Obama: "Government investments have made this country great"

Just yesterday, when addressing a gathering at the Portland Museum of Art, President Obama characterized Republicans as having "one message and that is, we're going to make sure that we cut people's taxes even more – so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and we will slash government investments that have made this country great, not because it's going to balance the budget, but because it's driven by our ideological vision about how government should be. That's their agenda, pure and simple."

But if it’s part of the Republicans’ ideological agenda to reduce government investments as well as taxes, then if government “investments” were sufficiently reduced, cutting taxes would not increase the deficit. Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t want to cut government spending enough to balance the budget, because according to him government spending “is what has made this country great”! He wants to expand the state and make it bigger and more powerful than it already is. He bristles at the very idea that people should have lower taxes, that they should have less money extorted from them by the IRS. He wants higher taxes, more deficit spending and more government control of the economy. Unlike some politicians (and even some Republicans), he is quite candid about it.

For a revealing comparison of Obamanomics with Reaganomics, see the following article in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/05/05/reaganomics-vs-obamanomics-facts-and-figures/

Post 1

Monday, April 2, 2012 - 4:46am

By 'investments' he means 'forced displacements' and he left out the 'some of' and 'at the expense of many.'

Connected crony forced displacements have made some great at the expense of many.

He wants to point at the periods -- fortunately few and far between when Ike's MIC is not itself drumming up business-- when free people have banded together to insure their right to be free from each other. He wants to use those instances as justification for him and his to throw an elitist grand centralized smorgasbord of paternalistic megalomania, a dressed up, can never bring themselves to say it, totalitarianism, managed by inbred Ivy League apparatchiks.

No thank you, from every fibre of my being.

Post 2

Friday, April 6, 2012 - 11:03am

From Obama's 2013 Budget proposal:

To rebuild our economy and strengthen the middle
class, we must create an America where everyone gets
a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone
plays by the same set of rules. We need to win a race to
the top for good jobs that pay well and offer middle-class
security. That means investing in areas like education,
innovation, and infrastructure that are critical to giving
every American an opportunity at success and creating a
strong economy that is built to last.

Translated: we need more big government spending.

To pay for these investments and to free our economy
from the burden of historic deficits and mounting debt,
we also need to restore responsibility for what we spend
and accountability for how we spend it. For far too
long, many Government programs have been allowed
to continue or grow even when objectives are unclear
and rigorous assessments of effectiveness are lacking.
The result has been a profusion of programs that are
duplicative, ineffective, or outdated—at a significant
cost to taxpayers. To be competitive in the 21st Century,
the United States cannot afford to be weighed down
by crippling budget deficits, ineffective programs that
waste tax dollars, and Government spending that lacks
accountability.

Translated: even though we are clearly terrible at it.

Post 3

Friday, April 6, 2012 - 12:25pm

To be competitive in the 21st Century, the United States cannot afford to be weighed down by crippling budget deficits, ineffective programs that waste tax dollars, and Government spending that lacks accountability.

My translation:
- We need to spend more and not be limited by budget.
- We need programs that waste newly printed money (reducing savers'/investors'/capitalists' purchasing power) instead of taxing our cronies that we give the money to.
- We need stronger control of the media, filled with our fudged numbers of CPI, unemployment, etc, so that we can dominate the austrian economic critics.

Post 4

Saturday, April 7, 2012 - 5:28am