Between the time that George Washington took the first oath of office as president and when Barack Obama did—-1789 to 2009, the United States had borrowed nine trillion dollars. Since Obama took office, it has borrowed or imposed nearly three trillion more debt. Tell me he is not deliberately seeking to bankrupt the nation.

In an August 28 Wall Street Journal editorial it noted that “To no one’s surprise except Vice President Joe Biden’s, second quarter economic growth was revised down yesterday to 1.6% from the prior estimate of growth of 2.4% which was down from first quarter growth of 3.7%, which was down from the 2009 fourth quarter’s 5%. Economic recoveries are supposed to go in the other direction.”

I was born during the Great Depression of the 1930s and have lived long enough now to find myself in a new one. There are similarities between the two, but the first one led to the creation of a variety of government regulatory entities and programs that should have avoided or at least were expected put the brakes on the current one.

At the heart of the current Depression is the government’s intrusion into the nation’s housing market via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government “entities” that functioned to purchase the mortgages provided by banks and lending companies that, by law, were required to make “sub-prime” bad loans. They have since been seized and billions remain at risk until such time as they are removed from distorting the housing market.

The mortgages were then bundled and resold to banking and investment firms. When the housing “bubble” failed, it threatened the financial structure of the nation. It was a classic asset bubble as people used their homes as piggy banks, taking second mortgages to pay for lifestyles that often did not include saving money for a rainy day. If this sounds like infantile behavior, it is.

Despite the multi-billion dollar bank bailouts initiated in 2008 at the end of the second Bush term and “stimulus” bailouts continued by the Obama administration, the recession has grown longer and there is talk of a “second recession.” This is like saying the family drunk or druggie has a “consumption problem.”

Despite zero interest rates for banks borrowing from the Federal Reserve justifiable fears have slowed lending. Consumers have held off spending. Home sales reached a 15-year low in June.

If the Obama administration and Congress allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, it will deepen the current crisis. In 1932 President Hoover persuaded Congress to raise taxes and we know this led to a decade of a severe economic Depression.

Poor monetary policy drove the Great Depression and is being repeated in this one. Government does not create jobs. Its highest priority is to protect the U.S. dollar so that investment and growth can be maintained.

E. Ralph Hostetter, publisher of American Farm Publications, recently noted that “The federal government has been in control of the U.S. dollar since 1913 when the Federal Reserve Banking System was established.”

“The 130 years prior to 1913, going back to 1783, was the longest period of currency stability in U.S. history. Since the dollar came under control of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, it has lost 90 percent of its original value. Eighty percent of that loss has occurred since President Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971.”

As Gerald P. O’Driscall Jr. recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “The solution lies in restoring balance sheets. For financial firms that means raising capital. For consumers and businesses alike, that means saving more of their reduced incomes.” He warned that “Low interest rates slow the process…by keeping asset prices artificially inflated.” The current Federal Reserve interest rate is zero.

The entire governmental and economic system depends on trust and the Obama administration has squandered that by constantly telling Americans that things were getting better when it was obvious to everyone they were not.

Claims that “shovel ready” projects would turn around the economy were false. Only 3.3% of the $814 billion stimulus was allocated to the Federal Highway Administration for highway and bridge projects. The bulk of the funds expended were directed at retaining civil service jobs of teachers and funds for police and firefighters. Union contracts, fat with pension and health benefits, have bankrupted many States.

In early August first-time claims for unemployment hit a nine-month high. Since the stimulus passed, 2.6 million Americans have lost their jobs and 1.2 million have given up trying to find a new one. Despite the 9.6% figure the government cites, the actual levels of unemployment are far closer to 20%.

During the Great Depression, unemployment was 25% and wages fell 42%.

The nation has reached a point where well-respected economists are now openly using the “Depression” word. David Rosenberg, writing in his daily briefing to investors, warned against interpreting the occasional blips of Gross Domestic Product and stock market gains as signs of recovery. Other economists from major investment and banking institutions are reducing their GDP predictions for 2010 to an anemic range of 1.5% to 2%.

The United States is not in “a summer of recovery” and is not likely to see any recovery if taxes increase. Massive “reform” of Medicare will drive up insurance and healthcare costs. Massive infusions of taxpayer money to keep states afloat to pay for Medicaid and other mandated costs are temporary at best.

Social Security, insolvent because successive Congresses have raped its so-called trust fund, will require a major overhaul to protect those who have paid into it and free new generations from its requirements.

Tax “holidays” are needed to allow businesses and consumers to keep their money instead of handing it over to a profligate federal government and to States that have failed to exercise fiscal sanity.

Get used to the word “Depression.” That’s what we’re in and the first step to get out of it will be to send people to Congress who will address these problems.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

“Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.” So said Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, in a commentary on Bloomberg.com, August 10.

His solution was to “radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess.” Unmentioned is the fact that it has taken since 1913 when the income tax was introduced to reach this point.

Social security and Medicare are “social justice” programs which, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were created to protect people against themselves, encouraging dependency on the federal government instead of expecting personal responsibility. They have managed to drain the national treasury.

Social justice is one of those terms like “progressive” designed to hide the implementation of programs that can literally be found in the Communist Manifesto along with the abolition of property rights and other nasty “solutions” to the fact that life is not fair.

I recommend you get a subscription to The Heartland Institute’s Budget & Tax News monthly publication because it is one of the best ways I know to gain a quick insight to the real state of the economy. The August edition has some revealing headlines.

