By Alan Caruba
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome
What was true for Rome is true for America. President Obama may know little about history and less about economics, but he is relentlessly destroying America and has been since he first took office in 2009.
In September, the Gallup polling organization, reported that “Americans’ trust in ‘the American people’ to make judgments about political issues facing the country has declined each year since 2009 and, at 61%, is down nearly 20 percentage points from its recent peak in 2005. Still, that exceeds the 46% of Americans who trust the ‘men and women…who either hold or are running for public office,’ which is one point above the historical low from 2011.”
“The results are based on Gallup’s annual Governance survey, conducted Sept 5-8. The same poll found that American’s trust in the federal government to handle domestic and international problems, their trust in the news media, and their trust in the three branches of the federal government, and in state and local governments are all at or near historical lows.”
In the end, the primary currency of government is the trust people put in its ability to respond to the problems they encounter in their daily lives.
As of October, more than ninety million Americans were out of work. The data the federal government publishes is not trustworthy. It is manipulated for political gain. By October, even the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to admit that 90.6 million Americans over the age of 16 were not in the labor force--an all-time high.
Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, noted that “After four and a half years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”
An October CNS News article reported that “Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau. They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.” The figures worked out to about 1.7 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every one person working full-time year round.
In September, CNS News reported that “A record 23,116,928 American households were enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)---AKA food stamps---during the month of June, according to data released this month by the Department of Agriculture. That outnumbers the 20,618,000 households that the Census Bureau estimated were in the entire Northeastern United States as of the second quarter of 2013.”
Also in September, CNS News reported that “During the four years that marked President Barack Obama’s first term in office, the real median income of American households dropped by $2,627 and the number of people in poverty increased by approximately 6,667,000, according to data released by the Census Bureau. The record total of approximately 46,496,000 people in the United States who are now in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, is more than twice the population of Syria,” a nation that has lost 100,000 people in its civil war.
“In 2008,” the CNS News report noted, “the year Obama was elected, people in poverty represented 13.2 percent of the national population. In 2012, they represented 15.0 percent of the population.” And, in 2012, Americans either went to the polls or stayed home sufficiently to reelect Obama. Obama supporters in effect voted to continue the nation’s poverty rates.
In late January, the Federal Reserve released data that revealed that its holdings of U.S. government debt had increased to an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 as of the close of day. The Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt had increased by 257 percent since President Obama was first inaugurated in 2009. It is the single largest hold of U.S. government debt. China is the largest foreign holder of this debt.
“The misery is not going to end soon,” wrote Mort Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News and World Report, in a July Wall Street Journal commentary, noting that the economy represents “the weakest gross domestic product (GDP) growth since World War II. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP in four consecutive years.”
Over the past five years, the U.S. spent $3.7 trillion on welfare. That includes approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. That figure is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time.
You don’t have to be an economist to see that Obama embarked on a deliberate program to impoverish as many Americans as possible since taking office in 2009. If this is not a cause for impeachment than nothing is, but he will not be impeached. Instead, he will continue to attack all aspects of the economy. Obamacare is the ultimate example of this.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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