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Because Obama is so acclimated to spending other people’s money, he doesn’t realize that those who spend their own – and who stand the chance of losing it – make investment decisions on the basis of tangible realities, not the projections of professional economists whose predictive accuracy is on par with Harold Camping’s end times pronouncement.
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| Talk to stalwart Barack Obama supporters (there are still some of them out there) and many of them will tell you that the key to the 44th President’s reelection is the state of the American economy.
The president, they reason, is still personally popular, able to trade on a likable personality and an innate charisma that recommends him to that subset of the American population whose loyalty can be won with such vaporous traits.
Nor is he especially vulnerable on foreign policy. The war in Iraq has essentially been a non-issue throughout his tenure. The conflict in Libya, though widely recognized as rudderless and amorphous in practice, commands only fleeting public attention and remains middling in its domestic impact.
Afghanistan, certainly the most salient of our armed endeavors abroad, is a source of increasing national disquiet, but that sentiment seems to be shared in the Oval Office. Obama, after all, is the president who announced his troop surge into that nation by discussing the withdrawal of those selfsame troops in the next breath. As a result, that surge seemed little more than the cost of his ransomed dovishness. Whatever qualms remain about his executive resolve, his supporters reason, will be obviated by his unqualified success in hunting down and killing Osama Bin Laden.
Given those preconditions and the introspective tact that the nation has taken in the wake of the economic downturn, the argument for reelection thus rests firmly on the prospects for renewed growth. Yet this is comfort served cold. With consistently high unemployment still hovering around 9 percent (and that’s without factoring in those who have dropped out of the labor force, which brings the number closer to 16 percent), surging food and fuel prices and a still-depressed housing market, the hill Obama has to climb is steep.
His policies ensure that he’ll never reach the top.
To the extent that government can manipulate the job market, it does so through the incentives put in place by public policy. The passage of ObamaCare – and the uncertainty of knowing how it will be implemented – keeps employers in the dark about what the true cost of hiring new employees will be, leaving them disinclined to expand the work force. The uncertainty about where tax rates will end up has a similarly paralytic effect. And a host of other regulatory impositions – be they environmental crusades or sops to big labor – freeze business in their tracks.
For Obama, who exists in a paranormal universe where benefits are unmoored from costs, this is unintelligible. In a February speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he harangued American business for sitting on nearly $2 trillion in capital, saying “many of your own economists and salespeople are now forecasting a healthy increase in demand. So I just want to encourage you to get in the game.”
Call it the soft soviet line of persuasion. Because Obama is so acclimated to spending other people’s money, he doesn’t realize that those who spend their own – and who stand the chance of losing it – make investment decisions on the basis of tangible realities, not the projections of professional economists whose predictive accuracy is on par with Harold Camping’s end times pronouncement.
While unemployment may be the dominant economic concern of the Obama Administration, it has no answers anywhere else either.
As gas prices go through the roof, the president has made no serious effort to expand domestic oil production, falling back on bromides about green technology that has repeatedly been shown to be expensive and ineffective in equal measure.
As the inflation that inevitably follows the Federal Reserve’s injection of trillions of dollars into the marketplace takes hold, the president remains silent, knowing that it’s a de facto tax on the American people and a gimmick to avoid addressing the national debt.
And as our entitlement programs careen out of control, Obama can do nothing but criticize the Republicans who have been bold enough to offer reform plans – despite the fact that the status quo is the most dangerous option available to us.
Barack Obama’s supporters say the key to the 2012 election will be the economy. His opponents can only hope as much.
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