President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats face in 2012 running for reelection into the stiff headwind of a terrible economy – largely of their own making.
In just the last four years, the federal government – run by a Democrat Congress since 2007, and adding a Democrat President in 2009 – has increased spending by 29%.
2007 Federal Budget: $2.73 trillion.
Note: This was the last all Republican budget – the House, Senate and White House were at the time all run by the Rs.
2011 Federal Budget: $3.82 trillion.
Note: This is an estimated total. Because the Democrats that were at the time running the House, Senate and White House didn’t write a budget – because they were afraid to go on the record with how much they actually wanted to spend in advance of the 2010 election.
Meaning – it could have been WORSE.
That is a $1.09 trillion increase – in just the last four years.
Behold the nation’s third Age of Bailout.
And the resulting Age of Bailout economy has been – atrocious.
Thusly, Democrats are seeking to rewrite recent history – and the present – in terms far more favorable to them than Reality to assist them in their re-electoral pursuits.
Much as our entire Left-Liberal cultural nexus – our government (i.e. public) schools, the Leftist PlayLand colleges and universities and the Hollywood-Media Corridor – have rewritten the histories of the first two Ages of Bailout.
Those would be the eerily-similar-to-today John Maynard Keynesian Democrat Huge Government efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society.
Where too the government robbed the private sector of gobs and gobs of money so as to then spend it in at best meaningless – and at worst ruinous – ways. Destroying the Village it takes in a pitiful attempt to save it.
It didn’t/hasn’t worked for FDR and LBJ, and – shocker – it ain’t working now.
Nevertheless, President Obama has decided to make the federal government’s bailout of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler – to which he and his Administration were by far the largest kicker of the $80 billion – a central theme of his 2012 push to keep his gig.
He has already repeatedly asserted that this government intrusion into the private sector – the picking and propping up of these auto-making losers at the expense of the nation’s winners – is a quintessential visual aide for what he has accomplished in his first term. And for why he deserves a second.
On the former, we wholeheartedly agree – the auto bailout is the epitome of the accomplishment of failure that is President Obama and his fellow Democrats in action.
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As just stated, (intellectually honest) historians will look back on the four years between the 2006 and 2010 elections as the nation’s third Age of Bailout.
Yes, the beginning of the economic fall and the Democrat Congress’s terrible Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) preceded (and helped usher in) the Obama Era.
But the Donkeys – once in control of both Houses and La Casa Blanca in 2009 – kicked into overdrive the amount, level and degree to which the D.C. Leviathan was commandeering control of the private sector.
And thusly did they firmly ensconce us in a non-recovering, bottom-bouncing, much-more-interminable-than-historically-normal, jobless “recovery.”
And thusly did they grow mightily the nation’s annual deficit. The largest President George W. Bush single-year shortfall was about $400 billion. President Obama & Co. have been around $1.5 trillion every single year.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan – from his 1980 campaign to save us from the now eerily familiar Jimmy Carter:
A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Barack Obama loses his.
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Behold the Third Age of Bailout:
Obama and the Democrat Congress in early 2009 forced We the People to spend nearly $1 trillion on the utterly fatuous Keynesian economic “stimulus” cash dump. A titanic waste – which President Obama and myriad others who favored and implemented it are now begrudgingly admitting, now that its utterly predictable – and predicted – failure has come to pass.
Shovel-ready wasn’t as shovel-ready as we thought.
President Obama devoted nearly $60 billion of his stimulus package to building a new green-based economy rich in renewable energy and strategies to cut carbon. But despite the price tag, not one green job yet exists. It comes down to a problem of etymology. No one can yet agree on what a green job actually is.
– Newsweek speaking with (avowed Marxist, 9-11 Truther and) then-Green Jobs Czar Van Jones.
We had the Congress and the President pitifully attempt a health care bailout – taking over the world’s greatest health care system via the now 1,500+-waiver-riddled-because-it’s-grossly-damaging-and-expensive ObamaCare.
