Category Archives: Barrack Obama

Joe Biden, Territorial Tax, and Social Security

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I often refer to Vice President Joseph Robinette “Joe” Biden, Jr. as the accidental comedian because of the strange things he says. He says them with such force and vigor that people often are swayed by the emotion conveyed and perhaps don’t notice the absurdity of what was said. During his convention speech he said (with great vigor) that “Governor Romney believes in this global economy it doesn’t matter where American companies invest and put their money or where they create jobs. He then went on to say that Romney was proposing “…a territorial tax, which the experts have looked at, and they acknowledge that it will create 800,000 new jobs—all of them overseas, all of them.” Joe, or his speech writers, apparently did not know that the business leaders on President Obama’s Export Council and his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness have said that the tax system Joe accused as originating with Mr. Romney would be a good idea for the U.S economy.

Those comments by Joe during his speech created a flurry of astonished articles, but it isn’t even my favorite recent “Joeism.” During the Vice Presidential debate he accused Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney of wanting to privatize Social Security and inquired where people’s retirement programs be if that idea had been accepted when George W. Bush proposed it. I did a posting in February in which I analyzed what would have happened to a worker who voluntarily put the suggested one third of their Social Security “contributions” into a S & P 500 index (which was called “privatization by Joe and others) on a dollar averaging basis. It would have been really worrisome to watch the value of the account plummet with the stock market in 2008, but the money being invested during that time would have bought more shares.

The calculations I made were based on a person earning $50,000 a year with $3100 being withheld for Social Security and matched by the employer. One third of the monthly total would have resulted in about $170 dollars a month going into the private account. There would have been about $8300 invested since the beginning of 2005, and the value would have dropped to  $5700 at the worst of the market collapse. However, the investors that took advantage of the lower market value and continued to invest would be pleased with the results. They would have invested about $15,700 by now, and, with the improved stock market, the account would be worth about $17,600.

No one knows what the stock market is going to do in the future, but history has shown it to be a good place to create value for investments. The individual with the private account would have the advantage of being able to use the money however they wished upon retirement instead of having the government calculate how much money they would receive each month. They also could designate the person or persons of their own choice to be beneficiaries who would receive the full remaining value. Social Security payments stop immediately after the death of the person.

All of that may or may not be of interest, but let’s get back to Joe. When he asked where we would be if Social Security had been “privatized,” he apparently didn’t know that the individuals who had voluntarily began the investment process would have more money. What is even more astonishing is that he apparently hasn’t noticed that the stock market has improved since Mr. Obama and he took office. Wouldn’t that be something to brag about?

Another Reset in Russia and U.S. Relations

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Diplomats had a good time three years ago when Hillary Clinton gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a “mock reset button” to symbolize U.S. hopes to improve relations with Moscow. The big news at that time was that the “peregruzka” label on the button that was intended to mean “reset” instead translated to “overcharged” or “overloaded.” The presentation of the button was said to have been in response to one of Vice President Biden’s gaffes. This one had something to do with the new administration wanting to reset ties with Russia after years of friction.

The recent termination of a U.S. aid organization’s activities by the Kremlin represents an ominous reset in relations. The September 20, 2012 English version of Pravda by Oleg Artyukov reported that the “…decision to terminate the activity of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, in Russia has expectedly caused a great deal of noise. Human rights advocates are in shock…” The Russian Foreign Minister said the decision to shut down the agency was made “…due to attempts of the agency to influence political processes, civil society institutions, and elections…”

The agency had distributed $2.7 billion in Russia since 1992.  A State Department spokeswoman said, “…not very confidently…” that a third of the money went to “…development of democracy.”  A New York Times article by David M. Heszenhorn published in the September 23, 2012 Denver Post said the money funded “…programs touching nearly every facet of society in the former communist state — fighting the spread of tuberculosis and HIV, developing judicial systems and training lawyers and judges, promoting child welfare, job readiness, youth engagement, human rights and democracy, even helping modernize the electric grid.”

It is apparent there is justification for the Russian accusation that the agency was being used to meddle in Russia’s internal affairs in addition to all the positive activities. An association that monitors elections in Russia called “The Voice” put out a statement that “The hastiness and sudden nature of this decision is apparently related to the elections on October 14.” There are continuing protests about that election, and Vladimir Putin has sent another warning to the protestors.

