Tag Archives: Obamaloot

Forward, eh?

Via Instapundit

The story behind the real estate bubble

I haven’t read this book yet (though I have read this one by the same author), but I liked the neat summary below by one reviewer which encapsulates details I have seen elsewhere piecemeal:

“This is a very thorough book that carefully documents the major developments that led up to the financial melt-down of late 2007 including the CRA [Community Reinvestment Act], the governmental pressure to make home loans to lower-income citizens who could only marginally afford them, the resultant buy-back by the federal government of most of those loans so that banks were relieved of risk in making them, the not-surprising greed of the mortgage industry in promoting these loans, the virtual take-over of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by community activists, the establishment of an implied federal backing of this risk, and the resultant bubble that has burdened the tax-payers with more debt in less time than ever in our history.”

This cynical bit of social engineering by politicians who know nothing of economics and could care less—though they always blame capitalism for the shite they stir up—was before Obamaloot came along and added billions in crony handouts. You know, the so-called “stimulus” which has worked out so well.

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Forward!

Looting the country

“Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions. . . .

“Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received funding ‘based solely on their merits.’ But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, ‘Throw Them All Out,’ fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to ‘individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.’”

Which is why I prefer to call his administration Obamaloot. Crooks.

New Deal Or Raw Deal?

This good 2008 book by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor of economic history at Hillsdale College, is a grand debunking of FDR’s effort to tame the Great Depression. He didn’t. The buildup for World War II and the war itself did. FDR succeeded only in laying the high-tax foundation of the modern welfare state.

These debunkings—another good one is Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man—are timely because Obamaloot and his socialist cronies have been explicitly following FDR’s lead since they were elected in 2008 to tame (but so far have only worsened) the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s.

Uncle Barry’s new campaign slogan “Forward!” not only is associated with European Marxism, but matches FDR’s 1936 campaign slogan “Forward With Roosevelt.”

Like FDR and his “Brains Trust,” the Obamaloots are ignorant of how business works but deeply suspicious of it, and much prefer government. So they began (as FDR did) with massive public spending (the so-called stimulus) to no apparent benefit except to their political chums (such as the bankrupt Solyndra) and a huge new welfare program dubbed Obamacare— the socialized medicine the Democrat Party has pined for since at least LBJ.

Leftie academic historians have crowned FDR “king” of American presidents. (Funny, they all think they’re kings. Michelle Obama, the first “first lady” to take numerous, expensive, tax-paid vacations, thinks she’s a queen.) But Folsom and Shlaes have the numbers and the proof that pulls back the curtain on King Franklin’s economics disaster. It’s a revealing and timely exercise, and a good forecast of the horrors ahead if King Barry and Queen Mooch win re-election.

Divider-in-chief

When more and more people know you’re a phony, how to win re-election? Divide and conquer, of course.

“Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo-ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6–3, the majority including that venerated liberal, John Paul Stevens.

“Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter, and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black?”

Via National Review Online.

Twenty-two percent unemployment

The Obama Depression is a killer that’s getting worse, not better.

“If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent.”

On the other hand, according to Spengler:

“The official unemployment rate is 8.1%. Include so-called discouraged workers, and it jumps to 15%. And if we include so-called long-term discouraged workers, the part of the adult working-age population that simply has disappeared from the labor force, it jumps to 22%

No surprise here. You knew the feds were manipulating the data to save Obamaloot and his Democrat cronies, right? Someone’s got to pay for Michelle’s vacations. Why shouldn’t it be you?