Gotterdammerung

JUST AN ASIDE BEFORE I REALLY GET STARTED:

The pro-abortion lobby is angry because the Susan G. Komen Foundation has cancelled funding to Planned Parenthood and they’re alarmed that Pfizer has announced a recall of some of its birth control pills, but they’re fuming over a Congressional investigation that indicates that tanning salons lie to their young female clients about the risks of cancer. I’m mystified that tanning salons merit the attention of the United States Congress but that’s where we’ve sunk as a society: The liberal kook fringe will demand a Congressional investigation into tanning salons as a threat to young women, and demand that minor girls should not be allowed to frequent tanning salons, but will simultaneously demand the right of those same young women to abort their babies. “Tanning beds – bad, killing children – good.” Insane.

In the final act of the final opera of the four-part cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs, Richard Wagner describes a scene of hopelessness and devastation. With the Rope of Destiny broken, his spear Gungnir shattered, the great hero Siegfried dead and the Ring of Power returned to the Rhinemaidens, Wotan, the father of the Norse gods, burns the great Hall of Valhalla to the ground, taking all the gods and heroes with him to a fiery death. Having lost everything, Wotan chooses suicide for himself and his entire race rather than live in mediocrity.

Wagner sought to portray this sort of self-destruction as noble and historians have opined that Adolf Hitler, himself a great fan and devotee of Wagner’s work, emulated Wotan’s example by choosing suicide not only for himself but for Germany as well at the end of World War II. Surrendering to the Allies, facing the ignominy of trial, humiliation and the hangman’s noose was too much to bear for the Fuhrer, even if surrendering meant saving the lives of his people, so he allowed the full weight of Russian fury and Allied bombs to descend on his country and blast it to oblivion. To my mind and the minds of many Germans I have met, this was the very model of insanity.

Here in the United States, Barack Obama, the Priest-King and Emperor of the Americas, stands atop the wreckage of the nation he was elected to lead. His stimulus plan has failed, his bank bailout plan has failed, his takeovers of the automobile manufacturing, insurance, banking and home mortgage industries have failed, a thousand companies have fled from Obamacare, his overtures to Russia, China, Iran and the Muslim world have failed, the model of his green energy initiative is bankrupt, his gun-running project to Mexican drug lords has failed and his Attorney General has been caught in a lie, he has suffered repulses in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, the midterm elections and in the Supreme Court, and as demonstrated in his State of the Union Address recently, he is out of ideas, at least ideas acceptable to him:

· He advocates Federal assistance to his union buddies in the manufacturing industry while he knows that America has shifted to a service-oriented economy
· He advocates helping his friends in the teachers unions
· He advocates price controls on universities
· He advocates allowing illegal immigrants to stay in America without the threat of deportation
· He advocates exploitation of our own oil and natural gas reserves at the same time that he blocks the Keystone pipeline
· He creates a Financial Crimes Unit to investigate shady financial deals when we know that the bad loans that caused the housing collapse and then the recession in 2008 were a direct result of pressure applied by Democrat Congressmen in the Nineties
· He advocates higher capital gains taxes on money that has already been taxed
· He advocates slashing military spending as China, Russia, Iran and Islamic terrorists threaten us across the world

In his mind, there is nothing left to do. He clings to the ideology of the Left, he cannot envision anything else, he keeps saying the same things and doing the same things and hoping the same things will work and when they don’t, he starts all over again. He keeps running on this philosophical scamper wheel because to try something else, anything else, would invalidate everything he believes in, and rather than face the humiliation of changing course, he dooms himself and his country to even greater suffering. Need some proof? Here’s what three years of Priest-King’s leadership has gotten us:

January 2011 unemployment rate: 8.5%
13.1 million people unemployed
2.5 million people marginally attached to the labor force (people who wanted to work and were available to work, who had looked for work within the previous 12 months but couldn’t find anything)
Actual unemployment rate: 9.9%
Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

6 million people collecting unemployment benefits
2.4 million people collecting state unemployment benefits
3.6 million people collecting Federal unemployment benefits
People can collect 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits, then collect up to 73 weeks of Federal unemployment benefits
Federal unemployment benefits have been extended eight times since June 2008
Cost of another extension: $44 billion

Reps. Barbara Lee and Bobby Scott claim that unemployment benefits stimulate the economy, one of the most absurd positions imaginable, akin to bleeding a patient to restore him to vigorous health.

The average time that the unemployed have been without work hit a record 40.5 weeks in September 2011.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/11/news/economy/unemployment_benefits/index.htm

2011 Federal deficit: $1.299 billion
2008 Federal deficit: $248 billion
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.html

2011 Federal debt: $15.5 trillion
2008 Federal debt: $10.0 trillion
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html

2011 Federal debt represented over 100% of GDP
2011 interest on Federal debt stood at 3.5% of GDP (government will likely default if the interest on national debt reaches 12%)
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_2007_2016USp_XXs1li111mcn_H0f

2011 Federal spending as percentage of GDP: 24.7%
Source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/runaway-spending-tax-revenue

2011 new single-family home starts: 606,900 (1.2 million starts would be expected in a healthy economy)
Source: http://money.ca.msn.com/investing/news/business-news/us-housing-starts-fall-2011-a-bad-building-year-1

