Obama inherited a huge debt of $10 trillion in 2008. Under his watch, it has grown to $16 trillion. Between wails from the Obama campaign about Romney’s tax returns, they also want some policy specifics. Let’s look at the specifics of deficits and the debt.

Since so many people are educated in government schools, a definition of terms is needed so you’ll know the difference between a deficit and the debt. You’ll also be able to tell when you are being lied to where the debt and deficit is concerned.

A ‘deficit’ is the shortfall created when the government spends more in a given year than it collects in taxes and fees. Candidate Obama said that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

The debt, or national debt, is the sum of all the deficits.

Bush’s last year produced a deficit of over $500 billion dollars. Bringing the national debt up to $10 trillion.  To keep his promise, Obama’s deficit this year should be about $250 billion. So much for Obama’s “promise” to reduce the deficit by half, by the end of his first term.

Since Obama has been in office, he has had record deficits with each year being over $1 trillion. Between those annual deficits and legislation like Obamacare, the debt has risen from $10 trillion to $16 trillion during his first term.

No surprise that the Obama campaign and their ‘low information’ supporters believe the President when he says he has a plan to solve the nation’s huge debt problem. He doesn’t, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says so.

In a random act of journalism, AP’s Tom Raum hits the specifics of how both candidates plan to solve the debt crisis.

President Barack Obama has proposed bringing deficits down by slowing spending gradually, to avoid suddenly tipping the economy back into recession.

Translation, they don’t plan on ever spending less than we take in. The ‘slowing spending’ means increasing the debt slower rather than faster. The end result is still increasing the debt. Not reducing it.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney would lower deficits mostly through deep spending cuts, including some of the reductions proposed by his conservative running mate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Republican’s plan reduces deficits by (wait for it) reducing spending on a schedule that eventually arrives at a balanced budget. Which is the starting point to actually paying down the national debt.

Today’s quiz: Who has a plan for reducing the deficit and debt? Romney or Obama?

Link: WHY IT MATTERS: Debt

The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

Continue reading The Fallacy of Redistribution -Thomas Sowell →

What a difference four years makes.

President Clinton (impeached Dec. 1998) tells us what the Obama campaign wouldn’t tell us four years ago, when everything was “Hope and Change” and “Yes We Can.”  Now the message is things were so bad that no one (except Bill Clinton) could have turned the economy around in one term.

And he should know. Bill Clinton’s own administration, “more than any other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy.”

Sounds like a Romney/Ryan endorsement to me. Obama is campaigning as if someone else has been in The White House these last four years. Because it’s not just that things ‘were’ bad. Things still are bad. And Obama has been at the helm for four years blaming everyone but himself for a still stagnant economy and record unemployment. Neither he nor his party have a long-term solution to our nations debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. No plans to make a balanced budget and no plans to outline a path towards a balanced budget. His world, his focus, is in the next four years. Not the next forty years.

With the foundation for ‘fundamental change’ already set with the railroading of Obamacare on the American people, Bill Clinton tells you what’s coming in a second Obama administration.

Now — but he has — he has laid the foundations for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. And if you will renew the president’s contract, you will feel it. You will feel it.

{You won’t like what you feel, emphasis added}

I believe it because President Obama’s approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America has to take to build a 21st-century version of the American dream, a nation of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, shared prosperity, a shared sense of community.

In his core, Obama will not accept free-market capitalism. Period! There is no one in the country, except Obama and Clinton, saying that America “has to take” a new “direction.” All the shared stuff does not relate to freedom and liberty. There’s less of that, more of government. The kind of America Obama wants is one where the government dictates who gets what of other people’s money. IE. Social Justice.

Creating an environment where people can succeed and won’t need government help is not in Obama’s political or social DNA. He is demoralizing Americans by robbing them of their potential and creating dependency every step of the way. Clinton said it, “to build a 21st-century version of the American dream.” Excuse me but, there’s nothing wrong with the old version. It is timeless. America did not elect him to change the American Dream. He was supposed to preserve it.

Had our country’s founding fathers based America on where they came from, or like twentieth century Europe, America would not be the leader of the free world but, just another miserable place with high prices, high taxes, less freedom and fewer choices. And with a ruler in The White House instead of a President.

Update: Thomas Sowell quote added

Link: The Brass Standard