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Barack Obama Archive

Saturday

2

January 2010

0

COMMENTS

Obama Needs More Vacations

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government

Some on the right are taking every chance to poke fun at the President’s vacation in Hawaii.  This is understandable given the left’s partisan attacks on Bush for 8 years. I can’t fault them for rightly making fun of such hypocrites.  When it comes to the vacation itself, however, I find no problems.  In fact, I wish the President would take more of them.

During his first year in office, America suffered through one of the most active and interventionist governments in our nation’s history.  No issue, such as that between Harvard professor Henry Gates and the Cambridge police department, was too small for executive attention.  This kind of government is both destructive for the country and inherently unsustainable.  Even Big Brother has limits.

Unlike statists, liberty lovers don’t need to believe that there is some figure watching over us at all times. The idea of a national father who never takes his eye off our daily affairs strikes us as creepy, not comforting. So for 2010, we should encourage President Obama to resolve to do less. We need him taking over fewer businesses, interjecting himself into fewer private disputes, and just generally toning down his hyper-active approach to running the executive branch. A good start would be for him to spend less time in Washington D.C. and more time on the golf course in Hawaii.

Sunday

27

December 2009

1

COMMENTS

Fannie And Freddie Have A Very Merry Christmas

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy

The outrageous story of the week is Obama’s decision to try and sneak this by during Christmas:

The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.

The Christmas Eve announcement by the Treasury Department means that it can continue to run the companies, which were seized last year, as arms of the government for the rest of President Obama’s current term.

Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year of watching government continue to do all the same idiotic meddling that destroyed our housing and financial markets.

Thursday

10

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Obama Resists Efforts To Make Recession About Race

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Identity Politics

Although he hasn’t been afraid to play the identity politics game on other issues, President Obama deserves credit for so far resisting the attempts from people like Jesse Jackson to turn our recession into yet another issue about race.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has joined black lawmakers in their push to get the White House to do more to directly help African American communities disproportionately hurt by the nation’s severe economic recession.

Jackson, who noted that he was not invited to President Obama’s recent jobs summit, said he has requested a meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to talk about economic aid for depressed minority communities. No meeting has been set.

In recent days, Obama has pushed back at the idea that his administration should focus economic revitalization policies on specific ethnic and racial groups. In an interview with USA Today and the Detroit Free Press last week, the president said, “The most important thing I can do for the African American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, period, and that is get the economy going again and get people hiring again.”

The President is exactly right here.  Helping the entire economy is right now the best way to help any particular subset of the population.

Now if we can just get him to look at policies that will actually help the economy, instead of constantly aiming to squeeze it under the twin burdens of higher taxation and greater regulation.

Saturday

5

December 2009

1

COMMENTS

Third Time Is Not The Charm On Stimulus

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy

The jobless rate is currently at 10% (or higher if you count the discouraged), so clearly we need a little government job promotion, right?  Barack Obama thinks so, and is set to unveil his latest “plan.”  But not so fast! Haven’t we done this before?

This will be the third time government has acted to “create jobs” since the beginning of 2008.  Why should we believe it will be any more successful now than it has been in the past?government-waste

In early 2008, President Bush teamed up with Nancy Pelosi to pass a $150 billion (then considered a lot of money) stimulus package.  This “booster shot” to the economy, consisting primarily of rebates to individual taxpayers, was supposed to head off recession.  At the time, the unemployment rate was under 5%.

A year later, Pelosi found herself with a new dancing partner in Barack Obama. President Obama’s subsequent stimulus package dwarfed that of President Bush.  Passed when the unemployment rate was not yet 8%, it was promised that the $800 billion stimulus would hold joblessness below a peak of 9%.  This package also failed, and today the unemployment rate is in double digits.

Leave it to government to insist we continue down a path with such a sterling record of failure.  It is time to abandon the Krugman-championed policies of Keynesian economics.  Government cannot create jobs by taking money out of the economy, funneling it through a wasteful bureaucracy, then directing it to the most politically connected and favored industries.  No economy has ever been successfully powered by such a model.

The best thing Democrats can do is to stop threatening to destroy so many industries via regulation and government control.  This would reduce the uncertainty hampering investment.  If they combined that by lowering the rates of the most destructive taxes, such as the corporate and capital gains taxes, an improved job market would follow.  Otherwise, we can continue banging our collective heads against the wall while insanely expecting an outcome other than pain.

Wednesday

2

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

What Obama Didn't Say

Written by , Posted in Foreign Affairs & Policy

Obama’s speech on Afghanistan is perhaps as notable for what the President did not say as what he did. What do I mean by that? Well, he never uses the words ‘victory,’ ‘win,’ or ‘jihad.’  He does use ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ five times, and ‘defeating’ a grand total of once.

He had to wiggle hard to avoid using some of these verboten words.  We don’t fight ‘jihadists,’ for instance, but rather “a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam.”  Despite being too busy to talk about winning the war, he did find plenty of time to talk about himself, using the word ‘I’ on 40 separate occasions, and ‘me’ another six times.

