Where Can We Flee to Escape “The Obama Economy?”

Kevin Price posted the following at politicalintegritynow.    Where will you Prager folks go to escape the economy when America goes south dragged down, down, down, by  ObamaMarxism?

“I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan and thought it was a great place to live at the time. We had four seasons, beautiful trees, and it was a wonderful place to be a kid. However, it was also a place in significant economic decline and, by the time we left in the mid 1970s, Detroit was a place on the ropes. Like the many “Michiganders” that flew south to escape the economy of Detroit, we often joked, “would the last person to leave Detroit, please turn off the lights.” With many economists indicating that real unemployment in the Motor City is around 50 percent, the day this city dies seems to be drawing near.

Detroit has reached such a dire status that its own demise has become a description for the decline of other economies. The Michigan based Mackinac Center discusses “Detroitification,” which is defined as the “hollowing out of the private economy to prop up unsustainable (and often unresponsive) government establishments.” That is a perfect explanation of what is going on in our nation’s capitol today.

The federal budget is expanding at a breakneck pace, with the deficit growing annually at an amount our entire national debt was just two decades ago. The US already has the second highest tax rates of any industrialized country in the world. Our fiscal policies are going to make the government demand more. Every dollar the government takes is money that would go to an expanding economy and job creation.

What is the government doing with its expanding expenditures? According to USA Today, during the current recession, the number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has grown at a rapid rate. While Americans struggle with economic decline that is demonstrated in higher unemployment, falling wages, businesses going under and housing foreclosures; federal employees are flourishing at the expense of taxpayers.

USA Today provides an example of this growth in government employment, at the beginning of the recession, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Today there are 1,690 employees with salaries above $170,000. The growth in six-figure salaries has made the average federal worker’s pay climb to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector. Furthermore, government jobs usually include many benefits that are not typical in the private sector, making the public jobs even more expensive. One can easily see how the costly nature of the government and private sector trade off.

Michael Jar of the Mackinac Center rightly notes, “So much for shared sacrifice.” The same tragic policies that have economically wiped out the city of Detroit are now being applied on a national level. Such policies keep certain political parties in power, and certain bureaucrats happy, but create ruin for the rest of the population.”

Is Obamacare Damage to America Irreversible? Mark Steyn, Hugh Hewitt Review

I look to  steynonline, to see what Mark Steyn is up to…..  In my assessment he is the funniest of the smartest conservatives around.  He can entertain nearly any time he opens his mouth.   Moreover, he is a conservative with guts.   I listen to Krauthammer’s brilliance and worry.  I listen to Steyn’s commentary and he makes me laugh believing  Obamadisaster is mere comedy. 

Below is his today’s conversation with Hugh Hewitt.  Hugh asks him if he thinks the Obama takeover of healthcare will pass the House this Sunday.

 MS  “Well, I’m generally pessimistic on this thing, because every time I’ve been reassured by those in the know that it’s never going to pass the House, it’s never going to pass the Senate, it’s completely dead now that Scot Brown’s been elected. It comes back to life. You know, I always liked the bit in the creature feature where they kill the monster the first time, and then they’re strolling away from the house devastated, and from under the ground, a hand reached up through the dirt, and rotting hand, and grabs the young girl’s ankle, and the monster has come back to life. And they have to kill it again. But this thing is ridiculous. I don’t mind one of those, just for the observance of tradition, but this thing should have been pumped full of silver bullets a long time ago. And this rubbish about deeming, now deeming it to have passed, as you call it, the kangaroo Congress stuff, it isn’t…whether it works or not, it isn’t quite respectable. And I think it’s even worse than actually strong-arming Congressmen into supporting it and passing it honestly. Taking one for the team is all very well. Taking one for the deem, or whatever this is meant to be, I think, just not only makes this a bad bill, but actually gives the whiff of banana republic to the whole process.

HH: It absolutely does, and you’re right about the horror film analogy, because every time we open a new door, or pry open a window, bats fly out with new stuff. Today, we find 12,000 new IRS agents. I believe five of them have been assigned to you, Mark Steyn.

