Amused Cynic

h/t The People’s Cube

Obamakin economic adviser Robert Reich has spilled the beans at his blog. “When will the recovery begin? Never.”

I’ll just let him speak for himself [emphasis added]:

This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years — featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere — simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track — a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can’t “recover” because it can’t go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.

Does everything begin to make sense to you now? I hope so, because looking at it as Reich describes it is the only way that anything that has happened economically since “the crash” makes any sense at all. And it is a very disturbing “sense.”

Obama doesn’t have the political power to “take” enough from “the rich” in order to “redistribute the wealth,” his goal, as he let slip to Joe the Plumber. But what he can do is devalue what you have to the point that it is worthless, and then decide what the new economic system will use for wampum. And then he, The Supreme Leader (or his descendents), will be the ones who decide “who gets what, where, and when.” Because they will be the ones passing it out. Sound familiar?

I established my tinfoil hat bona fides a long time ago with regard to this administration dynasty. Please read the following re-posts—read the whole things, and follow the links. I worked hard on them, and I think they’ve stood the test of time quite well.

Silent Coup… (January 30, 2009)

“Full Faith and Credit…” (January 26, 2009)

As I listened to the morning news, and heard again the voices of Obama and Biden, of Durbin and Obey insisting that their “stimulus package” will turn the economy around and threatening that without it, disaster will occur, I wondered about the negative effect all of this doomsaying must be having on our poor economy. Why are they trying so hard to talk it down? What are they really after?

Our economic experts deem “consumer confidence” to be so important that they have a special index with which it is monitored. After all, the entire system is based upon nothing but confidence. “The full faith and credit of the United States government” is the phrase used to describe those government financial instruments that the U.S., with its power and stability, absolutely guarantees will never fail. The problem is that our credit and our faith in the government are pretty much maxed out right now.

There are many reasons for this. You know how if you stare at something long enough it starts to look weird? Well look at the global financial system and the same thing happens. I don’t profess to understanding it, I’m no good as an economist, and even worse as a philosopher. But it’s all about faith and belief in the system. The more funerals I go to these days, the more I realize how little there is that really has intrinsic value.

There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer the other day about a woman, widowed at 50, whose husband’s estate had provided her with $7.5 million on which to live for the rest of her life. She had 7.5 million pieces of paper with George Washington’s picture on them. Actually, she didn’t have the paper, she had blips on a computer screen which said she was entitled to that many pieces of paper, which a financial manager forwarded to Bernie Madoff with a stroke of the “Enter” key. Now age 60, she is cleaning houses, for which she receives a much smaller number of pieces of paper, and keeps an eye out for small round pieces of metal on the ground. “If I see a nickel on the street, I’m picking it up.”

Arch-conservatives have been saying for years that our currency should be backed by gold, which of course it isn’t now. But why gold? Why not wampum? See how weird it gets if you stare at it long enough?

But my own crisis in faith in the system goes beyond ethereal nature of paper currency, and to the core of what makes our currency worth anything at all. Faith in the government, and I must say that I really am having a crisis of faith in that regard. I lost faith in the Republican congress for their lack of fiscal responsibility, I lost a measure of faith in the Republican president for failing to veto their largess.

Now obviously, my lack of faith must focus on the Democrats, who hold all the cards. The problem: they could be bluffing me; they could be cheating. There may not really be that big of a crisis. They could be playing us all for suckers with a big Trojan Horse. The new chief of staff, after all, warned his fellow Dems that they should never let a big crisis go to waste, because then they could accomplish “big things.” But what if they ginned it all up?

Barack Obama, Child Senator… (September 24, 2008)

I’ll just say this: I hope the Congress of the United States will be able to get its act together enough to protect “the full faith and credit of the United States government,” because that’s all those green-and white pieces of paper in your wallet are worth, anywhere. Period.