“Report Fuels Effort to Double Michigan’s Gas Tax”
“Proposed Washington State Income Tax Not Deductible, Attorney General Says”
“Oregon Raises Taxes, But Budget Situation Worsens”
“Illinois Lawmakers OK Budget Billions Out of Balance”
“Is the Pensions Bill Just a Bailout?”
“North Carolina Doubles Tax Reviews of Large Families”

One article, however, explains why most, but not all States are broke. “In Indiana, as Revenue Drops, So Does Spending.” What a novel idea. If you don’t take in enough money, you cut government spending.

Its author, Steve Stanek, a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, is the editor of Budget & Tax News. “Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) who took office in 2005, insists on fiscal discipline” and his enforcer is Christopher Ruhl, the Indiana Budget Director.”

While President Obama has complained from the day he took office that it’s all Bush’s fault, when Gov. Daniels took office he inherited a $800 million deficit. By dramatically reducing spending, the State turned a deficit into a $1.8 billion surplus. Unfortunately, Congress, even under the Bush administration, have not followed suit.

The Keynesian notion that a government can spend its way out of a deficit is, one hopes, now dead. The Roosevelt administration embraced Keynes, a British economist, throughout the 1930s and the result was the Great Depression.

One reason Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey (R) is now a rock star is because, on taking office, he confronted the state’s power teacher’s union and began to cut the budget to reduce an $8 billion deficit. What many Americans are only now realizing is that it has been the civil service unions that have been draining state and local budgets thanks to unrealistic salaries along with healthcare and pension benefits.

The Democrat Party has successfully portrayed the Republican Party as wanting nothing more than to put widows, orphans, and all others out on the street. It is pure demagoguery and it reflects the torrent of lies President Obama told throughout his campaign and since his election.

Kotlikoff explained why most Americans have been unaware of how bad the situation was. “Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.“

“This gargantuan discrepancy between our ‘official’ debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities ‘unofficial’ to keep them off the books and far into the future.”

Well, guess what? The future has arrived and, for a generation or two of Americans, unless the debt is dramatically reduced, they will be little more than slaves of the federal government who exist to pay off all the borrowing and all the imploding social justice programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

I frankly have zero faith that either the Democrats or Republicans, whoever is in Congress after the midterm elections, will do much more than nibble around the edges of the fiscal crisis.

As for the States, they are more likely to take some action, but even then you will have to cross your fingers. A good start would be the forced renegotiation of civil service contracts.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…we have just as much unemployment as when we started…and an enormous debt to boot!” It was a decade of disaster and the man who spoke these words was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. The date was May 9, 1939.

By then the Roosevelt administration had been in office eight years and Morgenthau was addressing his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee. In Congress and in the White House today our nation’s leaders are repeating the same errors as their predecessors in the midst of the Great Depression.

Reflecting on the errors of the 1930s, Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy at the Cato Institute, in September 2005 wrote, “Many people think that we need a big government to prevent, or to reverse, recessions. But the 1930s illustrate that activist policies increase, not decrease economic instability.”

What could be more activist than the year and a half that Barack Obama has held the reins of power in Washington, D.C.? From the failed Stimulus Act to the bailout/ownership of General Motors, to the forced imposition of Medicare “reform”, to the financial “reform” legislation, Obama has managed to plunge the nation into a level of debt not seen since the end of World War II.

Before departing, a Democrat controlled Congress just voted to send States $26 billion MORE on top of previous bailouts. This isn’t governance. It’s insanity.

It is not capitalism, nor is it a people capable of great productivity that is responsible for the economic crisis in which Americans find themselves. It is the government and, specifically, it is the growth of government since the 1930s with “entitlement” programs that include Social Security, Medicare, and endless other ways taxpayer money is either wasted or doled out to essentially buy votes.

In January 2004 economist Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that “immense tax increases would be needed” to keep up with the spending mandated by entitlement programs at a time when 77 million Baby Boomers were getting ready for retirement. “If spending—on the elderly or everything else—isn’t cut or taxes raised, deficits will spin out of control. What’s astonishing is that the problem has been known for decades.”

Six years later the warnings of countless economists have been ignored until they could no longer be ignored. The financial crisis in 2008 should have forced a confrontation with harsh realities, but it has not.

Almost comically, a commentary by Jon Hilsenrath in the August 9 issue of The Wall Street Journal was titled “Economy’s Quarterbacks Get Out ‘Hail Mary’ Passes.” Citing the official July jobs report which still clings to the lie that unemployment is only 9.5 percent when it is clearly closer to 20%, Hilsenrath reviewed the suggestions being made by various supposed experts, noting that “new spending would spark an outcry in the face of trillion-dollar budget deficits and no plan in place to reduce them.” Well, duh!

Few Americans paying any attention know that government spending must be drastically reduced at the federal and state levels. Others know that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, together asking Congress for a billion more of taxpayer and borrowed funds, must be phased out of existence even though they own more than fifty percent of all current mortgages. Loaning mortgage money should be a private banking, not a government function.

The government should not be in the mortgage business. It should not own automobile manufacturers. It should not control health care, a sixth of the nation’s economy. That’s communism, not capitalism.

Despite earlier calls to raise taxes, the notion of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is madness at a time when ensuring that Americans can hold onto as much of their own money for both savings and spending is vital to get us out of the present recession.

We need tax holidays, not tax increases. The lessons from the Great Depression are being ignored.

In “A Rather Angry America”, commentator Victor Davis Henson, wrote “We see the arrested adolescence and hypocrisy that come from that sermonizing generation (those who came into adulthood in the 1970s) whether in Al Franken’s puerile face-making, the ideologically driven suicide at Newsweek, the steady destruction of the New York Times, John Kerry’s tax-avoiding yacht, the Great Gatsby Clinton wedding, Michelle on the Costa del Sol, Nancy Pelosi’s jet, Tim Geithner’s tax skipping, or the constant race-card playing of Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters.”

