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The Challenge of Explaining the Critical Economic Mess To An Economically Ignorant Populous

Imagine that you live in a household that is neck-deep in debt.  Your credit is maxed out and the loan sharks are cracking their knuckles.  Then a supposed savior comes with the solution.  It involves putting a charge/expense on the usage of things that everyone uses in the household in order to generate more revenue to settle the debt.   Everyone using anything and everything from the fridge, the bed, or the automobiles had added fees ranging from 15 to 55 cents per usage.  Even the act of putting money away for a rainy day, retirement, or investing had an added fee in the top ranges.

To many this story sounds absurd and crazy.  And some may ask how can charging fees [taxes] on one’s most basic of activities and the very means of their production of income or wealth possibly be a way to bring in more wealth to get out of debt?  The answer is that it simply doesn’t.  But this is what is being proposed by both the political party leaders in the D.C. and Mr. Obama.  Rather than deal with the root issue of the maxing out of the credit card and spending way beyond its means, the government seeks just to squeeze more coins out of the house [the nation] that could possibly go towards producing more revenue to at least pay down the house’s debt and put it on the path to economic freedom and prosperity. It instead purchases more credit; thereby going into more debt to the loan sharks and the debt holders.

Sir Winston Churchill may have said it best when he said, “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”.  According to usdebtclock.org the government of the United States government brings in approx. $2,448,596,456,780.  But, it spends approx. $3,538,167,445,264.  One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to see that that’s economical hole more than a trillion dollars.  The federal government’s total debt is over $16 trillion – $5 trillion of which Mr. Obama added just in his first term alone.  I know that these numbers makes some peoples eyes go cross-ways, but to bring it closer to home the total U.S governments debt breaks down to over astoundingly $140 thousand per U.S Taxpayer.  There is no honest talk, if any at all, of cutting up the credit cards of the federal government and reducing it’s spending on all but the truest essentials, paying on the debt and interest, and or incentivizing more economic growth for the benefit of the nation’s posterity.

The analogy maybe simple, but the economic crisis that currently faces the nation, via the federal government, is no more complicated than the government spending more than in brings in and the American people not properly holding it accountable. The solutions being presented by Mr. Obama and the Republican House Speaker, whose party is supposed to be for limited government and low taxes, is to make revenue generating actions and activities cost more, and thus disincentivized those actions and activities from being engaged in, such as research and development by businesses, starting a new business, investing and savings by both individuals and businesses, and small business expansion and job creation, the actual things that can make us economically solvent again.  These such activities, or the lack thereof, do not occur in a vacuum, but have ripple effects that vibrates throughout the national economy.

But as egregious as the actions or inactions of the federal government are, what maybe even more unforgivable is the inability or unwillingness of the American people to hold the government and politicians accountable.  Too many Americans are oblivious regarding the dire straights the nation is in financially, and many others couldn’t care less.  Too many Americans have been conditioned to view political matters as something that can be left as someone else’s responsibility.  Too many taxpayers have no real idea how much in taxes they’re actually paying and where their money is going.  Too many Americans know more about the actions and activities of entertainers and sports athletes, who have no true affects on our lives, and have no idea who their congressional representative is or how their taxes will be effected through either the sequestration, the Bush Tax Cuts, Obamacare, or any of the  hundreds of laws that are annually passed in the Congress.  It truly doesn’t matter what the politicians do in D.C in the next couple of days if the majority of the populous have no real idea what they should be doing. The citizens of the United States and the American people have the representative government that we deserve and demand.  Jefferson warned us to be eternally vigilant to ensure that the government acts in our best interest.  If it doesn’t, and does so with impunity, we have only ourselves to blame.  And if the house’s finances are not put in order or at least be put on a path towards that end very soon led by a politically informed and engaged populous the nation will have no credit standings and the loan sharks will be doing more than cracking their knuckles.

O’s Rock Star Production Is Fading Under The Serious Lights of This Campaign

The most recent Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows Mitt Romney at 49% of voters nationwide and President Obama is at 47%.  My question is what are these 47% liking in O that he has earned or deserves another 4-year term to sit in the chair of the President of the United States that the rest of us are oblivious to?  Sir Winston Churchill said once that, “The best argument against Democracy is a 5 minute conversation with an average voter.”  He may have well been speaking of today’s political climate.

It is my sincerest belief that the election of Mr. Obama was not an election of a president or a leader by the citizens of United States, but a very attractive and articulate celebrity, a rock star; who also happened to have been also Black.  I can’t recall a time when I have seen the President’s face on so many entertainment magazines, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and entertainment shows, such as the Daily Show and the View. All this while the nation, and the world, is in crisis.

