Four Rough Ones Ahead

The swearing has been sworn, the parade has passed, the last dance has been danced. Inauguration day is over. It may be wrong to say, but I couldn't be happier. For over four years I have not been able to look at news on the TV without receiving a presidential lecture. Every day. Every single day. Now we have four more years of that to look forward to. I have watched Presidents through war and crisis since Truman. No TV for FDR but I remember him too. No President has ever had near the amount of face time with the American public that Obama has had.

But through all this I get the feeling that he really doesn't like us very much. I get the impression that he thinks himself better than us. I know he thinks himself smarter. Most liberals do anyway. It's their nature. But to have the chutzpah to go to foreign capitals and lecture foreign leaders as to how they should run their countries is a sign of over weaning selfness. 

Why with this huge dose of intellectual self-assuredness does he continue to focus on his ideological agenda rather than the huge problems that face our country on a day to day basis. I know that one problem is that he thinks of economics and success in general as a zero sum game. If you are hugely successful, you must be taking away from someone else. Not so. Never will be so. If I am successful, I spend more. Those that benefit from my spending get more successful and they spend more. Factories have to gear up and produce to our needs. That makes those businesses and those that work there more successful. As Reagan said "a rising tide floats all boats". I will never understand why our President has a problem with this.

Of course the other problem is spending. Obama sees it as a taxation problem. It is not. It is a spending problem. Obama as an avowed Keynesian feels that it is the government that should be spending. He is doing this at an insane rate. Increased rates of taxation and borrowing to support this spending can do nothing but drive the country into European style bankruptcy. "There are none so blind as they that will not see."

In his inauguration address the President stated the his targets for the next four years would be gun control, climate change, and immigration. Nothing on jobs. Nothing on spending. To do this, he will have to vilify the Republicans in the House. They are the only barrier to his excess and they are not the enemy, they are the loyal opposition. With his fellow Democrats and a liberal press corps he will have plenty of help. His program is a program that is just so wrong for the country but we will reap what we have sown.