America is sorely in need of grown-ups to oversee its fiscal affairs and they are sorely missing in the present Congress and in the White House. This brings us to the November midterm elections, the last chance to rid the nation of the party that trashed the economy in the 1930s and the people who are presently destroying it again.

The U.S. Constitution was written to ensure a small federal government with specific limits on the tendency of all governments to stifle free speech and plunder the treasury to advance tyranny.

Hard choices lay ahead for Americans and only proven conservative measures will save the nation from a decline about which a mountain of words have been written, spoken, forgotten, or ignored.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

I have a friend of over twenty-five years who I watched build a single idea for a business into one that, at one time, was taking in a million dollars a year. Then the Internet came along, followed by the 2008 financial crisis.

After a reasonable period of agonizing, my friend sat down and put the numbers on the page. They added up to firing all his employees and not renewing the lease on the office in which he’d been since the mid-1980s. Tech savvy, his business has gone “virtual.” As he put it, “I will make sales from my cell phone.”

Now take my friend, the classic entrepreneur and small business owner, and multiply him by thousands across the fruited plains and purple mountains majesty. Not only has the economy crashed, thanks to the latest “bubble” of bad housing mortgages, but it happened just in time to ensure that Barack Obama who never owned a business, met a payroll, or worried about selling anything other than himself was elected president.

Next on the list of burst bubbles will be all the “green” technology and “clean energy” companies into which the government has been pumping billions in subsidies for wind and solar power, grants for research on biofuels, electric cars, and all the other “green” projects the public continues to be told represent a bright new world.

Why would anyone think that a “community organizer”, academic, and briefly a working lawyer, could know or even be brought up to speed fast enough to know what to avoid and what needs to be done to put people back to work or help small to medium businesses? The answer is he couldn’t and he wouldn’t and he didn’t.

Obama’s most basic instincts are a liberal distrust of “big business”, “Wall Street”, and anyone else involved in shaping and making the economy. This is particularly true since his political rise has been fueled by millions from unions. He is their man. They own him. He is beholden to a number of other special interests, but that is where his heart is. That is where he looked for and received campaign funds, campaign manpower, and votes.

Once in office, he set about reversing the slow and well-deserved decline of unions that, while having a long-ago past history of correcting working conditions, are now totally parasitic no matter whether it is the auto or any other industry, or whether it is in the public service sector where they toil as government workers, teachers, and others whose work rules, health benefits, and pensions have contributed to the insolvency of most states and cities.

They and the nation’s other blood-suckers, the lawyers, are Obama’s chosen constituency and everybody else can just plain go to hell or shut up and take a government-issued check for a return on taxes you may not have paid (40% do not pay taxes these days), your food stamps debit card, or any of the other government handouts that keep people docile and unproductive. Don’t worry, when your unemployment benefits run out, Congress will just extend them.

The problem is that Congress and the nation are just flat broke. At some point all the borrowing will stop because those doing the lending will decide they are not seeing any real return on their investments in U.S. Treasury notes.

The problem is that one of the wonders of globalization is that when one country goes belly up, it affects all the rest. Sooner or later the whole global network of central banks is likely to run out of money with which to bail out one another. Then what?

My friend will run his business as best he can in an economy where his customer base has increasingly reached the same point that whole nations will. They will have to decide where to spend what little money they have.

This is going to become an increasingly difficult decision when Obama and the Congress raise taxes at the worst possible time, thus sucking anywhere from 40% to 60% or more out of the pockets of the middle class, the entrepreneurs, the managers, the professionals. If they own homes as many do, they will cease to have any equity and prove hard to sell.

So it will be the decline and fall of everybody other than the millionaires who can afford the lawyers and accountants to show them how to pay less taxes than a chimney sweep or bus driver.

My friend is sounding a lot more relaxed these days. He is no longer responsible for all the costs involved with hiring, paying, or firing anyone. He no longer has to meet the rent on his office. Even so, he has discovered a whole new layer of reporting to the IRS regarding his venders and must in turn provide data to those who continue to use his services. American businesses, large, medium and small are strangling on government regulation and taxation.

There is a ripple effect here. It begins with the laid-off former employees who cannot find new jobs. It includes the owner of the office building who has space he cannot rent to a new business enterprise. It includes a copier machine lease allowed to lapse. As he put it, he can walk down the block from where he lives and use printing and delivery services. For list maintenance and other IT services, there’s always the vendor in Bangalore, India.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

On the eve before Daylight Savings Time, I managed to break a wall clock in the process of trying to grasp it to “spring ahead.” It crashed to a counter top and gave up the ghost. I then went online to Staples and 24 hours later I had a new wall clock. We take such efficiency for granted these days.

In the midst of the heated debate over healthcare “reform”, we need to remind ourselves of how superior the private sector is to our now bloated, wasteful, and inefficient government. The bill that the Democrats and the president are desperately trying to foist on Americans is a nightmare to be avoided at all costs.

Recently I received a comparison between Wal-Mart and the U.S. government. Candidly, I do not know the source of the information provided, but I am inclined to believe it.

“Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart every hour of every day. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Sears, Costco, and K-Mart combined. It employs 1.6 million people and is the nation’s largest private employer. It is the largest company in the history of the world.”

“Wal-Mart has approximately 3,906 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are super centers. This is more than 1,000 than it had a scant five years ago.”

If the economy is in trouble, maybe the people who run Wal-Mart should be consulted instead of the 535 members of Congress who appear to not only be utterly clueless, but who have assisted Obama in running up the largest budget deficit in American history.

This is not a Democrat, Republican or independent problem. It is a government problem starting with the federal government and mimicked by state governments who have also spent themselves into penury.

Consider the following examples.

