Yeshiva University ... enough said
On Dec 18, 10:39 am, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The truth, in less than 2400 words. Ferrara is right on the mark here:
>
> *Our Marxist Wizard of Oz*
> Peter Ferrara
> December 16, 2011
>
> http://townhall.com/columnists/peterferrara/2011/12/17/our_marxist_wi...
>
> His mother was an unabashed hippie from 1960s central casting. His father
> was an openly avowed Communist from Kenya. While his father wasn't around
> much, his devoutly progressive grandparents arranged for him to be mentored
> during his adolescent years by a dues paying member of the U.S. Communist
> Party, Frank Marshall Davis.
>
> When he went to college, he was attracted to the Marxist professors and
> student activists, according to his own published memoirs. When he
> graduated, he moved to Chicago and became an instructor for the left-wing
> extremist organization ACORN in the social manipulation methods of radical
> Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky. He attended for close to two decades the
> Trinity United Church of Christ, which practiced neo-Marxist Black
> Liberation Theology. That church was headed during those years by the
> openly socialist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who declared that the 9/11 terrorist
> attack on America was "America's chickens coming home to roost." He also
> famously preached from his pulpit, "Not God bless America, God damn
> America...."
>
> He launched his political career in the living room of the home of Bill
> Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders and former leaders of the openly
> Communist domestic terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. That
> organization conducted several bombings in America and engaged in other
> violence that resulted in several injuries and even deaths.
>
> All of this is documented in the public record. This is the man the
> Democrat party took off the streets of Chicago, then pursuing a career as a
> Marxist street agitator, and launched into the White House, favoring him
> over Hillary Clinton because she was too moderate for the party. They did
> that because he best reflects the heart and soul of today's radical-left,
> Che Guevara Democratic Party. It is in this context that we should
> understand and analyze Obama's Hugo Chavez speech given last week at
> Osawatomie High School in Kansas.
>
> *Obama's Hugo Chavez Coming Out*
>
> In that speech, he drew a picture of America as a struggling third world
> nation, saying at stake today "is whether this will be a country where
> working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings,
> own a home, and secure a retirement." In fact, he said, "there are millions
> of working families in this country who are now forced to take their
> children to food banks for a decent meal."
>
> This sounds more like Indonesia, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua. But it is not
> America "long before the recession hit."
>
> He explained the roots of the problem as:
>
> Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed
> businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop
> and hire workers anywhere in the world.... Steel mills that needed 1,000
> employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were
> too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle.... If
> you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many
> in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.
>
> This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in
> a modern economy. Such advancing technology increases worker productivity,
> and, therefore, wages and standard of living. Technological progress over
> the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the
> standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.
>
> He then tries to pin the blame for his failures on others, saying, "Now, in
> the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a
> kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst
> economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same
> practices that got us into this mess."
>
> The policies that got us into this mess included primarily the so-called
> "affordable housing policies" Obama himself and other Democrats long
> advocated, with the government forcing the banks by overregulation to drop
> their traditional lending standards to provide loans and mortgages to low
> and moderate income applicants who could not qualify under those
> traditional standards. (See the full documentation and discussion in Paul
> Sperry's *The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About
> What Really Caused the Financial Crisis* and Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua
> Rosner's *Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and
> Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon*.
>
> The other major factor was the Fed's loose monetary policy starting under
> Bush in the 2000s, which funded the housing bubble. Both policies were
> departures from the fundamental planks of Reaganomics. As I discuss in
> detail in my own book, *America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb*, the four planks
> of Reaganomics had been effectively abandoned by 2008, and that was the
> cause of the financial crisis, which ended the 25-year economic boom from
> 1982 to 2007 that Reaganomics had created.
>
> Obama tries to continue his historical revisionism, saying, "Remember that
> in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive
> tax cuts in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in
> half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for
> the investments that built this country."
>
> Here is what really happened. Those Bush tax cuts quickly ended the 2001
> recession, despite the contractionary economic impacts of 9/11, and the
> economy continued to grow for another 73 months. After the rate cuts were
> all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs and
> the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%. Real economic growth over
> the next 3 years doubled from the average for the prior 3 years, to 3.5%.
>
> In response to the rate cuts, business investment spending, which had
> declined for 9 straight quarters, reversed and increased 6.7% per quarter.
> That is where the jobs came from. Manufacturing output soared to its
> highest level in 20 years. The stock market revived, creating almost $7
> trillion in new shareholder wealth. From 2003 to 2007, the S&P 500 almost
> doubled. Capital gains tax revenues had doubled by 2005, despite Bush's 25%
> cut in the capital gains rate.
>
> The deficit in the last budget adopted by Republican Congressional
> majorities was $161 billion for fiscal 2007. Today that deficit is nearly
> 10 times as much. Total federal revenues under Bush soared by nearly 30%,
> from $1.991 trillion in 2001 to $2.568 trillion in 2007. The day the
> Democrat Congressional majorities took office, January 3, 2007, the
> unemployment rate was 4.6%. George Bush's economic policies, "the failed
> policies of the past" in Obama's rhetoric, had set a record of 52 straight
> months of job creation.
>
> What has continued to fail us now is that Obama's own policies, the exact
> opposite of Reaganomics in every detail, have failed to produce any timely
> real recovery from the last recession. Before this last recession, since
> the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10
> months, with the longest previously at 16 months. But here we are today 48
> months after the last recession started and there is still no real
> recovery. Instead, we have record poverty, and record extended unemployment.
