Hope and Chains

As part of his July 13 Roanoke speech, about which I blogged a couple of weeks ago, Obama had this to say:

We got the slowest job growth in decades.  We got deficits as far as the eye can see.  Your incomes and your wages didn’t go up.  And it culminated in a crisis because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street and they could make reckless bets with other people’s money that resulted in this financial crisis, and you had to foot the bill.  So that’s where their theory turned out.

‘Their theory” referred, of course, specifically the previous Republican administration of George Bush, and generally to all previous Republican administrations. Slow job growth, deficits as far as the eye could see, and no growth in personal income was because “because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street …”

Almost a month later to the day, Joe Biden stumped before a predominately black audience in Danville, Virginia near the North Carolina line and, like his boss, went off script, and in his best faux southern drawl had this to say:

Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days he’s gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules … Unnnn-chain Wall Street … They gawn' put y'all back in chains.

I’ve listened to various renditions of the video and I believe I have accurately captured Biden’s disgusting minstrel enunciation as he delivered it. His Bojangles conflation of antebellum slavery with a GOP recapture of Congress and the White House sent handlers scrambling to say his comments were taken out of context – the same excuse they’d used to provide cover for Obama in Roanoke – but that dog won’t hunt (an southern aphorism Biden probably doesn’t understand) because the video is all over the Internet. Instead of repudiating the “chains” remarks, Obama fobbed them off, saying, "The truth is that during the course of these campaigns, folks like to get obsessed with how something was phrased even if everybody personally understands that's not how it was meant." Hmm. I wonder if that excuse would work for Todd Akin’s rape comment?

How would an Italian audience have felt if Biden had suddenly began adding the letter “a” to word-endings to create a sense of oneness with the audience – Ima gonna tella ya somthin’ – or if speaking to a German audience, suppose his “w”s became “v”s as if he were one with them – Vell, der verd en der strassa ace nut guud. I think they’d be incensed with speaker’s feeble attempt to impersonate them and would consider it a put-down and an insult.

That’s the way Doug Wilder, former Governor of Virginia and grandson of slaves, saw it. He said the “chains” reference was gratuitous, an appeal to make the Romney allegation racial, which it wasn’t, and revelatory of Biden’s own deep-seated if not subconscious racism. Wilder concluded:

Biden separated himself from what he accused the [Romney] people of doing. As a matter of fact what he said is, they are going to do something to y'all, not to me, not us. So he was still involved with that separate America. And I'm sick and tired of being considered something other than an American… Slavery is nothing to joke about.

The off-the-cuff “back in chains” plantation imagery was not an ill-considered misspeaking. It was chosen to inflame the audience. I was raised in segregated Birmingham, Alabama with its “White” and “Colored” water fountains and toilets and “Whites Only” facilities. As a child, I didn’t “get” the purpose of segregation. So, I didn’t understand why this audience didn’t jump to their feet and boo Biden for making such a stupid remark. Did he or his audience really believe that the “chains” remark accurately describes race relations today, or are Biden and Obama trying to take us back to that time with their racially divisive rhetoric?

Obama and Harry Reid obsess over Romney’s tax returns, but I’ve heard no one accuse him of racism. George Romney, Mitt’s father, was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s when I was a newly-minted college graduate. I became politically savvy at an early age, and the people I saw fighting equal rights for blacks were whites with names like Lester Maddox, Orville Faubus, Herman Talmadge, and George Wallace, all of whom had Democrat after their names. Mitt Romney’s civil rights record is unimpeachable. He may not get many black votes for President but he got a standing ovation after speaking to the recent NCAAP convention. Obama didn’t even show up. He sent Big Mouth Biden as his surrogate.

This administration seems to go out of its way to insult black audiences and black audiences seem not to be put off by the insults. For example, I recall then-Senator Hillary Clinton speaking at the black Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem in celebration of Martin Luther King Day as she began her campaign for President.

For the last five years, we’ve had no power at all. And that makes a big difference, because when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And yew know what ah’m  talkin’ about.

Her fake southern dialect, the “we” reference (you mean the audience or politicians?), and the “plantation” analogy was the condescension of a wealthy white woman appealing to identify politics with an audience whose votes she needed … “And yew know what ah’m  talkin’ about.” Ugh!

Biden says Romney is going to put people in chains. Really? Let’s talk about how Obama’s policies have put current and future American society in chains. Let’s talk about the chains of regulation, most of them illegal since he by-passed Congress and enacted regulation by Executive Order.

In the first three years of the Obama administration, he enacted 106 new regulations whose cost was 500% of the Bush presidency’s first three years’ of new regulations. The annual cost of complying with Bush’s new policies was $8 billion versus $46 billion for complying with Obama’s policies. And that’s just what’s currently known about compliance cost. ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Obama’s cabinet agencies can add to compliance cost with the sweep of a pen. The imperial power Obama has ceded to government agencies creates uncertainties that inhibit risk-taking, they delay or shelve business plans that could grow the economy and jobs, and they are a virtual black hole of added cost depending on the whims of an unelected bureaucrat.

