Obama's American Dream

At some point before the 2008 election, an angry sounding Michelle Obama snarled, “there are kids who still believe in the American dream. They think it exists!” 

For the past five years, her husband has been doing everything in his power to make sure it doesn’t.
Under Obama, the American Dream –  the idea that anyone can achieve prosperity through hard work – is becoming a thing of the past.
An overwhelming majority of Americans now believe that life was better for them when they were young, than it is, now.

 Over two-thirds believe that when today’s kids grow up, they will enjoy less financial security than adults today. And another two-thirds say today’s children face more challenges than opportunities. On all of these questions, the anxiety crosses lines of gender, race, and class.

Daniel Henninger argues in the WSJ that the economic destruction Obama has wrought since he was elected is worse than the ObamaCare trainwreck.
 

Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama “legacy.” Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart.

 For five years, news stories have chronicled the social and economic deterioration in America of people with no jobs or weak jobs. 

Here’s a headline over a Gallup report: “In U.S. Fewer Believe ‘Plenty of Opportunity’ to Get Ahead.”

 Two from The Wall Street Journal recently: “Parents Serving as Emergency Support for Adult Kids,” and “Workers Stay Put, Curbing Jobs Engine.”

A normal post-recession growth rate is at least 4%, but instead, Henninger notes, “the U.S. has fallen far off its normal 3.3% growth rate.” The growth rate for the rest of the year will be a mere 1.7%.

Ponder, though, a partial list of the public-policy decisions that have flowed steadily out of the Obama administration and directly into a job-starved U.S. economy: 

The no-decision on the Keystone XL pipeline and its union jobs; 

the 2,000-page regulatory law draped in 2010 across the entire financial sector; 

the shutdown in 2010 and then the slow-walking of offshore oil drilling; 

siccing the EPA on the utilities industry and the National Labor Relations Board on all industry; 

a 2010 FCC decision to regulate Internet growth; 

a significant tax increase this year; 

support this month for jacking up the federal minimum wage to over $10, certain to smother new jobs; 

the Justice Department’s $13 billion looting of J.P. Morgan bank; 

and of course Hurricane ObamaCare. 

Barack Obama has the U.S. economy on lockdown. It’s the worst thing this president has done. American resilience, and elections, mean it won’t stay this way forever. But for a lot of poor and middle-class folks, living with mom in the basement is getting old.

40 percent of all American workers make less than $20,000 a year before taxes.

And 65 percent of all American workers make less than $40,000 a year before taxes.  If you work on Wall Street, or have a cushy job with the federal government, or work for a big tech firm out on the west coast, life is probably pretty good for you right now.  But the truth is that most Americans are not living the high life.  In fact, most Americans are just trying to figure out how to survive from month to month. 

All of this economic destruction is no accident. This is Obama’s “American Dream.” 

Dinesh D’Souza points out a common view among Republicans – “that the problem with Obama is that he is a bungler, he is an amateur in the title of a recent book, he tries to do x but he gets y.” 

This has produced a whole set of conservative punditry essentially lecturing Obama on things like, “Obama, don’t you realize that confiscatory taxation does not produce economic growth?” “Oh, Obama, don’t you realize that by blocking oil drilling in America you aren’t going to create jobs?” “Oh, Obama, may we advise you that Assad, the dictator of Syria, or the Mullah’s in Iran are not our friends?” “Obama, you should wake up to the fact that if we slash our own nuclear weapons this will not inspire the Iranians to do the same.” 

Obama subscribes to an ideology that aims to reduce America’s influence in the world. He wants to cut America down to size. He doesn’t want America to be number one. He would be perfectly happy if we were number 18 or number 37. 

Why does Obama want to reduce America’s footprint in the world? Because he believes we’ve been stepping on the world. This is his ideology. What Obama really wants to do is redistribute power globally. He would like to see many countries on the world stage – Brazil, India, China, Russia, all vying for power. No single superpower calling the shots.