries… or at least it does theoretically. Unfortunately, in America in 2011 the citizenry and their agents in Washington are still living in a fantasy world. The fantasy I’m talking about is government spending. And I’m not even talking about current spending… I’m talking about future spending, in the form of unfunded liabilities: Those promises the United States has made for which it has no money to pay, no ability to pay and no plan (realistic or otherwise) for how it will pay them.

At what point does a nation grow up? At what point does a citizenry demand that its representatives speak honestly and act rationally? How big does the stack of promises have to be? Is there some dollar threshold? If so, what is it? The late Senator Sen. Everett Dirksen is said to have uttered the following: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.” I wonder what the late Senator would say if he had knew how large Uncle Sam’s unfunded liabilities had become. In a universe where the GOP is talking about going to the mattresses over raising the debt ceiling by a couple trillion dollars, Senator Dirkson’s “real money” has become $62 Trillion of promises Uncle Sam has no way keeping!

That $62 Trillion overhang is more than twenty times the federal government’s $2.5 Trillion 2011 revenue – and four times our $14 Trillion GDP. To put this in some perspective, let’s imagine you earn $50,000 a year in salary but your annual expenses are $65,000. To make up the shortfall you borrow $15,000 a year from a distant uncle. Given that you are spending 30% more money than you earn every year, how are you going to fund the $1,000,000 college education you just promised your newborn baby? At some point your once rich uncle, to whom you now owe $150,000, is going to cut you off. Then what does junior do for college? Imagine how upset he will get when he turns 18 and finds out you broke the promise you reiterated to him every day of his life for two decades. Unable to pay, you go out and adopt a bunch of foster children and put them to work to pay for Junior’s education. Soon enough you’ve got a house full of angry young adults each wanting their educations. At some point the reality of their bleak situation sinks in and the kids organize themselves and throw you out of the house, take whatever money you had stored in the floorboards and maybe even find out if there is a place where they can sell you into slavery.

At the end of the day, this is exactly the situation that America finds itself in. Uncle Sam – AKA the American taxpayer - owes private citizens and foreign countries $9 Trillion; owes himself another $5 Trillion (due to using the money paid into the Social Security trust fund to pay for current operations); and owes citizens themselves a whopping $62 Trillion… And that’s using the optimistic assumptions of the CBO – others peg it at $100 Trillion or more - bottom row... brace yourself!

This fantasizing simply cannot continue forever. The question is, when are the American people going to decide to force their employees in Washington to begin to take real steps to address this problem? Democrats suggest it can be solved by simply growing the economy and raising taxes on corporations and the rich. Unfortunately however, as Bill Whittle demonstrates very clearly, taking every single penny from the rich still wouldn’t even be enough to cover the costs of current operations, never mind future spending.

One doesn’t even need to raise the specter of Greece to make the point about what happens when government makes promises it can’t keep, although that is certainly an apt comparison. (Don't believe me... read what Bill Gross has to say about it.) No, you just have to look to California. Two weeks ago the US Supreme Court told the state they must release 40,000 prisoners. Why? Because they were all innocent? No. Because they had all apologized? No. Because the Court decided that the conditions in which the state was keeping them were “cruel and unusual” and therefore unconstitutional. The reason America is now going to be welcoming 40,000 criminals back into its arms is because California was not spending enough on prisons. With so many contracted promises to unionized employees there was simply not enough money left to pay for more prison cells. Sacramento, like Washington, lives in a fantasyland from which it refuses to emerge.

Forty thousand prisoners is just the beginning for California and for America. The New Jersey Supreme Court just last week demanded the state (broke or not) spend an additional $500 million for education, period, end of discussion – and just so the point wouldn’t be missed, one justice suggested raising taxes.

As shrinking credit availability and a government controlled economy that produces moribund tax revenues begins to intersect with trillion dollar deficits and exponentially larger promises of future spending, things will only begin to steamroll, and not in a good way. It will start with arbitrary budget cuts to things like national defense and homeland security and will eventually squeeze out everything other than wealth transfer payments. If Americans think they have little control over how Washington spends its money today, wait until the federal courts (filled with lifetime tenured judges) start telling Congress and the Executive Branch what they have to spend, where they have to spend it and how high they must set taxes.

