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Jewish World Review
June 1, 2012/ 11 Sivan, 5772
Don't believe in Obama's fairy tales
By
Jay Ambrose
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
When I was a small kid, my mother read me fairy tales, fantastic stuff I didn't always quite believe but still enjoyed. I grew up, did my own reading, focused mainly on the real world as reflected in history and current affairs, but now, to my amazement, we have a president offering something very much like those fairy tales on a regular basis. Sad to say, my enjoyment is gone.
In a recent Iowa outing, President Barack Obama's focus was on federal spending because, it seems, his diligent White House researchers had come up with an Internet analysis showing he had exercised more restraint as president than any predecessor since Dwight Eisenhower. When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said otherwise, Obama joked, it was a "cow pie of distortion." Cute? Liberal commentators thought so and whooped it up.
It's bogus, that's what it is. The president cited a May 22 MarketWatch column by journalist Rex Nutting that found only spending molehills, neglecting to hold Obama responsible for the mountains -- things like most of the 2009 stimulus package.
One of the few media fact checkers who does not need his own fact checker, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, has calculated that federal spending, under Obama, is at its highest level since World War II. He uses the only method that finally counts for much: assessing spending as a percentage of the total economy.
This real record adds up to a devastating criticism of the Obama administration, and even noting how much of the spending has gone to entitlements doesn't make it forgivable. Entitlements must absolutely be restructured, but what has Obama done? He has played the demagogue, falsely making it seem that a means-tested voucher plan for Medicare would be an assault on the unfortunate, when the real assault is his own telling negligence to act on Medicare fragilities except through a benefits cut some Democrats now want to rescind.
That cut, it might be remembered, was not an overall budget reduction but a means of helping to finance a health care act that could easily add a trillion dollars to federal spending over the next decade. The few virtues of "Obamacare" -- the Affordable Care Act -- are undone by massive faults that include worrying employers so much that they are doing far less employing than they otherwise would. It adds to an entitlement threat that will be a true assault on the poor -- and everyone else -- if left unaddressed. It does so by worsening a debt threat some progressives keep trying to dismiss.
They should quit it. They should listen, among others, to Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor of economics and public policy and co-author of "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly." He knew whereof he spoke when he said recently on "PBS NewsHour" that the debt could hinder economic growth for decades if Washington doesn't turn to something like the recommendations of the co-chairmen of Obama's own debt commission.
Theirs was a bipartisan plan, asking for some retreat by both Republicans and Democrats. But many Republicans did not like its tax reform proposals, many Democrats did not like its spending cuts, and their refusal to compromise means the country can go rot.
I don't feel like rotting and I don't feel like hearing more fairy tales, either. I am tired of Obama blaming others for all the county's woes. I am sick of his envy-mongering pretenses that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes. I am scared to death of his infatuation with European-style social welfare systems and anti-business tirades. I see nothing but his own political profit and hurt for everyone else in his oh-so-close fellowship with public employee unions. I am dismayed by his view that still more spending is the chief answer to recessionary evils.
Presidents can't do everything, but he could have done far more to lift the country from this economic downturn, and the public needs to grasp that reality.
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Comment by clicking here.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
• 05/30/12: Writing a book? Beats prison
• 05/23/12: Student loans fail students
• 05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
• 05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
• 05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
• 05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
• 05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
• 04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
• 04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
• 04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
• 04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
• 04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest —- or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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