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| Image Credit: Ed Driscoll.com via PJMedia |
Obama's Income/Spending Inequality Through A Reality Lens
The White House starts State of the Union Address day with executive action: an announcement that will raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 for new federal contract workers. That tees up a 9 p.m. State of the Union Address speech that is expected to have a heavy emphasis on executive actions to strengthen the economy and help the middle class.
Expect President Obama spotlight ways to create opportunity by laying out proposals for an increase in jobs, manufacturing, retirement security, energy, skills development, and education - with a nod to promising to try to work with Congress to do more.
But the reality key to all of this 44th President's actions is to expand his inequality agenda by spending, and digitally printing even more money ($75 Billion per month in "quantitative easing") to perpetuate the real inequality of government power over the productive power of individual lives.
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| Less Democrat | Less Republican | More Constitution. Image Credit: tenthamendmentcenter.com |
This excerpted and edited from PJ Media -
The Economic State of the Union Is Weak
by Tom Blumer - PJ Media
When President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, he will surely contend — as he did in 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010 — that “our union” is “stronger,” “getting stronger,” or at least “strong.”
It is no such thing.
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The five highest annual deficits the nation has ever incurred have been on Obama’s watch. ----
The national debt, at $17.27 trillion as of January 22, has increased by a jaw-dropping $6.6 trillion since he was first inaugurated. That this year’s deficit will be less than half of the official $1.4 trillion recorded in fiscal 2009 means, in his mind, that we can ramp up spending again. Outlays for the federal government’s operations plus interest are on track to remain above $3.5 trillion this year. That’s a ridiculous 30 percent above fiscal 2007, and virtually unchanged from fiscal 2009, when the so-called stimulus package was sold as a largely temporary spending ramp-up.
In his 2012 speech, Obama admitted that “the recovery is still fragile.” Two years later, in most of the U.S., it still hasn’t happened.
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In its recently released 2013 County Tracker based on late 2013 data, the National Association of Counties (NACo) echoed Obama’s early 2012 statement. Noting that the “recovery is still fragile in some parts of the country,”the NACo report described a still dismal situation:
About half of U.S. county economies had no recession or recovered their economic output (GDP) lost during the recession by 2013, most of them in the South. About 800 county economies, mostly in the South and Midwest, had no drops in employment over the last decade or were above their pre-recession levels in 2013.----
Given that the U.S. has 3,069 counties (Connecticut and Rhode Island, which are two of the country’s worst economic basket cases, don’t have county governments), that paragraph’s second statement is much more troubling. Only about 26 percent of them (800 divided by 3,069) have returned to or exceeded their previous employment levels. In other words, almost three-fourths haven’t.
The above National Association of Counties map shows us that 15 states have seen fewer than 20 percent of their counties achieve employment recovery, and that four of those have failed to get to even 10 percent.
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So what will Obama suggest to get the country back on track? Nothing which has a realistic chance of accomplishing anything.
More spending and stimulus, which might as well be the only page in the left’s and the Fed’s (but I’m probably repeating myself) macroeconomic play books, haven’t been the answers for the past five years. Why does any sane person believe they will somehow get us over the hump now?
An Obama-supported raise in the minimum wage to $10.10 will only throw more people, perhaps as many as 1 million, into unemployment lines while preventing new entries into the workforce – all at a time when labor force participation is at a 35-year low.
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No one has to recite any of the statistics noted above to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its friends in Washington. They know, and they obviously don’t care. If they did, they wouldn’t be pushing mightily to make 2014 their make-or-break year to pass economically ruinous illegal-immigrant amnesty. But to their eternal shame, they are.
Throw the ongoing and deepening confusion and chaos of Obamacare and the administration’s apparent nonchalant attitude as it crumbles into the mix, and the one thing you don’t have is a recipe for the economy to have anything resembling a strong year.
It’s impossible to know, but it may be that the stock market has finally caught on to what should have been obvious all along, as it shed about 3 percent of its value in last week’s final two days. One thing we do know is what CNBC’s Rick Santelli stated Friday afternoon: government and central bank strategies based on endless stimulus and artificial money creation “can’t go on forever.”
[Reference Here]
The main purpose of what was written in the founding documents of the United States was to protect the interests of both the smallest and the largest special interest groups that live here in this country - the individual. The United States Constitution, the Bill-Of-Rights, and the Rule-Of-Law combined with a power structure that broke down power in three separate and distinct branches so as to insure that the strongest level of power could be retained by the individual.
Unchecked and assumed powers to spend the monies collected from individuals, manufacture additional monies without a value basis, and expand the scope and power of government through regulations created by bureaucracies backed through the powers granted to the Internal Revenue Service (taxes) have tipped the balance of power in favor of the government.
Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 (a 28.2% increase in an anemic 2% growth economy) for new federal contract workers does very little except have this government spend even more money without the proper authority from the body that is Constitutionally responsible for spending, the House of Representatives.
Only 62% of able-bodied individuals are participating in the labor force (over 13% real unemployment when the available labor force is considered) due to the lack of jobs being created through the inequality of government growth over individual freedom to create and produce goods and services.
The issue around the inequality of income is the ability to retain what little income that is earned when we are governed by an entity that has run up nearly $7 Trillion of additional United States debt (Total debt = $17 Trillion - an overall 40% increase) in just five short years of this country's 237 years of operation.
The middle class in the United States remains under assault with the push by both political parties for "comprehensive immigration reform" which has its political strength from large businesses (who give big political donations) for even cheaper labor and an increase in the voter base through amnesty paths to citizenship.
This political activity, executive power minimum wage increases and the push for increased immigration, does not make sense in the face of the lowest labor participation rate since the late 1970's combined with the largest unemployment rate in a half a century.
Post State of the Union address UPDATE:
Utah Senator Mike Lee's Best Point In His Response To President Obama's SOTU Address:
Senator Lee offered a populist Republican explanation of economic inequality ...
“This inequality crisis presents itself in three principal forms: immobility among the poor, who are being trapped in poverty by big-government programs; insecurity in the middle class, where families are struggling just to get by and can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic insiders twist the immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone else.
… [Inequality is - through example] guaranteeing insurance companies taxpayer bailouts if Obamacare cuts into their profits.
Inequality is blocking thousands of middle-class jobs in the energy industry as a favor to partisan donors and radical environmental activists.
… But where does this new inequality come from? From GOVERNMENT — every time it takes rights and opportunities away from the American people and gives them instead to politicians, bureaucrats and special interests.”
[Reference Here]
... notes from The EDJE