MS: (laughing) That’s very probable.

HH: So in terms of the Bismarck Bank Deal that comes in today as well, Kent Conrad’s got himself a carve-out for the student loan business in North Dakota. Does the indelible brand of corruption attach itself to the Democratic Party after this fiasco?

MS: Well, I don’t think, I mean, I think if you look at, for example, all the utopian drivel that attended the passage of the National Health Act in Britain in the 1940s, of the original Medicare up in Canada in the 1960s, that whatever one feels about it, it was clean. I think this thing, where you, it’s dragged through on a partisan vote, and then, even then, you have to resort to these parliamentary shenanigans, which by the way, I regard as very serious, because in any free society, the checks and balances really are only as strong as the willingness of all players to be gentlemanly about it. I mean, in a sense, they depend on unspoken codes of conduct. If you have a revolutionary commissar like Nancy Pelosi, who’s prepared to just ride roughshod over them, you can more or less do anything you want. And I think that is what is disgusting about it. So I think this will be tainted from the get-go. And that’s very different from what’s happened in other countries.

HH: It’s the serial assaults on precedent. It has a whiff of the Roman revolution about it. When every successive leader did something no one had ever dreamed would happen before, wear away at the self-restraint that’s imposed on the system. I don’t know that they can repair this, Mark Steyn. I think it’s going to be six months of knock-down, drag out hostility from both sides, and I welcome that. Do you?

MS: Well, I think this is a useful clarifier. I mean, I was interested to see David Brooks, for example. David Brooks was a man who was smitten, by his own account in the New Republic, he was one of these right of center types who was smitten by Obama’s cool, by his pant leg, by the perfect crease in Obama’s pant leg, as David Brooks rhapsodized. And he now says that essentially, we’re in banana republic terrain here. So I think that’s what’s interesting about this. You can’t present this even in terms of progressive utopianism. It’s dirty, it stinks from the beginning, and I think that is going to be impossible for Obama and his commissars to cover up.

HH: There’s another difference as well. If I read…I don’t know much about post-war Britain, but I remember that the big Labour guy, Anthony Bevin, was a tough character.

MS: Yeah, Ernie Bevin.

HH: Ernie Bevin.

MS: Yeah.

HH: Tough, smart character, right?

MS: Yeah, yeah.

HH: Compare that to Congresswoman Slaughter, who originally we heard from when she came up with the chopper stopper at the health care debate. Here’s a sample of Congresswoman Slaughter defending her creation yesterday.

LS: It really has been an astonishing fact, or not a fact, a fact telling them on what it was coming out today here about the Constitutionality of whether we can deem a bill to be passed. It has been done here since the 1930s over and over again. Most people, I think, in the House at this point have voted for something exactly like it or very similar during their Congressional career.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, that is A) false, B) delivered in a tone that is risible, and C) recalls that people like this and Dennis Kucinich and Nancy Pelosi are deciding the fate of the American republic. It’s, it would be so amusing…

MS: Yeah, and you have, just to correct something, when I said Ernie Bevin, he was a foreign secretary in the post-war Labour government. It was actually Nye Bevan who was the health minister.

HH: Okay.

MS: And Nye Bevan stood up after they passed the National Health Act and said that Britain now had the moral leadership of the world. Now you don’t have to agree with that to at least recognize that the whole thing had been, had gone through the House of Commons an the House of Lords, and received royal ascent in an entirely legitimate process.

HH: Yes.

MS: And this is the difference here. They are making up the rules as they go along, and that is something that this ridiculous woman, as you say, the last heard from demanding that we backdate federally-subsidized false teeth all the way back to George Washington’s wooden choppers, this woman is not in that league at all.

HH: And Dennis Kucinich, they were actually listening to Dennis Kucinich yesterday as though he had something to say, Mark Steyn.