Priest-King has spent more money than any other human being in the history of Planet Earth but we are left with a staggering, punch-drunk economy, eyes swollen shut and one haymaker away from hitting the canvas. Now with all this money being spent (which must include the Federal Reserve’s two Quantitative Easings, in which the Fed bought almost one trillion dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds to try to stimulate inflation and kick-start the economy), one would ordinarily think that inflation would be skyrocketing and adding to our list of troubles, but it isn’t: Although inflation has doubled since 2009, we are still left with a comfortable three percent rate. How can that be, you ask? Simple – when 15.6 million people can’t find work, unemployment acts as dead weight on the economy, slowing it to a crawl. Even with ridiculously low interest rates – the Fed’s prime interest rate still stands at 0.25% - people and businesses simply aren’t borrowing and spending and building as fast as a liberal community organizer thinks they should (new housing starts stand at half the norm), and since Priest-King can’t think of anything else to do but spend even more money, he determines to throw good money after bad :

2012 projected Federal pensions (including Social Security): $806 billion
2012 projected Federal health care (including Medicare and Medicaid): $866 billion
2012 projected Federal education: $121 billion
2012 projected Federal welfare: $432 billion
2012 projected federal defense: $925 billion or 24.8% of Federal expenditures
2012 projected Federal social programs spending: $2.225 trillion or 59.7% of Federal expenditures
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending

So we have absolutely amazing sums of money being dumped into the economy while interest rates remain at record low levels, meaning that our currency loses its value with every breath we take, we have millions of people out of work, businesses afraid to hire because of aggressive, adversarial policies pursued by the Federal government, the credit worthiness of the United States has been downgraded for the first time in history, free enterprise itself demonized by the President and his Occupy Wall Street co-conspirators and we have a debt heavy enough to sink us all and what does Priest-King propose to do? Why, slash the Pentagon, that’s what: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced on 26 January $487 billion in cuts over ten years, including 72,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (cutting from 42 planes to 29 in 2012) and very plainly threatened the Republicans in Congress with the following:

“Make no mistake: the savings that we are proposing will impact on all 50 states and many districts, congressional districts, across America. This will be a test, a test of whether reducing the deficit is about talk or about action.

I understand how tough these kinds of issues can be, and I understand also that this is the beginning and not the end of this process. But my hope is that when members understand the sacrifice involved in reducing the defense budget by almost a half a trillion dollars that it will convince Congress of the important responsibility they have to make sure that we avoid sequestration.

That would be a doubling of the cuts, another $500 billion in additional cuts that would be required to take place through a meat- axe approach, and that we are convinced would hollow out the force and would inflict severe damage to our national defense for generations. “

Translation: Either increase taxes and spending or we’ll gut your precious Defense Department with a dull deer antler. Friends, this is like a gangster movie, when the bad guys kidnap a member of a rival gang and cut off a finger just to prove they’re serious. The Left will absolutely risk the national security of the United States, at a time when we are challenged by China, Russia, Iran and Islamic terrorists, before they cut social welfare and entitlement spending.

Source: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=66940
Source: http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4962

But do we really have to increase taxes? Is our debt problem caused by a weak revenue stream? Will pillaging the wealthy get us out of this mess? Well, empirical data would indicate it won’t:

2011 Federal revenues: $2.15 trillion

Federal revenue has more than tripled since 1965 (Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003)

And in a sharp rebuff to the Occupy Wall Street idiots and the liberal Democrat lawmakers who urge them on, the facts are that the top ten percent of wage earners pay 70% of Federal income taxes while the bottom fifty percent of wage earners pay only 3%. That debunks the myth that wealthy people don’t pay their fare share of taxes, when the truth is that wealthy people pay an extremely disproportionate share of the total while the middle class pays almost nothing and consumes everything in sight. The truth is, friends, that the Federal government receives plenty of money, mountains of money, but blows it so much faster than it takes it in.
Source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-government-revenues

So if Priest-King won’t listen to reason on this side of the Atlantic, will he take a lesson from our allies on the other? Absolutely not. The bailouts of Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece and the possible collapse of the eurozone itself do not register with him. Hugely unrealistic social welfare programs, free education and health care for life, two years of paid family leave after the birth of a child, thirty-hour work weeks and lavish retirement plans that crush whole governments and steal their sovereignty make no impression on him. He believes with all his soul that socialism is good, socialism is fair, socialism overcomes the fundamental injustices of life and if it has failed at all (he ignores the collapse of the Soviet Empire and China’s transformation to a market economy), it has failed because it just hasn’t been tried hard enough, to which I say, !@#$%^. Life is indeed unfair but if you live in the United States, you have a better chance of having a prosperous life than anywhere else on Earth as long as you have the nerve to try for it. Pitching a tent in front of the New York Stock Exchange, screaming at the police and demanding that your college loans be forgiven won’t cut it, and neither will dragging your country into the flames with you when your plans fail. What WILL work is voting Barack Obama out in November, consigning his debacle of a Presidency to the abyss and starting over, older, considerably poorer but wiser.


Source: http://primerate.wsjprimerate.us/2011_01_01_archive.html
Source: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/02/new-report-released-by-gop-lawmakers-suggests-top-justice-officials-had/
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/24/transcript-obamas-2012-state-union/
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/federal-investigation-finds-indoor-tanning-salons-deny-health/story?id=15483714
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/pfizer-recalls-birth-control-pills-cites-packaging-error/story?id=15490045
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/video/susan-komen-cuts-ties-planned-parenthood-15493090