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. It had 234 years to get it right, but it is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. It has had 74 years to get it right, but it is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938 to underwrite the provision of mortgages so that everyone could own a home. It has had 71 years to get it right and it is broke. As the result of the financial meltdown, the government had to seize control of it.

The War on Poverty started in 1964 and has 45 years to presumably eliminate poverty. $1 trillion in public funds is allocated to “the poor” every year and there is no evidence they are any less poor.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 allegedly to lesson the nation’s dependence on foreign, imported oil. It has since ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year. The U.S. imports more oil than ever before because the U.S. government forbids exploration and extraction on 85% of the nation’s continental shelf. It forbids the same in ANWR. It has had 32 years to address the need and it is an abysmal failure.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. They have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.

There aren’t that many things that the government does well or does right. Meanwhile, the private sector, corporations and small business enterprises continue to innovate and provide products and services with remarkable efficiency. Both are heavily taxed. U.S. taxes on corporations are the second highest in the world.

Right now, Americans have to ensure that a Democrat-controlled Congress does not pass a 2,700 page Medicare “reform” because our lives are literally on the line if they do.

After that, the government has to stop wasting billions to create jobs because the only jobs it creates are government jobs.

It’s not like we the People can escape responsibility for this. A majority of voters elected these morons.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Perhaps it is just the product of the times in which I grew up and my experience with the events of the world. Or perhaps it is the spin that has been added to the word “global”, endowing it with an almost spiritual quality.

Mostly, though, I think it is my utter disgust with “global warming”, having spent the better part of three decades striving to defeat this plot to enable all forms of governmental intrusion into people’s lives and choices.

A bit of personal history; as a child I recall riding the train to and from the Jersey shore when it was filled with young men in uniform, all destined to fight in far-off places whose names even then seemed exotic to me; Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Normandy, and Sicily. It was the harsh geography of war, but to a youngster it only meant someplace far away.

By the time I was a teenager, an older brother was already in Japan at the headquarters from which the Korean conflict was conducted. There were new names to deal with, Seoul, Incheon, and the Yalu River. By then the Cold War was well on its way.

The 1950s were full of talk of A-bombs and then H-bombs, and then intercontinental missiles. In college I took scant notice of events in Cuba, but a few years later I would be in full combat gear waiting for orders to invade. Then the problem went away without ever really going away. It has since spread to Venezuela.

Like many Americans, I learned about the world because we were sending troops somewhere to push back against some form of aggression or some new oppressive regime. At home the streets were filled with Civil Rights marchers or anti-war marchers, both of whom would be replaced by new groups demanding to be heard. It was the era of Woodstock and Watergate.

And no trains filled with soldiers because the military had ceased to be every young man’s duty to serve their nation. It became a voluntary military and, we’re told, one that is superior to the former model. It would suffer casualties in Beirut, wrest Grenada from a communist takeover, invade Panama to remove yet another corrupt leader and then, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, go there to set things right. After 9/11, in 2001 it would drive the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and then in 2003 invade Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein.

Is it any wonder Americans are weary of war? Is it any wonder that the word “global” to my generation means some new place where young, dedicated Americans are battling some new despot, regime, or threat to peace anywhere and everywhere?

All of which brings me to the new meaning of “global” for the generations that followed mine. It is attached to “global warming”, the greatest hoax, not merely in the modern era, but in all of history! And it was initiated and implemented by an international institution that was supposed to end wars, the United Nations.

Some years ago, the UN published a book called “Our Global Neighborhood”, but we do not live in a global neighborhood. We live in our own, local neighborhood. The UN is all about global government with, of course, global taxes, a global army, and, as in the case of every dictatorship, a global restriction on gun ownership.

It is all about a vast matrix of global treaties that involve the surrender of some element of U.S. sovereignty to the UN to oversee “heritage” sites and our national parks. It is about an educational indoctrination program to turn American children into “citizens of the world.”

So you will have to forgive me if I look at the world and see places where Americans have continually had to sacrifice blood and treasure because someone or some nation had ambitions to impose their will on people who just wanted to be left alone.

If something terrible happens in America I do not expect to see one single other nation on Earth come to our aid.

In America today, the enemy is not always in some far-off place. It is in Washington, D.C. where an out-of-control Congress is spending and borrowing to the point where we are being warned that our dollar is at risk of being worthless. Led by a feckless new president, it has imposed huge debts on generations yet to be born.

The White House is trying to expand an “entitlement” program, Medicare, that is already broke for the purpose of controlling one sixth of the nation’s economy.

The White House is giving money to banks and then threatening to tax them after they have repaid it.

The White House has bought General Motors and Chrysler instead of letting them go through a bankruptcy process like any other business.

The White House is squandering billions on “clean energy” and “green jobs”, both of which are mere fantasies while billions of barrels of oil go untapped, billions of cubic feet of natural gas remains unavailable, and hundreds of year’s worth of coal is not mined.

Congress is engaged in phony, multi-billion dollar “stimulus” programs instead of cutting taxes to jump-start the economy.

“Think globally. Act locally” is the mantra of the environmental movement, but the movement itself is a global monster, determined to decide what you can eat, how you should deal with your garbage, what kind of car or truck you can drive, how much you should heat or cool your home.

It is despotism, no matter what other name you call it.

And then there are those insane followers of Islam who want to inflict more harm on America because they are not content with killing their fellow Muslims.

I wish I could ignore the world beyond my neighborhood, but it won’t let me.

If you think that you are going mad, based on the statements out of the White House and Congress, let me assure you that you are sane, but those in charge of governing the nation appear to have lost their wits.

The Democrat’s third-ranking House leader, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), during an appearance on Fox News asserted that “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession.” It is his view that “We’re not going to save our way out of this recession.” So saving money is bad. Spending money we are borrowing at a rate of a billion dollars a day is good. If that sounds insane, you’re right.