If what I’m hearing is correct, what we’re facing is way more than an economic version of 9/11—it’s much more along the lines of a nuclear attack on the entire east coast. Regarding the child Senator from Illinois, ask yourself this: If 9/11 had occurred a few days ago, would you want him in D.C. doing his job, or sitting at Ole Miss waiting to debate an empty chair on national TV? What if we really are facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Obamessiah, boy Senator, has apparently made his choice. He will be sitting in Oxford talking to the press, while Senator McCain will be in the Capitol, being a Senator, and a grown-up man.

Once upon a time, being a United States Senator was a very important position. They were supposed to be the cool heads that would calm the supposedly more-excitable members of the House of Representatives, and guide the country to the correct mega-positions. John McCain has decided that this crisis merits his attending to his duties as a U.S. Senator, and has returned to Washington to face the crisis and work out a solution. Child Senator Obama has stated that his original personal goal, the POTUS, is more important. Everyone in this country should sit up and take notice. I think he has made a huge mistake, both as a supposedly mature U.S. Senator, and as a candidate for the presidency.

Whoops! Wrong about that last one!

UPDATE: My fellow tinfoil-hatter Neoneocon writes on the subject.

You can say they’re overreacting [small entrepreneurs], and perhaps you’re correct. But I think their fears are an understandable response to the signals Obama has been giving out.

One of the reasons it’s been difficult for many people to see what Obama may be doing is distraction; there’s been such a flurry of activity on so many fronts at once. So it’s not that easy to see the bigger picture.

Obama also utters soothing words every time he does something against the interests of the business world: he’s not really trying to stifle small business. And he’s not really trying to take over (fill in the blank) the banks, the auto companies, whatever. He’s just reacting to the crisis, reluctantly doing what must be done. That’s what he says.

But successful business people are adept at reading which way the wind blows. If they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t be successful. And they sense that Obama is against them; every single policy he has championed seems to have that effect, despite his stated reluctance to harm them.

UPDATE II (7/12/09, 6pm): Sorry to keep hitting you with all this “read ‘em and weep stuff,” but this is important. Victor David Hanson on Obama’s remaking of America.

[...]You see, I think the point was never much to build more bike paths on borrowed money or just bail out GM, but rather more to reengineer the tax code, as part of a grander vision of creating a new equality of result in America.

Soon we will all end up after each April 15 about making the same, driving the same sort of cars and using the same sort of mass transit, living in about the same sorts of houses, and having about the same sorts of “‘they’ will take care of it for me” philosophies — all overseen by brilliant, but highly ranked and exempt Platonic Guardians who suffer on our behalf as they jet and limo at breakneck speed ensuring our welfare.

We are beginning to sense the debate is not about “stimulus” (politicians did not even read the various bills that they rammed through and care little about the fiscal impact from them). Rather, we are witnessing an inversion of Reagan’s sort of playing chicken, once called “starve the beast” (which I thought was a wrong notion), a philosophy of cutting taxes to cut revenue to starve the federal government’s excessive spending in the face of spiraling deficits.

Under Obama’s “gorge the beast” version, America will simply write so many bounced checks, run up such an enormous $10 trillion debt, that taxes will have to rise on “them”– and wasn’t this really the point of it all anyway: to “spread the wealth around” and “never let a crisis go to waste”? Since new programs never shrink, but, like Johnson grass, grow with impunity, and since Democrats, even more so than wasteful Republicans, don’t worry about deficits, taxes must escalate to avoid catastrophe.

The Bad Guys

Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services — the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc.

“Their Fair Share”

Last fall we heard that this percentile was unpatriotic, did not wish to spread the wealth around, and had made off like bandits under Bush. But the fact is, to quote Mayor Gavin Newsome’s “like it or not,” they are precisely those who decide most dynamically whether to hire, fire, expand, contract, buy/sell goods, etc.

And the results of the Obama war against them are threefold: 1) in major key states, the productive minority’s state income taxes will near or exceed 10%; their federal rates will go to 40%; the abolition of caps on FICA will ensure 15% plus of most of their income will go for new Medicare and Social Security bites; and they may well be eligible for a newly proposed punitive health-care surcharge tax of 4-6%.