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IBD Responds to Obama’s ‘Third World’ Rip at GOP

Filed under: Business Moves,Economy,Environment,Health Care,Taxes & Government — TBlumer @ 10:17 am

In a Friday evening editorial (bolds are mine), in response to President Obama’s assertion that “Republicans will make US a ‘Third World’ country’” (AFP’s headline; bolds are mine):

Excuse us, isn’t that the way we’ve been heading under Obama? Consider for a moment these trends:

• Real earnings have fallen for five straight months, and are down 1% since the end of last year.

• Consumer price inflation is growing at a 6.1% annual rate over the last three months, while producer prices are rising an even-faster 13%. According to John Williams of the Shadow Government Statistics website, if we measure consumer prices the way we did before 1992, inflation is now running at 10% a year.

• The U.S. has added $6 trillion to its debt under Obama, a sure sign of being on the road to Third World status. Three years ago, the U.S. had $7.9 trillion in debt. Today, we have $14 trillion. Bankrupt, hyperinflated Zimbabwe couldn’t do any better.

• The U.S. dollar has fallen so much and foreign nations have so little confidence in our ability to run our fiscal affairs that the “BRIC” nations — the mostly fast-growing former Third World nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China — are talking about replacing the U.S. dollar in foreign trade with the Chinese yuan.

• Just 45.4% of Americans had jobs last year, the lowest since 1983, according to census data crunched by USA Today. Among men, just 66.8% had work last year, the lowest ever.

• Obama touts the “recovery” that supposedly began in June of 2009, but a look at the data show that last year’s real private sector GDP was in fact still down 1.1% from its peak in 2007 — so all of the “expansion” has been in government, not the private sector.

• While we’re at it, under Obama, spending has risen farther and faster than under any president in history.At current rates, government at all levels will take up more than half of all economic activity by 2050.

Can’t happen here, you say? In 1920, Argentina was one of the five richest countries on Earth. Then it followed policies similar to Obama’s — kowtowing to unions, government control of industry, price controls. It crashed, burned and never really recovered.

Third World nations also either lose respect or have longstanding disrespect for the rule of law. This administration would appear to care less about the rule of law, as exemplified by the following notorious items in a far less than complete list:

• Its voiding of certain secured creditors’ contractual rights during the Chrysler bankruptcy, accompanied bytheir serial intimidation.
• The President’s clearly anti-constitutional signing statement insisting on preserving his czars in direct defiance of Congress, which specifically de-funded them.
• The Sestak job offer(s).
• The Romanoff job offer(s).
• The dropped Black Panther Pennsylvania voter-intimidation prosecution.
• The reissuance of a virtually identical deep-water drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico almost immediately after a federal judge declared the original null and void.
• Continuing to implement Obamacare after a federal judge voided the Affordable Care Act in its entirely.
• As reported by Patrick Poole a few days ago, the alleged scuttling of terror finance prosecutions against CAIR co-founders and others for political reasons.

As IBD’s editorial intro states: “As psychologists say, it sounds like projection to us.” It IS projection to anyone looking at the administration’s record.