MS: Yes, and in fact, he was just subject…when the President gave that speech in Ohio a few days ago, Kucinich was there, and Obama got the crowd, he asked the crowd how do  you want Dennis to vote. And he got the crowd all chanting yes, yes, yes. I mean, this,  that was almost like one of those Soviet show trial moments. And I think this is, however you do it, whatever emerges from this, the Obama cool, the post-partisan healer, the whole shtick he ran on, that’s dead and gone forever. There’s a price that he’s paid for doing this, and I guess from his point of view, it’s worth it. It’s worth cancelling all these overseas visits to Indonesia and Australia, it’s worth offending even more allies than he normally offends in the course of a week. But I guess from his point of view, it’s worth it, but it’s changed the nature of the man and his character as it’s understood by the American people.

HH: Agreed. Now we’ve talked about this before, and you’re a pessimist about repeal. But I’m beginning to think that they’ve gone so far down the road towards banana republic land, and kangaroo Congress land, that indeed repeal might actually be possible in a swoop. What do you think?

MS: Yes, I think so, and I think what we need to do is get all Republican candidates to delegitimize what happens. And so in November, they should announce that they do not recognize what has happened as a legitimate piece of legislation. They will vote to repeal it when they can, and in the meantime, they will do their best to starve it of funds, and starve it of any practical applicability. What we are seeing here is something that will, I think, actually bankrupt America, and a lot quicker than anybody thinks. If you look at what’s happened in Massachusetts, it’s led to all the features of a classic socialized system, longer waits in emergency rooms, more shortage of doctors, doctors quitting the profession, plus 27%, Massachusetts residents pay 27% more than people in the rest of the country. I think that’s what we’ll see here, and very quickly. And that’s why all Republicans should take the equivalent, I think, of the New Hampshire no tax pledge on this health care thing.

HH: So is the damage to the Republic irreversible?

MS: Well, if it stays, it is reversible. I mean, we keep, you know, making these comparisons with what’s going on in Greece at the moment, but the reality is that what happens in Greece isn’t terribly important to the fate of the rest of the world. What happens in America is on an entirely different scale of this, and I think you see that’s really the difference between…America is not a genuinely, even a potentially utopian society in the way certain European countries are. If you ask the Swedes to go for socialized health care, they’ll at least do it in a utopian and equitable way. What we’ve seen in Congress is it’s done with strong-arming and bullying and special deals for every little rinky-dink Congressman or Senator who sits on the fence long enough. So it’s stinkingly corrupt. Even if you regard socialized health care as utopian and deluded, at least in Canada or Scandinavia, there’s an equality of awfulness. This is not merely utopian and deluded, but stinkingly corrupt.

Obama’s Other Disgrace: Eric Holder

Eric Holder’s Massive Ineptness

By Michael Gerson

“WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder is controversial on the left for preserving much of the Bush administration’s legal structure for conducting the war on terror. He is controversial on the right for overturning portions of that structure in ways that seem both clueless and reckless. But Holder is the most endangered member of the Obama Cabinet for a different reason: Just about everything he has touched has backfired.

The list is oddly impressive. First, there was the decision to release Bush-era interrogation memos and reopen the investigation of CIA interrogators after they already had been cleared by career prosecutors. Holder assumed these actions would rally public outrage. Instead, he started a national security debate he has pretty much lost. Seven former CIA directors — serving under Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 — sent Holder a letter warning his actions could “help al-Qaeda elude U.S. intelligence and plan future operations.” Holder opened a serious, ongoing rift between the Department of Justice and the intelligence community.

Second, there was Holder’s repudiation in the matter of John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the Bush administration lawyers who provided the legal justification for enhanced interrogations. Holder appointees had determined the two lawyers guilty of professional misconduct. But the Justice Department’s senior career attorney cleared Yoo and Bybee of the charge, embarrassing Holder in the process.

Third, there was the handling of the underwear bomber case. It is fortunate that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab eventually resumed cooperation. It is also evident that Holder’s decision to Mirandize him after 50 minutes was hasty and based on minimal consultation with intelligence officials. Holder treated a national security judgment as a purely legal one. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair later told Congress: “That unit (the High Value Interrogation Group) was created exactly for this purpose — to make a decision on whether a certain person who’s detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means. We did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have.” In fact, Blair was unaware that the High Value Interrogation Group did not yet exist.