In defending his new budget, President Obama declared that “Already, we have made historic strides…to cut wasteful spending.” The problem with that is that his budget proposal, for a second year in a row, would increase federal spending as a percentage of the Gross National Product at a higher rate than any time in the past 65 years. Fully a quarter of the GNP would be sucked up and spent by the government.

As we all know by now, because the President keeps telling us, that everything that happened last year was the fault of the previous President, George W. Bush, but it turns out that President Obama proposes once again to spend 30% more of the GDP than Bush.

President Obama has also given notice to the United Nations that the U.S. would agree to the Copenhagen Climate Change Accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is reported that this means a reduction of “carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.” This would be contingent on the passage of the Cap-and-Trade bill lingering in the Senate.

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is based on the now widely discredited global warming hoax that blamed carbon dioxide for the non-existent rise in the planet’s temperature.

Thus, the Cap-and-Trade bill is, itself, a hoax and, worse, would increase taxes on all energy use for all Americans. The reduction that President Obama calls for would require a return to the days of horse-drawn vehicles and an end to manufacturing and other activities dependent on oil, natural gas, and coal.

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced its intention to regulate carbon dioxide, the gas other than oxygen on which all life on Earth depends. Its justification for this is, of course, global warming. It requires a lot of gall to ignore the fact that the Earth entered a cooling cycle in 1998 that is likely to last another decade or two.

If the insanity emanating from the White House, Congress and the EPA is not enough, over at the United Nations last Monday the Human Rights Council met in Geneva. It was presided over by Halima Warzasi, a woman whom UN Watch notes “personally shielded the Saddam regime from international censure over the (Kurdish) gas attacks.” She was preceded in the chairmanship by Alfonso Martinez of Cuba. The Council’s principal members include China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, none of which are famous for their attention to human rights.

Also last Monday, one brief moment of sanity; Ali Hassan al-Majeed, also known as “Chemical Ali” for having ordered the poison gas attacks on the Kurds, was hanged.

To Americans struggling with debt, with mortgages that cost more than the present value of their homes, and, for many, with unemployment, the notion that the nation would end the Bush tax cuts while raising taxes at the same time it is borrowing and spending money at an unsustainable rate is a good definition of madness.

In November, the Obama administration released a report stating that more than $98 billion in taxpayer dollars spent by government agencies was wasted. The main culprit according to the report was Medicare, a program that the same administration via its “healthcare reform” legislation wanted to expand by adding millions more to its rolls.

So you may be forgiven for thinking that something is terribly wrong with the White House and Congress because it is.

After the State of the Union speech and the instant analyses on television and the punditry that follows on newspaper’s editorial pages and, of course, on news/opinion websites and countless blogs and forums, the tendency is likely to dwell on how it portends more of the same bad policies.

It is obvious to the “experts” and to the general population that this President and Congress has burdened the nation with an insane amount of debt, something in the area of $330,000 for every man, woman and child. Babies born today will arrive with that burden. That’s not what American’s voted for in 2008. That’s not what they wanted or expected in 2009.

That, however, is what they got and what they will continue to get in the contemptuous nonsense that pours forth out of the White House like an infected wound. However, the triage of the American economy and future began in Virginia, in New Jersey, and in Massachusetts. The next bailouts you will read about between now and next November will be Democrat members of Congress announcing they will not run again.

“Après moi le déluge” is attributed to the French king, Louis XV (1710-1774) who bankrupted his nation and would cost his grandson, Louis XVI, his head in a revolution (1789-1799) that went so badly that Napolean eventually took over and annointed himself Emperor. If only Barack Hussein Obama had the old king’s grasp of economics and history.

The Tea Party movement is the modern equivalent of the American Revolution that went quite well, albeit taking some seven years to wear out the British resolve to hold onto its colonies. Within six months, the new nation had signed agreements with Great Britain to get trade going again though, in 1812, there was another disagreement involving a bit of military conflict. Since then, we have been good friends through thick and thin.

I cite all this history because the history of America, along with a careful analysis of its demographics, its population, native-born and naturalized, portends that, once we get past the megolomania and Marxist ideology of the current pretender to the throne…oops, I mean to the Oval Office, America is ideally poised to dig itself out of its current financial difficulties.

And that, dear reader, is the good news!

An excellent analysis of the current and future demographics of the United States appears in an issue of World Affairs. It is titled, “Undying Creed: The Acceleration of Our Exceptionalism”, written by Joel Kotkin, a scholar at the New America Foundation.

It is important to keep in mind that America has had some really bad and mediocre Presidents in his short history. We are dealing with only the 44th one and he, like several of his predecessors will be assigned to the chapter titled “What Were We Thinking?”

Kotkin has looked at the population trends around the world in places like Europe, China, India, Japan and South Korea, and come up with some very interesting conclusions. Unlike these nations, the American population has a higher rate of fertility, assuring new generations to be raised with values that have led to what is called our national “exceptionalism.”

Americans work hard. Harder, in fact, than most other nations and the reason is that we believe that hard work will lead to a better life, not one on the dole from the government. We attract skilled labor from nations that don’t offer as much opportunity as we do. And, while our population is expected to add at least 100 million people by 2050, it will not consist of a largely aging population in places like Europe and the Far East that will outnumber its more productive members. Even our older people will continue to work well beyond “retirement” age and are likely to become a rich source of volunteerism.

By contrast, China’s one-child policy will, by 2050, leave it with a rapidly aging population. Russia is already on the precipice of both a diminishing and aging population. Japan, too, has an aging population and no real diversity.

Then, too, Americans like raising children, have a strong, commonly shared moral code, and religious values. According to a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, about sixty percent of Americans think religion is “very important.” A Marxist will never understand this.

