Soaring
Active Member
- May 30, 2009
- 502
- 91
- 28
-I don't know about you guys, but I am staying "hunkered down." I don't spend a dime unless I have to. I am waiting for all this stimulus, bailouts, cap and trade and obamacare BS blows over before I once again start buying high dollar items and investing again. Mark Steyn is a smart egg.
Betsy's Page
Sunday, August 23, 2009
One sure effect of Obamanomics
Mark Steyn hits on something important in his weekly column as he looks for an explanation of why the stimulus package hasn't stimulated us out of the recession.
Thats why the stimulus flopped. It didnt just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats political priorities overrode everything else. If youre a business owner, why take on extra employees when capntrade is promising increased regulatory costs and health reform wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obamas leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When hes spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dusts settled and you get a better sense of just how broke hes going to make you. For this level of community organization, there arent enough of the rich to pay for it. That leaves you.
For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. Its no surprise that the president cant make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because thats not what its about and for all his cool, he cant quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans are losing faith in Barack Obama.
Losing faith? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: Give me a sign, O Lord!
But he has. Theyre all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: This Massive Expansion of Wasteful Statism Brought to You by Obama Marketing, Inc.
Imagine trying to make future business plans when you don't know what health care expenses, environmental and energy regulations, or tax burdens are going to look like next year. The broad and ambitious reach of Obamanomics has introduced a deep level of uncertainty in our business climate. Corporations have to try to make decisions built not only on the normal doubts as to what the economy will look like down the road, but also with the added uncertainty of what increased government regulation is going to do to their bottom line? The broad reach of Obama's administration into everything in our economy is altering the planning that businessmen have to do to make decisions about their future.
The Politico wrote yesterday about the political dangers that President Obama risked in going for his "big bang" theory of governance by trying to do so much all in the first months of his presidency.
By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters especially independents worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents confidence in Obamas ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.
Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.
Go-big-or-go-home isn't the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.
So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.
He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks hes beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.
Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health care reform starting next year a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.
There were political risks in the decisions that the Obama administration made in going all out to try to accomplish everything in the first year. But there were also less visible economic risks in introducing so much uncertainty into the economy about what the future shape of our regulatory and tax environment will be once Obama is done working his magic.
If you ran a pharmaceutical company today, would you make the decision to invest in a possibly promising, but expensive line of research into a new treatment or would you wait to learn what our health care environment is going to look like after Obamacare has been fully played out? Now multiply such decisions by the hundreds of thousands and you can understand why Steyn is right when he talks of people preferring to just hunker down and wait to see what will develop.
______________________________________________________________________
We live in a society -
"of the Government, by the Government, for the Government".
We are now slaves to A GREEDY government.
Betsy's Page
Sunday, August 23, 2009
One sure effect of Obamanomics
Mark Steyn hits on something important in his weekly column as he looks for an explanation of why the stimulus package hasn't stimulated us out of the recession.
Thats why the stimulus flopped. It didnt just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats political priorities overrode everything else. If youre a business owner, why take on extra employees when capntrade is promising increased regulatory costs and health reform wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obamas leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When hes spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dusts settled and you get a better sense of just how broke hes going to make you. For this level of community organization, there arent enough of the rich to pay for it. That leaves you.
For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. Its no surprise that the president cant make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because thats not what its about and for all his cool, he cant quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans are losing faith in Barack Obama.
Losing faith? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: Give me a sign, O Lord!
But he has. Theyre all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: This Massive Expansion of Wasteful Statism Brought to You by Obama Marketing, Inc.
Imagine trying to make future business plans when you don't know what health care expenses, environmental and energy regulations, or tax burdens are going to look like next year. The broad and ambitious reach of Obamanomics has introduced a deep level of uncertainty in our business climate. Corporations have to try to make decisions built not only on the normal doubts as to what the economy will look like down the road, but also with the added uncertainty of what increased government regulation is going to do to their bottom line? The broad reach of Obama's administration into everything in our economy is altering the planning that businessmen have to do to make decisions about their future.
The Politico wrote yesterday about the political dangers that President Obama risked in going for his "big bang" theory of governance by trying to do so much all in the first months of his presidency.
By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters especially independents worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents confidence in Obamas ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.
Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.
Go-big-or-go-home isn't the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.
So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.
He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks hes beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.
Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health care reform starting next year a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.
There were political risks in the decisions that the Obama administration made in going all out to try to accomplish everything in the first year. But there were also less visible economic risks in introducing so much uncertainty into the economy about what the future shape of our regulatory and tax environment will be once Obama is done working his magic.
If you ran a pharmaceutical company today, would you make the decision to invest in a possibly promising, but expensive line of research into a new treatment or would you wait to learn what our health care environment is going to look like after Obamacare has been fully played out? Now multiply such decisions by the hundreds of thousands and you can understand why Steyn is right when he talks of people preferring to just hunker down and wait to see what will develop.
______________________________________________________________________
We live in a society -
"of the Government, by the Government, for the Government".
We are now slaves to A GREEDY government.