The U.S. media coverage of the story is perhaps as interesting as the story itself. The story was published on page 23A of the Sunday Denver Post, and I found little else about it except on the English Pravda site.  Senator John McCain described the closure of the USAID mission as “an insult to the United States and a finger in the eye of the Obama Administration.”  Is it possible the U.S. media doesn’t want to publish news of a major setback to Mr. Obama’s foreign policies when there is an election coming up?

Romney Remarks About Voter Dependency

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Mitt Romney made the astonishing mistake of speaking freely at a private fund raising event. How could someone who has campaigned for so long have forgotten that everything is says in public will be recorded and analyzed for possible anti-Romney ads? Also, how could he have gotten his facts wrong?

I won’t bother to look for a link to add for the comments, because they are everywhere. I haven’t seen the Obama ads quoting their favorite parts, but I’m certain that’s because I haven’t watched much television in the past couple of days. He said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe 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, you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for the president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of lower taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so mu job is to not worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

People who don’t pay taxes either are those who don’t make much money, have more deductions than income, or have good advisors who can see that income is sheltered from taxes (such as income from tax-free municipal bonds.) Many of those who don’t pay taxes are elderly and young people who can’t find jobs other than perhaps a low-paying part time job. I expect that some portion of those people will be more attracted to Romney than to Obama. I do see that Mr. Obama has a solid 47 percent of the vote, but a large part of that number are people who are loyal liberals/progressives/Democrats. Many of them are very well paid and pay significant amounts of taxes. I’ve seen data that well over fifty percent of lawyers voted for Mr. Obama.

I believe Mr. Romney was onto something. I do think it is true that Mr. Obama believes a primary role of government is to redistribute wealth to “make things fair.” I also believe that there are many voters who will vote for him for that very reason, and that his only challenge is to make certain that those who think he will look out for their “entitlements” will go to the polls.

What Mr. Romney should have done was to read or paraphrase a quote from Thomas Jefferson. “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Or he could have paraphrased the quote from Adrian Rogers, “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it.  You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it.  Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” He also could have mentioned that the top ten percent of earners pay 71 percent of income taxes. Mr. Obama says that isn’t enough to be “fair.”

Climate Change Continues

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I’ve written in previous blogs that I think Al Gore and the others who pound the drum of manmade global warming should change the title of their mantra to “climate change.” They would finally be right this if they predict climate change, because the climate has always changed and it always will. The warnings in the 1970s were that man was going to create a global cooling climate disaster. The climate did change, but there was a warming trend instead of the predicted cooling. Some researchers responded by developing computer models that correlated warming temperatures to carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. They never mention the oceans warm when the sun is more active and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. Man has no control over the warming of oceans that causes higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A recent Denver Post editorial took both Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney to task for not proposing more aggressive actions to battle climate change. Much of the basis for the editorial is the low level of Arctic ice coverage. The Sea and Ice Data Center indeed does show that ice levels dropped below the average levels and the 2007 levels beginning around the first of August. I expect the Post was also influenced by the record number of over 90 degree days this summer. However, there are other indications that “catastrophic global warming” is not occurring. A web site that has numerous graphs of the average temperature of Gulf of Mexico waters shows 2011 had one of the largest drops in temperature in eighty years.

The book Climatism reviewed on that link of this web site is a good place to start if you want to read details of why man is not the cause of global warming and most if not all of the efforts to develop alternative energy sources are doomed to fail because of simple economics.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. were at a twenty year low last year because significant amounts of power are being generated with recently inexpensive natural gas. Power generated with natural gas creates half the carbon dioxide compared to coal. One report says that it is expected there will be 175 coal burning plants will be replaced by natural gas plants over the next five years.

Michael Mann of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University seemed to be grumbling about the improvements created by the shift from dirtier-burning coal to natural gas. He commented that “ultimately people follow their wallets on global warming.” Roger Pielke, Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado had a bit different take. He said, “There is a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources.”