While we just avoided a total financial meltdown (largely by infusing billions into several banking institutions—eagerly paying it back) the real beneficiaries have been the many local banks that avoided the high risk loans and other investments. All across America they are having the assets of failed banks transferred to their administration as the government steps in to avoid the horrors that befell Americans in the 1930s. This also accounts in part for the slowdown in credit and loans by both large and smaller banks as they get themselves back to normal, prudent banking standards.

Contrast the Recession’s impact with Japan whose “rate of decline in Gross National Product was three times that of the U.S., while Germany and Britain contracted by twice as much.” America’s economy is simply more resilient. We have lost a great number of jobs, but they will return more swiftly than in other nations. If, of course, the government gets out of the way!

By 2050, Americans will look different. The infusion of Asians and Hispanics will lead to a new kind of American civilization that will exist “across the entirety of human cultures and racial types. No other advanced populous country will enjoy this kind of ethnic diversity.”

Kotkin predicts that America “will probably not be the hegemonic giant it remains today, but the America of 2050 may well evolve into the one truly transcendent superpower in terms of our society, technology, and culture.”

By the time 2010 ends, President Obama will have been politically neutered. Power will shift to a chastened Republican Party whose new leaders will renew the fundamental principles of conservatism and redirect national priorities from the ideologies of liberalism to a pragmatic determination to meet our present and future needs.

John Quincy Adams said, “Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.” We have seen courage in the town hall meetings, in the Tea Party events, in elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. We have it in spades!

Editor’s Note: You can read Joel Kotkin’s article at
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2010%20-%20JanFeb/full-Kotkin-JF-2010.html

Each one of us has their own “state of the union” so far as the economy is concerned. Much of the workforce receives a paycheck, but many of those jobs have ceased to exist. Other jobs involve contract services. A reported 10% of the workforce is unemployed and the likelihood is that the actual percentage is much higher.

Small business, one of the largest components of the economy, is hurting because consumers are cutting back on spending. It is no surprise either that the banking community, under direct attack by the President, is reluctant to stick its neck out. The result is an understandable reluctance to extend credit and loans, and a loss of investor confidence.

On Wednesday, the President will give his first State of the Union (SOTU) speech, but if it looks and sounds familiar, it is because it will be the third time in the past year he has addressed a joint session of Congress. That has to be some kind of record, but he has set records for more than 400 speeches in the past year.

When the President reads yet another speech written for him by other people, keep in mind that he has surrounded himself with a cabinet and advisors composed primarily of lawyers like himself. Most have no experience in private enterprise. They have not managed a business, nor met a payroll. Less than ten percent of them have experience in the business sector. And these are the people charged with solving the current financial crisis!

I do not need to wait until Wednesday to hear President Obama’s State of the Union speech. I already know he cannot be trusted to respond honestly and candidly about any issue. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) gained fame by calling out “You Lie!” in an earlier speech and he was right. He did, however, apologize for the breach of etiquette, but I am pretty sure other Republicans in the chamber will feel the same impulse.

After fifty years of earning a good living as a public relations counselor and a provider of editorial skills, the market for my skills has contracted in response to the economy. That’s my SOTU. I am confident that, when the economy improves, there will be individuals, corporations, trade associations and others who will rev up their efforts to influence consumers and issues, but until then, while the President lives off the fat of the land, I am pretty much living off my “fat.”

A recent issue of U.S News & World Report devoted an entire issue to my generation and those closely gaining on it. It concluded that many either do not want to retire, nor can afford to. I have a cousin, also in his 70s, who’s in his Wall Street office every day. According to the magazine, both of us have a good chance of making it to age 100!

Many investments intended to provide a retirement nest egg have been reduced in value, interest on savings is miniscule, and the rising cost of living has left those in their seventies and older often unable to opt out of the work force if they are fortunate to be employed or considering re-employment if a job can be found. We make excellent workers because we come equipped with a good work ethic and attitudes.

Meanwhile, a legion of Baby Boomers is beginning to join our ranks, lining up for their Social Security and other benefits.

Tampering with Medicare this year, a huge distraction from the task of encouraging job growth, was possibly the dumbest thing the White House and Democrat Congress could have done. There will be a senior citizen payback at the ballot box in November.

I have a younger member of my family who, like thousands of Americans these days, owns a home whose value is less than his mortgage. Like all homes, it is a money pit. And worse for him, it is in New Jersey, a state with the highest property and other taxes in the nation. At the height of the housing bubble, I sold the home in which I had lived for more than sixty years and moved to a luxury apartment complex. I miss my former home, but it didn’t come with a pool, a fitness center, and a charming concierge staff.

Having been born during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I have now lived long enough to be in a new Depression. The irony is that both had their roots in government policies and, in both cases, were prolonged by government hostility to corporations, banks, and other generators of income and growth.

The present administration is maniacally opposed to Wall Street. They oppose the engines of energy in America, oil, coal, and natural gas. They waste billions on so-called “renewable” energy or “biofuels”, all of which are incapable of producing sufficient energy for even a moderate-sized city or town. Biofuels just drive up the cost of crops like corn for no sensible reason.

Those “shovel-ready” construction projects have not yet materialized while the nation’s infrastructure continues to be neglected. Not one single new nuclear plant or refinery has been built since the 1970s.

Over the years, the auto industry has been destroyed by increasing congressional interference in the form of mileage mandates, by requirements for ethanol use, and, internally, by the auto unions that demanded and received huge medical and retirement plans that ate profits. Two of the largest American auto manufacturers are essentially owned by the taxpayers due to massive, multi-billion bailouts, and controlled by the unions that destroyed them.

So my SOTU is to find a market for my editorial and other skills. I don’t give a rat’s patoot what the President will say Wednesday evening. He’s not the solution. He is the problem.