Fourth, there is the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the civilian trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other 9/11 conspirators in Manhattan. Under Holder’s direction, this process has collapsed. There is no serious plan to close Guantanamo. Holder has been unable to articulate reasons why some terrorism cases are referred to civilian courts while others are tried in military tribunals. And his groundwork for a “trial of the century” was botched in almost every respect. The White House, having lost faith in Holder’s ability to manage terrorism trials, has assumed direct control of the process. Civilian trials for the 9/11 terrorists now seem unlikely anywhere in the United States. But backing down on that commitment will have a cost. “If this stunning reversal comes to pass,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “President Obama will deal a death blow to his own Justice Department, not to mention American values.” While a military trial for KSM would hardly be a mortal blow to American ideals, Holder’s initial announcement has created a political expectation on the left that may be impossible to fulfill.

Finally, there are the Supreme Court briefs filed by Holder that he failed to disclose to Congress during his confirmation — likely to be the focus of a congressional oversight hearing in which Holder will testify on Tuesday. Holder’s spokesman says this omission was inadvertent. But one of those briefs opposed the detention of Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant, leading Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., to wonder, “Are we expected to believe that then-nominee Holder, with only a handful of Supreme Court briefs to his name, forgot about his role in one of this country’s most publicized terrorism cases?” Holder’s briefs preview his later decisions on the underwear bomber and KSM. Few in Congress or the White House have leapt to defend Holder’s convenient omission.

Add to all of this a series of public gaffes. America is a “nation of cowards.” The possibility of capturing Osama bin Laden alive “simply does not exist.”

Sometimes haplessness can provoke sympathy. But Holder mixes ineptness with self-righteousness. Critics of his questionable choices, he says, “cower.” They lack “confidence in the American system of justice.”

But there is another possibility. Perhaps Holder’s critics — in Congress, in the country and even within the White House — just lack confidence in his judgment.”

Comment:  The above article is from realclearpolitics.  

Mr. Holder, like Mr. Obama are both doing their best to make Marxism “the American way”.  They both have confidence in their goal.  In this light one can make the argument they are at this moment being very successful.

No one pays any attention to America’s voice in foreign affairs in this Obama-Holder axis.  No one expects the president to know the difference between truth and lie.  He simply talks……as the  Democrats remind us…..we deserve the government we elect.

Obamadebt Before the Obamacare Debacle in Enacted

Even before this disgraceful fraud called Obamacare becomes law…and it will be passed this Sunday….Obama is running a budget deficit of over $2,000 000 000 000 per Obama year….Again, that is before the government has taken over Democrat controlled health in America.

The following information is provided by the National Center for Policy Analysis:

“The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows the national debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office. 

Consider: 

• The debt now stands at $12.6 trillion.
• On the day Obama took office it was $10.6 trillion.
• President George W. Bush still holds the record for the most debt run up on his watch: $4.9 trillion.
• But it took him over four years to rack up the first two trillion dollars in debt.
• It has taken Obama 421 days. 

But the Obama Administration routinely blames the Bush Administration for inheriting a budget surplus and turning it into years of record-breaking deficits and debt — and then leaving it on the doorstep of the new president, says Mark Knoller of CBS News. 

“I walked into office facing a massive deficit, most of which was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program,” Obama said last month in a speech to corporate executives at a Business Roundtable conference. 

“When we walked in, we had a deficit of $1.3 trillion and projected debt over the course of a decade of $8 trillion,” he told the CEOs on February 24th.  “The lost revenue from this recession put us in an even deeper hole.  And the steps we took to save the economy from depression last year have necessarily added to the deficit — about $1 trillion, compared to the $8 trillion that we inherited.” 

The most the administration says it can do is try to slow the growth of the national debt — but its own forecasts show it doesn’t look promising, says Knoller: 

• In the 2011 federal budget released last month, the administration projects the national debt will soar ever upward to over $25 trillion in the year 2020.
• The total debt will amount to more than 100 percent of the national economy as early as 2012. ”

Source: Mark Knoller, “National Debt Up $2 Trillion on Obama’s Watch,” CBS News, March 16, 2010.