>
> They can't say that is because the recession was so bad, because the
> historical record in America is that the deeper the recession the stronger
> the recovery. Based on the historical record, we should be ending the
> second year of a booming economy right now. The failure to achieve that is
> the responsibility of Barack Obama.
>
> Obama himself was counting on precisely this history making him look like a
> hero. That is why he so confidently told the Today Show on Feb. 2, 2009, "a
> year from now I think people are gonna see that we're starting to make some
> progress...if I don't have this done in three years, then this is going to
> be a one-term proposition."
>
> Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America
> as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity. But
> today Obama tells America "It doesn't work. It's never worked. It didn't
> work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not
> what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn't
> work when we tried it during the last decade."
>
> But it's President Obama, who fundamentally doesn't understand his own
> country, that doesn't work.
>
> *Obama's Tax and Spending Fantasies*
>
> In his Kansas speech, Obama offered as his solution increased government
> spending as the foundation for rising prosperity. He says:
>
> Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with
> the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and
> communicate with the rest of the world. That's why the over one million
> construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed
> shouldn't be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding
> our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband;
> modernizing our schools -- all the things other countries are doing to
> attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.
>
> Instead of the American capitalist model maximized by Reaganomics, Obama
> tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as
> the model that works. But American economic growth is not suffering because
> of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country. It is
> suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every
> policy that would free the economy to produce and boom. Under such
> Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a
> reliable energy grid like a third world country.
>
> Obama whines that Bush's massive deficits (if his deficits were massive
> what are Obama's?), supposedly caused by his tax cuts (not--revenue again
> rose during the Bush years), "have made it much harder to pay for the
> investments that built this country and provided the basic security that
> helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class -- things
> like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and
> Social Security."
>
> But spending on all of those items soared during the Bush years, and they
> have rocketed up all the faster under Obama. To no avail, because
> government spending is not the foundation of increased economic growth and
> prosperity. Increased production, spurred by ever stronger incentives, is.
>
> Of course, essential to all of President Obama's essential spending is to
> increase tax rates on the rich, otherwise known in English as the nation's
> investors and job creators. As President Obama tutored us in Kansas last
> week:
>
> But we don't have unlimited resources. And so we have to set priorities. If
> we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values.
> We have to make choices.... Do we want to make the investments we need in
> things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we
> want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our
> country? Because we can't afford to do both. That's not politics. That's
> just math.
>
> So there you have the Obama formula for economic growth and prosperity.
> After the greatest runaway spending spree in American history during the
> Obama Administration, the answer is for government to increase spending
> even more, financed by increasing tax rates even more on the very investors
> and job creators that produce the jobs for the middle class and working
> people in America's economic system. That is a perfect prescription for
> another recession, not the long, long overdue recovery America is still
> waiting for under Obamanomics. Obama tells us, "It is wrong that in the
> United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who
> earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50
> million." That would be wrong if it were true. But it is not.
>
> What Obama is peddling to America on tax policy is only the ugliest example
> of his well-established rhetorical style of calculated deception. It is
> based on what he thinks the average voter does not know and will not know,
> and can be manipulated to believe to Obama's political advantage. For the
> picture he is painting of the rich getting away without paying their fair
> share while working people bear most of the tax burden is the opposite of
> reality.
>
> Even before Obama was elected, under those "failed policies of the past,"
> the top 1% of income earners in 2007 paid 40% of federal income taxes (up
> from 17.6% when Reagan entered office), while the CBO just reported that
> they earned 17% of the income in 2007. Moreover, that 40% of federal income
> taxes paid by the top 1% was more than paid by the bottom 95% combined,
> according to official IRS data. While the top 1% paid 40% of federal income
> taxes, the bottom 40% paid no federal income taxes as a group on net. Today
> 47% pay no federal income taxes.
>
> Yet, Obama has already enacted under current law further tax increases on
> the nation's job creators, investors and small businesses going into effect
> in 2013, when the tax increases of Obamacare become effective and the Bush
> tax cuts expire. Consequently, that year the top two income tax rates would
> rise by close to 20%, the capital gains tax would soar by nearly 60%, the
> tax on dividends would nearly triple, and the Medicare payroll tax would
> rocket up by 62% for these disfavored taxpayers. This alone would take us
> well beyond the Clinton tax rates, despite Obama's outdated talking point
> that he is still repeating from 2008.
>
> This is in addition to America suffering with virtually the highest
> corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40% on average,
> counting state corporate rates. As I have previously noted, even Communist
> China imposes only a 25% rate, with the rate in the EU even less on
> average. Our Canadian neighbors, enjoying a booming economy since Obama was
> elected in America, will enjoy a 15% rate next year, down from 16.5% this
> year.
>
> Yet Obama barnstorms America calling for still more tax increases on
> American business, large and small, and the job creators and investors on
> which jobs and prosperity for working people depend. The galloping
> regulatory burdens he is now imposing effectively involve still further tax
> increases stifling production. It all adds up to a brew for another
> recession in 2013, unless the American people force a change in course in
> 2012.
>
> Newt.For.President.2012..jpg
> 23KViewDownload
>
> Ferrara.jpg
> 21KViewDownload
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