Obama Supporters

When will the remainder of people that still support Obama and give him passing marks wake up?

I think it safe to say that most everyone understands the negative impacts of nearly $4 a gallon gas has on the economy, prices, and on individuals, but Obama supporters apparently don’t take seriously the fact that prior to the election he said himself that “under my plan energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.” Do people think he was kidding or is it just the idea that “well this isn’t really his plan; the gas prices have gone up drastically because of demand and all the unrest in the Middle East?” If things can happen to help him implement his plan without putting all of his policies into place, certainly he will take advantage of that. He used the gulf oil leak as a reason to stop granting drilling permits and even revoked some on-land permits in Colorado. It was his own chief of staff that said “never let a crisis go to waste.” Now the CEO of GM has come out saying he wants to see an increase in gas tax… Why? To push people towards more economical cars (I guess since no one wants to buy the Chevy Volt he wants the government to put more price pressure on us to “encourage” us to make the purchase that he would like us to make.). We could go on here, but the purpose of this writing is not to discuss only oil prices…

Obama has held up Spain as the standard by which we should model our new “green” economy. I could understand from the “environmentalist” standpoint if he had made such a claim a decade or more ago before the realities of what Spain has done are there for everyone to see. For every green job that Spain created two jobs were lost. The unemployment rate in Spain for 2010 was ~20%. Obama supporters should have been freaking out that their guy would hold up a miserably failing country as some kind of standard.

The selling points that Obama gave his healthcare plan was to cut and control costs, and to get more people covered, but the government's own budget office has reported again and again that the healthcare plan will cause significantly increased government spending, and it will be ineffective at controlling any costs. It also encourages employers to drop people that are already covered. In the end there is no way that this will work without significantly increased tax rates and rationing of care given. It is rationed everywhere in the world that healthcare has been nationalized, so what possible rational can supporters put forward that we will somehow be different? What it does do regardless of anything else is gives government control of a significant portion of everyone's life.

What about the impact of increased regulations? We could go on and on about increase regulations within healthcare; the burden is enough that over 1400 companies and unions have received waivers for parts of the law…, but let’s bring up a few others. The EPA is being used to implement their own version of cap and trade for carbon emissions even though this had failed to pass through the legislative process (an energy company just announced that it will close five coal plants in order to conform to these new regulations). These are the policies that Obama was referring to when he said that energy prices would skyrocket. The FCC has started issuing internet regulations even though both congress and the courts have said that this is outside the authority of the FCC (they did it anyway). The new financial industry regulations (these passed by the legislative process), which are supposedly to protect us from greedy unscrupulous Wall Street executives causing another financial meltdown (that is the topic of another blog), add lots of costs to doing business along with setting up a permanent “bail-out” fund for continued government meddling and intervention and ongoing costs to the taxpayer.

So what? How do all these things tie together? The thing to consider is what impact all this has on individuals. Everything we are talking about here makes living more expensive. What impact does that have on the poor and middle class? This makes it much harder for the lower and middle classes to travel, go on vacations, or do much more than stay in their own home town. The current White House administration has put forward their vision for communities of the future many times. This vision is about “livable communities” where people can go to work, go out to eat, go to a grocery store, and go to a movie without ever having to drive or own a car. Here is the big problem- this administration and others in power know that we would not choose to live this way, because we like the freedom to travel, go to the beach, and see the sites across this country, so how do you force “the masses” to do what “ruling class” thinks best? You gain control of large segments of the economy, make the cost of living very high, and increase the dependence on the government. At that point the government can control the lives and movements of “the masses” at the whim of whoever is in power.

Is this just crazy talk? You be the judge…