Some environmentalists aren’t happy about the good news. They don’t like the “fracking” that has resulted in production of huge amounts of natural gas and caused the price of the fuel to drop by more than half. They believe the practice will pollute underground water sources and cause leakage of methane to the atmosphere despite the belief by many government officials that the practice is safe if done properly. My suspicion is that those who are grumbling are mostly worried that there will be even less emphasis on development of expensive solar and wind generated energy. “Installation of new renewable energy facilities has now all but dried up, unable to compete on a grid now flooded with a low-cost, high-energy fuel.” The massively advertised “shift to renewable energy” has added scant amounts of power generation. “Wind supplied less than 3 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2011…and solar power was far less.”

I won’t be in the grumbling camp. I find it refreshing that ingenuity and economics have resulted in improved air quality.

Selecting a Presidential Candidate

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There were three articles in the Sunday, September 02, 2012 Denver Post that were pertinent to the choice for voters. The first was titled “Evaluating Obama’s grade on economy by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post. People usually “vote their pocketbook,” so the state of the economy is crucial to both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. Mr. Samuelson leads his article with, “President Obama’s economic report card is at best mediocre. I’d give him a C-plus while acknowledging that presidents usually don’t much influence the economy…For the first six months I’d award him an A-minus; for the rest a C-minus or D.” The latter grade is based on the insistence of Mr. Obama at focusing on the health care law (for his legacy) despite the fact the complex law discouraged job creators from expanding their businesses. The battle over the health care law also created gridlock between the two political parties that dominates politics in Washington, D.C.  Mr. Samuelson writes that there is no way of knowing whether Mr. Obama’s missteps have weakened the economy. “My guess is that Obama’s errors have had a modest effect.”

The second article is by Dave Maney, and is titled “Third vision needed.” The article proposes that Republicans are good at clearing impediments to economic change while Democrats are good at identifying those needing help. The author writes that Democrats “…prescribe an attack on healthy parts of the body to somehow cleanse it and make the sick parts well again. It’s like stabbing yourself in the stomach because you’re having a heart attack—it brings zero relief but lots of additional pain” But then he turns to the Republicans and says “We just need to go back to the way things were in 1984, and we’d be in great shape.” That is characterized as being equivalent to telling an ailing patient in his 70s that they would feel better if they were still 40. I didn’t read an alternative between the two visions presented by the two parties except something to the effect that we need to do things differently in the different world.

My favorite article was titled “American optimism in eye of the beholder” by Ann Sanner and Calvin Woodward of The Associated Press. According to the article, young people continue to be optimistic while older people are pessimistic. There are examples of those in their 50s who have lost optimism for their retirement goals because of the layoffs and reduced value of investments. One fifty year old woman is quoted as saying that she firmly believes in the American Dream “…but in the sense of dreaming it, not grasping it. I’m not seeing anything to strive for; I guess….I’m settling.” “Nearly two thirds lack confident that life for today’s children will be better than it has been for today’s adults…”

There are several disturbing statistics about the pessimism of older voters and the continued optimism of younger people despite their college debts and the dismal employment situation. Mr. Obama has noticed younger people are happier with the current economic situation, and he has arranged many of his campaign appearances on college campuses. No one can accuse him of not being politically astute.

The Amateur

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the-amateurThe subtitle of this book by Edward Klein is “Barrack Obama in the White House.” The book begins with a detailed discussion of what is supposed to have been a very private discussion between Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton. Bill is pleading with Hillary to run against Mr. Obama in the 2012 primary. Chelsea agrees with Bill, but Hillary refuses and wants to wait until 2016. The quoted conversation ends with Bill declaring that Barrack Obama “…is an amateur.” I wondered about the truth of the conversation, which wouldn’t likely be carried out in front of anyone the Clinton’s could not trust completely.

It is later pointed out that Americans love amateurs who succeed, and Barrack the candidate certainly did thrill his supporters. Unfortunately Barrack the skilled campaigner has been revealed to have few of the talents needed to lead and communicate with the country. Presidential historian Fred I. Greenstein observed, “With all of Obama’s rhetorical brilliance and flash, he went into the phone booth as Superman and came out as Clark Kent.”

There is considerable information about Michelle Obama, Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, and the people who are the key advisors to Mr. Obama. I’m more interested in Mr. Obama, so I don’t intend to say much more about the others.