A recent Gallup poll reported that 46% of small business owners are not hiring because of the uncertainties of new government regulations, and the hiring plans of 48% are frozen by the potential costs of ObamaCare – including its 21 new taxes.

John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market has been an outspoken critic of Obama’s policies. He recently had this to say:

In some cases, regulations have gone too far and it really makes it difficult for small businesses.  There’s too much bureaucracy and red tape; taxes on business are very high.  So we’re not creating the enabling conditions that allow businesses to get started

In Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which was published just after Jobs’ death, Issacson reported:

[Jobs] described [to Obama] how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do that these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs

When he retired from Congress and his failed run for the presidency, George McGovern, the leading liberal in the Senate, tried his hand at business. He tried to start a bed and breakfast in Connecticut but government red tape and regulations ate seven years of his Senate savings, forcing him to go bust. He learned about being a business owner the hard way, which caused him to say:

If I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee, that knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

Too bad the guy living in the White House now never held a real job that would have taught him the same lesson.

Chains? Let’s talk about the chains Obama euphemistically calls taxes – not taxes that are needed to raise government revenue but taxes that are guaranteed to produce less than expected revenue – taxes whose purpose is to punish success and allow the Maximum Leader to shovel his “fairness” horse hockey when half the workforce is already exempt from taxpaying.

“I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible,” Milton Friedman said in a 2003 interview. Wonder what the late Nobel Prize winning economist would think about the so-called $494 billion tax increase that now hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of 50% of the American workforce who pay taxes? This so-called Taxmageddon will fall in January when the Bush tax cuts expire.

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand,” Friedman said on another occasion. He knew government was good at only one thing – waste. Therefore the way to minimize the scope of government waste faute de mieux was to cut off the revenue spigot. The Federal Reserve has predicted that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will throw the country back into a recession. Think Obama has any interest in avoiding the risk of that happening by ratcheting back his class warfare policies? I don’t. He would rather add more chains to the country’s job creators – those despicable one-percenters – while 13 million people languish without work … and are consequently not paying taxes.

Obama’s anti-business policies are another pile of chains around the neck of the economy. Remember those bad old days of George Bush’s 5.6% unemployment rate, which presidential wannabe John Kerry called “the worst economic record since the Hoover administration”? I wonder what the French-looking gentlemen thinks of Obama’s 8.3% unemployment, which is more like 11% if those who’ve quit looking for work are included in the count? Obama’s anti-business chains have managed to keep unemployment above 8% for 42 months – the longest in post-war history.

Nevertheless, Obama refused to allow the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline to be built, so he could pander to his “green” crowd, EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, continues her quest to be Obama’s champ-peen job-killer, even though the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit smacked her down for the sixth time this week for her illegal Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, Obama’s amateurish negotiations on free trade agreements moreover have killed innumerable jobs in a tip of the hat to unions, and recently Obama illegally eliminated the work requirement as a condition for receiving welfare assistance – a provision of the Clinton welfare reform legislation. We’ve yet to see the job-killing capacity of ObamaCare. Lots of chains there.

How about the chains on future generations of taxpayers – including those yet unborn – which Obama’s trillion dollar a year deficit spending has contributed to the $16 trillion national debt, which grows almost $4 billion per day,  has grown to  and the interest that must be paid on it? Obama’s 2010 budget projected government debt would fall to 67% of GDP this year, but the CBO says it will rise to 70% of GDP instead. Even more frightening is the ever-important debt to tax revenue ratio which has leapt from 165% the year Obama moved into the White House to 262% this year according to the IMF. Among developed economies only Ireland and Spain have worst ratios.

Talk about “plantations” and “chains” – what would you call the fact that 100 million people … more people than ever before … depend on federal government for food, housing, student aid, income assistance, and other forms of assistance. Can that still be considered a democracy?

It’s disgraceful that government policies have caused one in five families to be recipients of food stamps. We’ve become Food Stamp Nation under Obama in which half the food stamp aid goes to families with children who have received aid for almost nine years. Think of the increasing dependency of people on government. which Since government has no money itself, it must take it from those who work. Well, let me restate that. It must take it from the half of the workforce who pay federal taxes.

The food stamp program was designed to be a “hand up” to independency. Instead, it has become a handout to greater dependency. The number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps has doubled, increasing from 1.7 million people in 2009 to 3.9 million in 2010 and costing taxpayers an extra $4 billion per year. Where is this leading future generations, an increasing percentage of whom don’t know what it is like to work full time?

“They gawn' put y'all back in chains”? With its regulations, taxes, deficit spending, anti-business policies, and increased government dependency program, the failed socialism programs of the Obama administration have done more to enslave American society and limit its freedom than any previous administration. I don’t get it.

During the Obama Administration Americans lost 40% of their wealth. That puts them back where they were in 1992. Why aren’t people demonstrating their outrage?

When he debated the hapless and out-matched Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan delivered the knockout punch with this summation. We usually remember only the first question. Read them all.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions 'yes', why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don't agree, if you don't think that this course that we've been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.

How would you answer? Your family? Friends? There are about 70 days to decide if you haven’t.

Vote November 6. Vote Republican or Democrat – for President and Congress – but vote. A failure to vote is a half vote for each candidate.