Tuesday

1

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Honduran Democracy Survived Onslaught By Leftist Cabal

Written by , Posted in Foreign Affairs & Policy

The unholy alliance between leftists Hugo Chavez, Manuel Zelaya and Barack Obama suffered a crushing defeat at the polls in Honduras this weekend.

Despite their best efforts to delegitimize the elections, and the claims of pro-Zelaya propaganda, Hondurans impressively turned out at a rate greater than 60% to elect a decidedly non-leftist candidate. Although the Obama administration recently backed off its insistence that it would not recognize the result of the elections, despite their having been scheduled since well before Zelaya was removed from office for his thuggish and unconstitutional plans for dictatorship, the White House worked tirelessly for months to support the efforts of Hugo Chavez and other brutish regimes to create a legitimacy crisis in Honduras.

Still, leftists are continuing to push for crisis in Honduras. Brazil won’t recognize the election, while the United States is again waffling, and threatening to bully Honduras into restoring, however briefly, anti-democratic brute Manuel Zelaya, in what I can only assume is a symbolic gesture to the power of leftwing dictators to tear apart constitutional governments. It seems the thuggish instincts of this Chicago-style President are hard to shake.

Tuesday

10

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

News Flash: Socialism Still Failing

Written by , Posted in Foreign Affairs & Policy

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and some still find “perplexing” the failures of socialism:

This country may be an energy colossus, with the largest conventional oil reserves outside the Middle East and one of the world’s mightiest hydroelectric systems, but that has not prevented it from enduring serious electricity and water shortages that seem only to be getting worse.

President Hugo Chávez has been facing a public outcry in recent weeks over power failures that, after six nationwide blackouts in the last two years, are cutting electricity for hours each day in rural areas and in industrial cities like Valencia and Ciudad Guayana. Now, water rationing has been introduced here in the capital.

The deterioration of services is perplexing to many here, especially because the country had grown used to cheap, plentiful electricity and water in recent decades. But even as the oil boom was enriching his government and Mr. Chávez asserted greater control over utilities and other industries in this decade, public services seemed only to decay, adding to residents’ frustrations.

In other South American news:

Populist leaders in Latin America are increasingly making legal and political moves to silence their critics in the media, the president of the Inter American Press Association said Friday.

The leaders’ tactics include revoking broadcast licenses, fostering hostility toward journalists and giving a free hand to government supporters who have attacked broadcast stations, newsrooms and printing plants, said the association’s president, Enrique Santos Calderón.

The headline reads, “Latin American Leaders Seek to Rein in Media, Press Group Says,” but thanks to the President’s war on Fox News, the ‘Latin’ qualifier for such stories has been rendered superfluous.

Sunday

25

October 2009

0

COMMENTS

Wednesday

14

October 2009

2

COMMENTS

The Nobel Committee’s Silly Excuses

Written by , Posted in Foreign Affairs & Policy

They’re not surprised by the criticism, say the Nobel Peace Prize Committee members which have taken questions about their decision to award Barack Obama the prize.  Yet for people who saw the questions coming, their explanations are incredibly silly.

“We simply disagree that he has done nothing,’’ committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said yesterday. “He got the prize for what he has done.’’

Jagland singled out Obama’s efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an antimissile shield in Europe.

“All these things have contributed to – I wouldn’t say a safer world – but a world with less tension,’’ Jagland said by phone from the French city of Strasbourg, where he was attending meetings in his other role as secretary general of the Council of Europe.

…

“Alfred Nobel wrote that the prize should go to the person who has contributed most to the development of peace in the previous year,’’ Jagland said. “Who has done more for that than Barack Obama?’’

Who has done more than nothing? A lot of people, I’d imagine.

Some brush all the criticism off by noting that the award is really just an understandable rebuke of the crazy Bush years, where a psychopath cowboy went around scaring the beejesus out of dictators world leaders.  Although that explanation gets close to their motivation, it is not entirely satisfactory.  It doesn’t explain the laundry list of past winners that have done little to nothing to promote peace (Al Gore), are falsely given credit for the work of others (Mikhail Gorbachev), or in some cases flat out opposed peace (Yasser Arafat).

It is clear that this prize is not about peace, per se, but correct adherence to left-wing orthodoxy.  Members of the committee may rationalize this on the basis that they believe adherence to this ideology will ultimately promote peace, but ought such assumptions be tested with empirical evidence before handing out a world renowned award? Shouldn’t someone produce a single place where people have been made more peaceful thanks to an Obama policy before his stances are declared as having promoted peace?

Of course, if they used any empirical analysis at all – as opposed to a straight ideological checklist – you might find among the list of winners some people that actually deserved it, like Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan. No global leftist worth his salt could ever let that happen.

Monday

12

October 2009

0

COMMENTS

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About Me

profileI serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.

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