The only way out of this black hole is to address the problem of unfunded liabilities and current account deficits today. If we don’t, we shouldn't be surprised when the Supreme Court demands tax rates be doubled and the pentagon slashed down to a triangle in order to pay for welfare, Medicaid and Social Security. Unfortunately however, even the entire federal budget isn’t a fraction of what it would take to pay for all of the promises Washington has made. Most of us survived learning there was no Santa Claus. The question is, how bad do things have to get before we summon up the courage to break the news to Uncle Sam?

The Prosperity Ratio: Why we should encourage tax cuts for the rich

One of the easiest ways to recognize a liberal is their refusal to accept that the universe is dynamic rather than static. The most obvious example of this is their perpetual inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the notion that increasing taxes and growing regulations impact taxpayer behavior. This can be seen in on a number of levels. On the state level it can be seen by companies and wage earners fleeing high tax locales for those with low taxes or no income taxes. Rush Limbaugh famously left New York two years ago for the zero income tax comfort of sunny Florida. Then Governor Paterson responded by demonstrating his state’s disdain for the people who actually fund New York’s nanny state spending: "If I knew that would be the result, I would’ve thought about (raising) the taxes earlier." And New York is not alone… New Jersey, Maryland and many others have also seen taxpayers flee their states in recent years.

California too is befuddled by the exodus of taxpayers from the progressive Nirvana Democrats have been creating there over the last 40 years. In 2010 an average of 3.9 companies a week moved their operations out of California due to high taxes and burdensome regulations. During the first four months of 2011 that number increased 25% to 4.7 companies leaving per week… and taking their jobs with them! What is the destination of choice for those companies? Not surprisingly, Texas, with its minimalist regulation mentality and no income or capital gains taxes. California officials were so flummoxed by the exodus that a delegation of (mostly Republican) legislators and Democrat Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom went to Texas to talk with erstwhile California companies about why they had left the not so Golden State.

Again, not surprisingly, the answer was obvious… High taxes and burdensome regulation. For decades California socialists in Democrat clothing assumed Golden State economics were static and that they could simply raise taxes or increase regulation and employers would simply suck it up. Of course they were wrong, but they (and California’s voters) have yet to figure that out.

At the federal level, Barack Obama is the lead siren singing the “Tax the rich” song, ostensibly to try and shore up Uncle Sam’s finances. Last week the President said: “I believe that we can't ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money…”

In an environment where fully 47% of the people in the country pay either zero income taxes or actually get “rebates” for taxes they didn’t pay, Obama and the Democrats want to hike taxes on the people who actually choose to put their capital at risk and produce the jobs that fuel the economy. And like all good Democrats, they feel like they can simply raise taxes and the rich will automatically fall in line and fork over more money without making any adjustments in their behavior.

Strangely enough, that’s not quite how things work as human nature on the federal level is no different than on the state level… when taxes go up, people change their behavior. While most people are not going to move to another country if their federal taxes are raised, they will do what they can to reduce their tax burden, from investing in foreign markets, to parking their money to hiring high powered accounting firms to help them shelter their income.

Nearby is a table whose data is drawn from IRS numbers showing tax rates from 1986 to 2005. The table focuses in on the top 1% of tax filers and isolates the tax rate and the share of overall taxes paid. The third column is a ratio I created that I call the Prosperity Ratio. (My apologies if someone has used the ratio earlier, I’ve just not seen it.) Essentially it is the average income tax rate paid by the top 1% divided by the percent of the overall income tax burden paid by the persons in that same 1%. I’ve dubbed it Prosperity Ratio because the higher the ratio, the more people who are prosperous and happy… When taxes on the “rich” are lower they get to keep more of their money, which of course makes them happy. Simultaneously those same taxpayers pay a larger percentage of the overall income tax burden, which means that the remaining tax payers are happier as well because they are paying a smaller portion of the overall income taxes. Everybody wins.

To demonstrate how this Prosperity Ratio works, in 1986 when the average tax rate paid by the top 1% of taxpayers was 33.13%, they paid 25.75% of all federal income taxes resulting in a Prosperity Ratio of .78. By 2005 when the average rate paid by the top 1% had dropped to 23.13%, they were paying 39.38% of all federal income taxes, generating a Prosperity Ratio of 1.70. Everyone won as the rich, able to keep more of their money were motivated to create more wealth, generating more revenue for the tax collector. The other 99% of taxpayers were happier as well as they were able to keep more of their income too. It should be the goal of the government to generate the highest Prosperity Ratio by cutting taxes as until the ratio starts declining.