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister

It began as a beautiful cruise to a land of “hope and change”, but it has become a nightmare in which the ship of state is being deliberately steered toward a whirlpool of debt from which, if Obama is successful, the nation cannot escape.

One of the primary reasons the U.S. economy has grown over the years has been the confidence in its innovation and productivity. It has generated investment from around the world from those who wanted to profit from our success story. There was a time when U.S. securities were the safest in the world, but that is no longer the case.

On December 24, 2009, the U.S. Senate voted to raise the ceiling of the government debt to $12.4 trillion, described by an Associated Press reporter as “a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.”

On January 20, 2010, barely a month later, Senate Democrats “proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.”

This is the reason, by virtue of the Massachusetts special election; the United States has dodged the bullet of a “reformed” healthcare system which would have slashed a half trillion dollars from Medicare coffers while adding millions more people to its rolls.

It would have turned the health insurance industry into a public utility. They would have ceased to be private enterprises of competing companies. It would have driven physicians out of practice. It would have bankrupted the nation and reduced a widely acknowledged excellent health system to that of a third world nation.

The proposed “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on all energy use—the lifeblood of any economy, must be defeated. This will come most likely from a lack of votes as Senate Democrats are finally scared enough of the electorate to act with some degree of rationality.

In a recent commentary, Jerome R. Corsi, the author of “America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving the Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty”, wrote “With the recession and the huge stimulus package added to the beginning of the baby boomers retiring, United States debt is already at 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the Obama administration plans as they currently stand.”

In other words, the U.S. government is committed through various “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other expenditures, to spend more than it takes in via taxes. The other major expense is for defense. These three factors represent half of the annual U.S. budget.

The situation is so grave that, on January 18, The Washington Times editorialized that “Obama is killing the economy.”

The bill has finally come due for decades of socialism that began in the 1930s.

“The 2009 budget deficit tripled over 2008. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) went from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009. The deficit for the first month of fiscal year 2010 was $176 billion, which was greater than the $161 billion deficit for the entire 2007 fiscal year.”

At present rates, the public debt of the United States will reach 85 percent of GDP by 2018, just eight years from now, and 100 percent by 2022. It would be 200 percent by 2038 unless some brakes on spending are not applied before the ship of state gets sucked down beneath an ocean of debt.

What does President Obama propose? He wants to apply an unconstitutional special tax on banks! And not all banks, but just those banks on “Wall Street” whom he blames for the current recession.

His most recent proposal to regulate the banking system drove down the Dow Jones Average signaling further fears of his intention to micro-manage the economy. It is a recipe for disaster and shares of the big Wall Street banks in particular fell. He is deliberately attacking the great engine of the nation’s economy.

Wall Street is not the problem. The government is the problem.

Obama made no mention of the real culprits for the housing market meltdown, the reckless spending of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act that underwrote a program that put $12 trillion of mortgage loans, half of all such loans, in the hands of the federal government!

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, “President Obama’s proposal (would) bring back 1930s-like separation of commercial and investment banks, dubbed Glass-Steagall II or Glass-Steagall 2.0, (and) would do little to prevent the problem of financial institutions being too big to fail. What it would do is hurt economic recovery, reduce types of financing available to businesses big and small, and give European and Asian financial services firm a huge competitive advantage over their U.S. counterparts.”

The billions still unspent in the so-called “Stimulus” bill should be returned to the Treasury. Plans to expand Medicare and Medicaid need to be scrapped. Taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, must be avoided if for no other reason that CO2 has nothing to do with a non-existent global warming.

The capacity of the United States to recover calls for an end or at least a cap on the mindless spending of taxpayer millions on the pet projects and crony deals of Representatives and Senators.

It calls for an end to the restrictions on the exploration for and extraction of the nation’s vast coal, oil and natural gas reserves, including in ANWR and aggressively in the offshore continental shelf.

It calls for an end to huge multi-million dollar subsidies for “renewable energy” schemes such as solar and wind power.

It calls for an end to the ethanol mandates that dilute the mileage of every gallon of gasoline and actually increase CO2 emissions!

It calls for an end to congressional mandates on the auto industry that have, in part, driven two of its largest manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler, into bankruptcy. The U.S. must divest its ownership in both companies.

It calls for reining in the rogue government agency, the Environment Protection Agency that is attempting to unilaterally impose control of CO2 emissions and has long engaged in practices that impede economic growth for business, industry, and the nation’s agricultural sector.

There are many reasonable and rational steps that can and should be taken, but it seems clear that the President, with the support of a Democrat controlled Congress, has no intention of taking any of these steps and, indeed, is intent on bankrupting the U.S. government and its people.

I am frequently asked how I come up with something new to write about every day, but in fact I write about the same things, the Constitution, energy issues, the global warming fraud, education, immigration, et cetera. There is, however, always something new to address within these and other ongoing topics.

As another weekend beckons, I have any number of questions rambling around in my brain about current events.

Is 2010 the year in which global warming will be officially declared dead?

How is it that the Obama administration can announce it is ready to given $10 BILLION DOLLARS a year to developing nations to help them cope with climate change? First of all, the U.S. is for all intents and purposes broke. We exist off of the billions we have to BORROW DAILY just to function and meet enormous obligations such as Medicare and Social Security payments, pensions, the entire U.S. military, and countless pork projects. We don’t have the money to give and climate change has been around 4.5 billion years.

Why can’t these so-called developing nations—which have been developing since I was born over seventy years ago—start developing a few things themselves, like water purification programs, supporting agriculture through the use of genetically modified seeds so crops can resist drought or insect depredation, or just ensuring that, in some cases, the riches from oil royalties actually gets used to build some schools, health clinics, et cetera?

