http://bit.ly/eF7tM I'll translate this to plain English in chunks. The illogic of it all can be a bit overpowering at times.
- - - SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money? OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we've made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we've seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades. - - - "We are out of money now." I thought it was irresponsible to spend money you don't have? Obama's answer to the debt problem has been to triple it by legislative fiat. That never works, it always makes matters worse. It's a kicking-the-can-down-the-road solution. Except this time, he better hope he doesn't get re-elected, because it WILL come back to haunt us before his hypothetical second term end---if it doesn't catch up even faster than that. I know it's in his interest to keep bashing the past administration but it's already starting to wear thin. He owns TARP 2, the Porkulus, and the future budgets he proposes, and while their upside is more of a hopey-feely thing, their costs are plainly going to make the debt situation dramatically worse, not at all better, any time soon. The notion that failure to socialize health care lead to this is so disingenuous it's not funny. The very idea that the same government that has bankrupted social security, spends hundreds of dollars on toilet seats, has already thrown untold trillions at "poverty," at "welfare," at "medicare/medicaid" and prescription drug entitlements etc., in other words, which has been meddling directly in health care and other "social services" for decades, making it almost as complicated as the tax code, is actually the solution to and not in point of fact the proximate cause of the problem really needs some serious scrutiny. Note, here and later, how he seems to be convinced that he's the only person on the planet who knows how to make 'good decisions.' On what basis he has this faith -- especially given his checkered past -- is a mystery. - - - So we've got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it's putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off. So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit. So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it's too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can't afford it. We've got this big deficit. Let's just keep the health care system that we've got now. Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything... - - - "We had to spend a lot of money" --- money he confirmed in the previous statement WE DO NOT HAVE. And by the way, he didn't in point of fact have to do it, and there is a lot of question whether any of it has "trickled down" and actually done any good. The latest revised estimates by the Fed paint a picture of a situation getting a lot worse, not better, after TARP has been enlarged and the Porkulus bill has passed. Catepillar, which was supposed to start hiring the moment the legislation was signed, has in fact has three successive rounds of additional layoffs. And his proposed 10 year budgets blow the lid off any deficit spending Bush ever did. Obama's cheapest initiative eclipses even the cost of the Iraq war, which he now admits was in fact a success, so much so he wants to emulate it in the mountains of Afghanistan, where even Bush wasn't dumb enough to go. "If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation we can't control the deficit". No, if we can't control our elected representatives' tendency to print money and pay back political contributors above all else, and create programs that prolong the problem so they can grab more power and control unto themselves, then we'll never get control of the deficit. I thought McCain-Feingold was going to do that, but oh well. </sarcasm> The idea that pandering now to the health care lobby and blowing several trillions more we don't have into that black hole is going to fix our deficit is just nuts. Flashing revelation of the obvious: NOT SPENDING MONEY WE DON'T HAVE AND ACTUALLY PAYING BACK WHAT WE OWE is the answer to shrinking the debt. We know he's never run a business until GM and Chrysler. I'm beginning to think he's never run a family budget, either. Note also Obama only sees either-or solutions. Either we do nothing, or we do everything I say. The Republicans don't advocate doing nothing, but that's always his straw man "other option" when he lays out the options. I thought Obama was supposed to be different than Bush? - - - SCULLY: When you see GM though as "Government Motors," you're reaction? OBAMA: Well, you know - look we are trying to help an auto industry that is going through a combination of bad decision making over many years and an unprecedented crisis or at least a crisis we haven't seen since the 1930's. And you know the economy is going to bounce back and we want to get out of the business of helping auto companies as quickly as we can. I have got more enough to do without that. In the same way that I want to get out of the business of helping banks, but we have to make some strategic decisions about strategic industries... - - - "I have got more than enough to do without that." THEN DON'T DO IT. The man's narcissism is really staggering. Again, he's got to be The One to make the good decisions, then we'll let the peons have their businesses back. - - - SCULLY: States like California in desperate financial situation, will you be forced to bail out the states? OBAMA: No. I think that what you're seeing in states is that anytime you got a severe recession like this, as I said before, their demands on services are higher. So, they are sending more money out. At the same time, they're bringing less tax revenue in. And that's a painful adjustment, what we're going end up seeing is lot of states making very difficult choices there... - - - Ha! If you don't think they're going to bail the states out, in order to use that as a pretext for snatching their "decision making" autonomy just like he's doing to the banks and the auto industry, you obviously don't know how "community organizing" works, or to what end. - - - SCULLY: William Howard Taft served on the court after his presidency, would you have any interest in being on the Supreme Court? OBAMA: You know, I am not sure that I could get through Senate confirmation... - - - Well he finally spoke a truth. In point of fact, given legitimate questions about his citizenship (I'm actually more concerned about dual citizenship in Indonesia, his family roots to which are a kind of bragging point for him with Muslims lately), his unwillingness to release his actual original birth certificate which is sealed in Hawaii (a very curious thing); his refusal to release education records of any kind to public scrutiny; his admitted but not-widely-known history of dangerous illegal narcotics; his papered-over associations with domestic terrorists and communist front-groups, he would not be able to get a job as a janitor at any Federal building in DC involving a minimal clearance. I'm not joking about this either. It's very hard to get a clearance, and takes a long time. They investigate EVERYTHING about you, in a very long, invasive process that feels a lot like a Franz Kafka novel. And you get disqualified for the according to the most stringent rules. The worst Obama ever endured is some rather obvious noting of the curious things Reverend Wright has a tendency to say when Obama isn't listening, and this professor guy in his neighborhood, whom he also doesn't know very well despite having a lot of contact with him over the years as well. :| As Obama's ascendency proves, it is a mistake to think that our elected officials go through such a rigorous clearance process, or anything close to it. In reality, they can bypass this whole messy thing by getting elected, which is how Obama got his clearance. It's also how Pelosi got hers, and we see now what happens when you let a psychotic idiot like her get top secret briefings. We will rue the day we put this unknown quantity with deeply narcissistic tendencies in the Oval Office. The whole Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate is going to go down in the annals of American history as a dark period, from which we may not emerge "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty & justice for all"... - Bob _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