Don’t hold your breath of course. Liberals live in a fantasy world where they can raise taxes or increase red tape and the world magically bends to their will and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately for the rest of us we have to live with the real world consequences of their static delusions. Maybe now is a good time to have a discussion about the difference between static and dynamic, or in the lexicon of a liberal, fantasy and reality. And maybe this time we should include the people who keep voting for them...

A Shameless Obama Snow Job

Shame and public humiliation used to be very effective forms of social conditioning. In Middle Age Europe an offender would often be placed in a pillory or stock and be subject to public humiliation and ridicule for their offense. The idea was that after being subjected to such humiliation the offender would mend their ways in order to avoid a repeat performance. Such discipline was not always effective, but the recidivism rate was probably far below what is seen in the American judicial system today.

In America circa 2010 one could make the argument that the very notions of shame and public humiliation have almost vanished in both public and private spheres. Paris Hilton, Eliot Spitzer, Barry Bonds, Charlie Crist, the Salahis, the popularity of Reality TV etc. In an America where almost anything seems to go, where nothing is reproachable, where everyone’s position is equally valid regardless of its substance, it’s no surprise that we have a President and administration who have the audacity to make ludicrous arguments to demonstrate the success of their policies and then expect us to accept them – and that’s before the sycophants in the media begin to spin them.

President Obama set the tone early on. In the administration that promised an unprecedented level of transparency, they were going to be crystal clear in demonstrating the efficacy of their policies in the place where it mattered most: Jobs. While previous administrations traditionally utilized the traditional Payroll or Household Surveys to measure the effect of their policies, this administration was turning a new page in government accountability, jobs that were “Saved or Created”. Rather than tethering themselves to what was actually going on in the economy, President Obama created a fantasy measurement with no correlation to anything but their imagination, something that could be neither be proved nor disproved. Saved or Created is such a vacuous measure that it would actually be possible for the administration to claim they had saved virtually every job in America. One could imagine President Obama giving the following statement to start off the Summer of Recovery:

“The country’s economic situation when we took over was so bad we were forced to take drastic measures. The single most significant measure we took, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a resounding success. Uncertainty at the time was deep and widespread: There were suggestions China was preparing to dump American bonds, OPEC was looking at pricing oil in Euros and companies across the country were considering mass layoffs to conserve cash. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave international markets and domestic employers the confidence that our administration was going to do what was necessary to bring order to America’s economic house after eight years of economic mismanagement. As a direct result of that stimulus bill and our sound economic policies, the 25 million jobs that our internal analysis suggested might be lost were indeed saved and I’m glad to say here today that we have put our economy back on solid footing and America is beginning to grow once again.”

While he didn’t actually make the above statement, given the lack of substance underlying the Saved or Created measure and the media’s proclivity to paint everything Obama in glowing hues, one wonders why they didn’t.

Now that the Summer of Recovery has been shown to be on life support and Saved or Created has not helped President Obama’s cratering approval ratings, the administration has just rolled out the latest measure for demonstrating the genius of their economic policy… “Lives Touched”. According to CHT2M Hill, the company that received 4 or the 10 largest contracts under the stimulus plan:

"Lives Touched" is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.

First Saved or Created and now Lives Touched? Really? Such idiocy could only happen in a country where embarrassment, shame and humiliation have ceased to exist. What else explains the willingness of the administration to seriously suggest such tools to measure economic efficacy? That is the mentality of a four year old with cookie crumbs on his face telling his mommy that some imaginary person took the cookies. The four year old might be excused as having not quite grasped the concept of truth vs. fiction. Despite their childlike pursuit of policies that are so obviously flawed, the Obama administration is not filled with children. They should have, at least in concept, understood that inventing unsupportable criteria to measure real world events is simply unacceptable. Only in a country that no longer knows what shame means can politicians act with impunity when they should be embarrassed. In the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” the Emperor was not embarrassed because he actually thought he was wearing respectable clothes. Barack Obama on the other hand has been nakedly inventing stories to mislead the American public for 18 months. Perhaps a little shame and public humiliation are in order for having the audacity to think Americans are too stupid to see through his illusions.