Barack Obama, got elected four years ago to be the president of the United States, after not even completing his first term in the Senate and without many voters knowing hardly anything about him personally, philosophically, or politically. They knew he was a democrat; he looked good on camera, intelligent, and spoke well – especially with a teleprompter.  The voters of the United States wanted to give “him a chance”- the first true African-American, as though he was applying for managerial position at a Denny’s Restaurant.  But since getting into office he seems to be unable or unwilling, to tell the truth or be straight with the American people.  He came into office with a cloudy past that includes serious communist  and  radical liberal affiliations.  He promised that if the “Stimulus Bill” was passed unemployment would not raise pass 8% and would create over 3 million jobs.  Since the bill’s passage unemployment has hit a 25 year record high, negative job creation every year, and if the underemployed and those wanting full time work but having to settle for p/t work were counted, the rate today would be an astonishing 14.5%.  He rammed through Obamacare without any bi-partisan input promising that it would improve and lower the cost of healthcare without raising taxes on anyone earning below $250k yearly income.  But according to the Americans for Tax Reform, Obamacare will clobber every U.S taxpayer and business owner with taxes and regulations that this nation has never imagined. According to the Heritage Foundation Obamacare will end up costing millions of jobs and cripple the nation’s employment environment. Also, according to U.S Daily Review the law will not improve healthcare at all, but drastically reduce quality and access.

Mr. Obama is up to his crown in concealing and lying blatantly to the American people about Fast and Furious, that involved covertly flooding gangs in Mexico with American guns that have killed untold numbers of Mexicans and at least one U.S Border Agent.  He has also played a significant role in the sacking of the strongest and largest American friendly Arab state, Egypt, and an Arab nation that was no direct threat to America, Libya.  Both interestingly kept a lid on the extremely radical Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood.  But more recently with another “spontaneous uprising” in two Muslim Brotherhood-led countries of Libya and Egypt due to obscure YouTube Video defaming the Prophet Muhammad that caused the slaying of the U.S Ambassador to Libya and three Marines on September 11th.  But rather than admit that the attack in Libya and on the Ambassador was a planned military attack by Al-queda he has set to conceal the truth of what actually happened, how it happened, why it happened, and blame America for our freedom of speech that allowed this obscure video to be made.

So who are these 47% of the U.S populace who still favor a man with such a track record who now wants to have another 1,460 days to “fundamentally change” America even more?  Governor Romney may have had it right when he stated in September that, “there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That, that’s an entitlement.” And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.” Obama seemingly panders to the lowest intellectually politically initiated in the nation and dreams of a nation of dependency, both domestically and internationally.  And it is only with the blessings of the Establishment Media, with his expansive rock star production, coupled with this nation’s extreme culture of celebrity worship does his blatant verbal manipulation and deception goes mostly unabated.

But in a Democracy it is only as sturdy as the political aptitude of the least of our fellow citizen.  Unfortunately these seem to be Mr. Obama’s targeted group for supporter. Thomas Jefferson may have stated the answer to what ills the nation today when he said, “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” It does appear that many of the rest of the nation are truly beginning to listen with our ears and see with our eyes.  We are beginning to hear that he says nothing, that only his lips are moving as someone else tugs at the strings, and that he is standing naked before us. We are becoming initiated to become more responsible for ourselves and wanting a better nation for our posterity.  May the hands of Providence gently lie upon us all.

Condi’s Convention speech echoes warnings from the past of America’s self-destruction

At the 2012 Republican Convention former U.S Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in her speech, “There is no country, no not even a rising China, that can do more harm to us than we can do to ourselves if we fail to accomplish the tasks before us here at home.”  That got me to thinking of some other prophetic statements regarding America’s self-destruction spoken by others in the past such as, “If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security.”,  Ezra Taft Benson;  “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”, Thomas Jefferson;  “If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” and “Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself.” President Ronald Reagan;  “If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.” Benjamin Disraeli;  and “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” , stated by Mr. Alexis de Tocqueville.

What all of these prophetic statements speak of is America’s greatness as well as its curse.  Our nation was established with the greatest of intentions, that is to have codified in our foundation that man is to be governed not by man, but the Creator’s endowed rights to his life, his liberties, and his pursuit of happiness to be limited only by his equal respect to the same of that of the other citizen.  Our nation has an abundance of natural resources, natural gas, oil, coal, and precious minerals.  With our great nation’s unique  freedom to achieve to our wildest dreams and aspirations, we too have freedom to give in to our lowest desires and weaknesses.  We can be the greatest of people who continually look to achieve greatness and not settle for mediocrity, to become the best educated on what responsibilities are borne by our cherished freedoms, to live within our means, and take ownership of our decisions – successes as well as our failures – or we can be a people who celebrate the lowest of ourselves and cherish a life of triviality, be all too willing to exchange our birthrite of individual liberties and freedoms for the promise and illusion of government-provided security and social utopia – whether it is as a nation or globally – to look for others to be the creditors and bearers of our ill-temperance and irresponsibility.   If you take inventory of this nation’s situation today, you would realize that many of the prophetic warnings went unheeded to our detriment.  But it doesn’t have to be our nation’s future.  At the end of the day no one or no nation can defeat us, but ourselves.

Another of my favorite quotes that come to mind was said by Thomas Jefferson, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”  And nor should it.