The Democrat Congress couldn’t bail out the unions by passing Card Check – so Obama’s Administration did so by enforcing it as if it did.
With TARP, the federal government bailed out their buddy banks and Wall Street firms in true crony capitalism style.
And on, and on, and on….
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And it was through TARP that the Obama Administration heaved even more money at General Motors and Chrysler (which also served as yet another union bailout).
So let us again take a brief look at President Obama and the Democrats’ definition of success – of the Age of (Car) Bailout, and their foisting it upon us.
- GM had to file for bankruptcy anyway.
- President Obama originally claimed we’d make money on our $80 billion. Seven months later, the Administration admitted we’d lose more than $16 billion – and dishonestly claimed the loss they had said would be a profit was “less than the(y) originally expected.”
- GM last year claimed in a television ad campaign to have “repaid (their) government loan in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule.” Which was another total lie. They had in fact paid back only a tiny fraction thereof – and had done so so with other government TARP money.
- So fraudulent was GM’s media-buy proclamation that there has been a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint filed against them.
- As of November 16, 2010 – more than half a year after the “paid in full with interest” ad – GM had only paid back $361 million.
- President Obama and GM eviscerated bankruptcy law – throwing secured bond holders over the side to the benefit and illegal betterment of his union allies.
- GM has been all too distracted with its tilting at Leftist ideological windmills.
- They are now making redline, subprime loans on their cars. The same global economy-devastating loans that government entities Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae made (and continue to make) on houses.
- They have spent far too much time, money and effort on the way-too-expensive-and-unprofitable Chevy Volt.
- In true “stimulus” fashion, GM is expanding this failed effort. They are spending $100 million on four product lines for fuel-efficient car and truck engines – of the unprofitable Chevy Volt sort – to create (or save?)…thirty jobs. That’s more than $3.3 million per job – to manufacture cars on which they’ve already proven they can’t make money.
- They have in the past year received more of these amazingly profitable clean energy patents than any other U.S. company.
- Administration-appointee Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dan Akerson has called for a $1-per-gallon gasoline tax hike. Which would demonstrably hurt his (alleged) industry – but is proffered in the perverse hope of forcing people into the Volts they have thus far avoided like the Bubonic Plague.
- GM has fitted an (again, unprofitable) Volt plant so as to be exclusively solar-powered. Which cost $3 million – but only saves them $15,000 a year in electricity.
- Probably due at least in part to these distractions, GM and Chrysler has been dominating the Forbes Worst Cars of the Year list.
- With the exception of the 2011 Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the 2011 Smart ForTwo and the 2011 Nissan Titan, the cars on the list are all American-made. Worse than that, they all come from two manufacturers: General Motors and Chrysler. Ford managed to avoid the list completely…. (GM) offerings from Chevrolet and Cadillac crowded the picture…
GM has some work to do before it can regain a good reputation fleet-wide. Four GM-made vehicles-the Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, Chevrolet Colorado, and Chevrolet Aveo/Aveo 5-are ranked as among the worst on the market today. All but the Tahoe Hybrid qualified for the Worst Cars list last year as well.
- Probably also due at least in part to these distractions, GM has had to recall their cars – again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and….
- Chrysler hasn’t fared but a little better.
- It appears that President Obama has exempted GM for years from federal taxes. Again, crony capitalism. Please keep this in mind as you read all those glowing stories about GM turning a first quarter profit. Especially when one digs into those numbers.
- (A)lmost half of the ($3.2B) profit came from $1.5 billion in one-time gains that included the sale of stakes in former GM subsidiaries Delphi and Ally Financial.
Please remember all of this – these serial, unmitigated disasters tumbling over and over one another – as the Age of Bailout is rewritten by President Obama, his Democrat colleagues and his Leftist and media minions – as a “success.”
One they claim is so great that the President deserves next year to be returned to Washington – with newly ensconced Donkey Congressional majorities.
Ummm, no. We have already spent far too much in the rewarding of failure.