Friends of the Earth put out a letter to their members saying, “Since day one of the Copenhagen climate summit, our Friends of the Earth delegation has stood with people from African nations, small island states, and other poor countries in demanding climate justice.” What exactly is “climate justice”? The climate is the climate. It has nothing to do with justice. Unless, of course, you think rich countries are responsible for the reason poor countries are poor. In which case, you’re just nuts.

Is it possible that the Democrat Party and its leadership, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are either stark raving mad or just such dedicated Marxists that they believe the U.S. must be bankrupted with a bizarre healthcare “reform”, taxes on all forms of energy use, and the regulation of the second most vital gas on planet Earth, carbon dioxide, as a “pollutant” that is “harmful” to public health?

Where is the Constitution at work these days except for the extension of its Bill of Rights to foreign combatants who are self-admitted Islamic terrorists that engaged in an act of war called 9/11? Since when do we try war criminals in anything other than military tribunals? The answer is and was never.

How long will it take Iran to launch a missile at Israel after it has put together a nuclear warhead? My guess is about five minutes because the ayatollahs who have been in charge since 1979 see such an act as possibly the sole reason for their Islamic Revolution.

Here’s another random thought. If the Constitution expressly says “No person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” And just what is the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize and how much money comes with the shiny medal, if not a present and emolument? If Congress passed a resolution of consent, I didn’t hear about it.

Monday marks the beginning of winter. For all those global warming enthusiasts, it is a period of deep denial about the fact that the Earth gets particularly cold for several months. To make it worse, having been in a cooling cycle since 1998 winter may stick around longer in the coming decade or two. During the last Little Ice Age, the Thames froze over regularly from 1300 to 1850. Here in America, soldiers billeted at Valley Forge had to endure bitter cold.

By the way, four inches of snow fell on Copenhagen in the last few days. This is considered a blizzard by the Danes because it is an unusual amount for that city.

Santa will arrive next week. I have been a very good little boy.

It has taken less than a year for most Americans to conclude that the Obama White House is all about appearances. The “Job Summit” is a classic example. Just how does one hold such a conference without inviting representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to participate?

Most administrations worry about their credibility, whether most of the public believes what they are saying, but this one doesn’t really care. The result is an endless succession of staged events in which the hand-picked participants all say what the White House wants.

The December 2nd edition of Business Week, however, had something different to say on the subject of “The Slow Road to Jobs.” Reporter Jane Sasseen began by asking, “Could it take as long as five years for the economy to replace all of the eight million jobs lost since the Great Recession began? The most bearish economists think so.”

“Job creation,” reported Sasseen, “is proving to be painfully slow, and Washington is starting to panic. With unemployment at a 26-year high of 10.2% and climbing, the Democrats are scrambling to rev up the economy before the midterm elections next November.” Unofficial estimates put the unemployment rate closer to 17% which would put it in the category of a full-blown Depression.

The notion that the White House or Congress can create any jobs other than government jobs is a fallacy. Real jobs are largely created by small business owners and by major corporate enterprises, but the latter keep leaving the United States because they are paying among the highest corporate taxes to be found anywhere in the world. Neither can plan ahead thanks to the uncertain penalties that Obamacare would impose.

The prospect of an increase in the costs of healthcare insurance and/or the complete government takeover of healthcare is enough to make corporations look for a friendlier place in which to set up shop.

The present recession differs from previous ones. “The U.S. economy, once the greatest job-creation machine in the world, has taken longer and longer to replace the jobs lost in recent recession,” reported Sasseen. “This time could be even worse. U.S. payrolls peaked at 138 million in December 2007; today they stand at roughly 130 million.”

As household and businesses reduce their spending, the prospect of any near-term increase in hiring or economic recovery is unlikely.

The government’s spending binge continues. Fox News reported that “The federal government spent $3.5 trillion during President Obama’s first year in office.”

Though fond of blaming President Bush for all the ills of the economy, President Obama “shattered the budget record for first-year presidents, spending nearly double what his predecessor did when he came into office and far exceeding the first-year tabs for any other U.S. president in history.”

“That price tag came with a $1.4 trillion deficit, nearly $1 trillion more than last year. The overall budget was about a half-trillion more than Bush’s for 2008, his final full fiscal year in office.”

The stimulus bill has billions allocated for so-called “green jobs” in the area of solar, wind, and biofuels; so-called “renewable energy.” In a December 2 commentary in The Washington Examiner, Thomas J. Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research pointed out that, “At the height of its construction this past summer, the largest solar plant in the United States employed 400 workers. Now that it’s complete, the DeSoto Solar Center in Arcadia, Florida, stakes claim to two – yes two – full time ‘green jobs.’”

Contrast this with an estimated 1.2 million energy jobs that would be made available if the Obama administration would permit exploration of the nation’s vast continental shelf for the vast oil and natural gas resources going untapped. There are an estimated 115 billion barrels of recoverable oil and more than 565 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Institute for Energy Research estimates those jobs would generate $70 billion in annual wages. Then add in the savings in the cost of importing these energy sources, plus the bonus if increased national security.

The costs of the proposed economy-killing healthcare “reform” could be reduced starting with tort reform, opening the marketplace for the sale of insurance, and a serious effort to reduce the estimated $70 billion in Medicare fraud.

Instead of taking billions out of Medicare and thus likely causing some hospitals to shut down and the widespread denial of care to the millions of seniors who paid into the system, the Obama administration is more focused on government control of one-sixth of the economy. Or what will be left of it after they run it into the ground.

All manner of steps could be taken to energize the economy, not the least of which would be tax cuts that would encourage spending and hiring.

But no, the Obama administration would rather put on a show for the cameras.