There are an astonishing 862 reviews on Amazon, and the average rating is four and a half out of five stars. The half results from the one hundred one star reviews. One of those said “It is difficult to know where this author received his information. He does not use any quotes to substantiate his allegations.” However, I will say in defense much of the information in the book is based on public record and agrees with information in news reports.

I found the book easy to read and mostly interesting. Much of the public record about Mr. Obama in his youth continues to be thin. He apparently was nearly invisible in college, displayed no intellectual curiosity, and wrote no scholarly articles as a young law professor. However, he had written his autobiography by the time he was thirty. He was elected to the Illinois Senate and hardly showed up at all. (He voted “present” on most issues.) He demonstrated no interest the legislative process, but he did enjoy giving speeches.

Mr. Obama married Michelle Robinson at the age of thirty, and the most significant adult influence on him during that time and for many years to follow was the controversial Jeremiah Wright whose sermons “…encouraged a victimization mentality among his black parishioners.” When Mr. Obama says “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody, he is channeling Jeremiah Wright.” The media followed the same approach with the reporting about Wright that they followed with just about any potentially negative story about Mr. Obama. They did not report it. (It has been said the power of the press is not in what they report. It is in what they decide not to report.) The media was swooning over Mr. Obama, and they made little effort to vet him as he campaigned for the Presidency.

There is much information about Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, which begins with the ideas that American exceptionalism is misguided and that American power has done more harm than good. He very much wants the Muslim world to gain respect for at least him if not the country, and he thinks that Israel needs to bend to the Palestinians. He forbids the use of the term “Islamic extremism.” He much prefers to be travelling and speaking to adoring foreign crowds to governing or dealing with Congress in any manner. He was said to have commented that he did not want to waste precious hours talking with “congressmen from Palookaville.” He is described as a thin-skinned, haughty, and exceedingly proud man.

Perhaps the scariest part of the book is the description of a secret meeting with several presidential historians where it appeared the historians were being asked about the most admirable traits of great presidents. One of the attendees observed that Mr. Obama “…seemed to be looking for a presidential identity not his own…endlessly trying on new presidential masks.” The meeting was judged by the author to reveal Mr. Obama “…didn’t have the faintest idea 1) who he was; 2) why he had been elected president; and 3) how to be commander in chief and chief executive of the United States of American.” “In short, he didn’t know what he didn’t know.”

But he did and does have devout fans. Oprah Winfery encouraged his apparent messianic complex by referring to him as “The One,” which is a reference to both Jesus Christ and Neo from The Matrix. Joe Biden, in typical Joe Biden fashion, told a gathering that Barrack Obama had been unable to attend “…because he’s getting busy for Easter. He thinks it’s about him.” It is said his personality most closely matches Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was being asked about appointments, and made it clear that he owed no one anything. He explained “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”

Mr. Obama has been so inept at so many aspects of being President that The Onion News Network broadcast a fake “…story that the real Barrack Obama had been kidnapped just hours after the election and replaced by an imposter.” The book asks whether the centrist, pragmatic, post-partisan leader vanished, or, “Did he ever exists? Was he a figment of his own imagination, or of our imagination—or both?”

Chapter 7 is titled “Bungler in Chief,” and lists many of Mr. Obama’s failures. He loves signing ceremonies, but has little interest in what is being signed. Perhaps his most embarrassing failure was his decision to go to Copenhagen to convince the Olympic committee to select Chicago as a site for future games. He had many friends in Chicago who would have had handsome profits if the city was chosen. He gave his speech, and Chicago came in fourth out of four. Of course that isn’t the only embarrassing failure, and the Solyndra fiasco immediately comes to mind.

There are interesting observations about the current presidential campaign. First, it is written that the Republican (who we now know to be Mitt Romney) will have to run against not only the Democratic campaign but the full force of the liberal media. They are already gearing up a campaign that Barrack has made mistakes, but he has learned so much he deserves a second term. Axelrod “…has ripped a page out of Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook …he demonizes his opponent and runs against a ‘Do-Nothing’ Republican Congress and its wealthy supporters.” The last pages of the book list all the things Mr. Obama does not want America to remember on Election Day.

George F. Will recently wrote about Barrack Obama, “…people who like the idea of him, but not the results of him.”