Obama ASU Speech - Building A Stronger Foundation?
President Barack Obama gave the commencement speech at Arizona State University yesterday and although his remarks were encouraging and pointed ASU graduates away from greed and towards what they can do to make the world, and our country, a better place, a bit of hypocrisy reared its ugly head during the talk. Unfortunately, hypocrisy is what you end up with most of the time when you’re the POTUS and you constantly seek to manipulate instead of lead.
Here are President Obama’s remarks in question:
And as a nation, we’ll need a fundamental change of perspective and attitude. It is clear that we need to build a new foundation - a stronger foundation - for our economy and our prosperity, rethinking how we educate our children, and care for our sick, and treat our environment.
If we need to build a new foundation for our economy as the President states, then why would you start out your tenure as the big chief by spending, lending or committing $12.8 trillion, that we don’t have, to bailout crooks, cheats, and institutions that may possibly collapse or go bankrupt anyway?
As I mentioned in my last post, in addition to the $12.8 trillion the POTUS signed over to crooks and failed business models, he has also proposed the largest budget in history to run the ever expanding government with the largest deficit in history to go along with it.
This isn’t a formula for prosperity and opportunity, it’s a formula for utter economic disaster. Printing money to cover the gargantuan expenditures the President is racking up, is a plan fraught with doom that can’t be undone until collapse ensues.
I just have one question for the President - How does spending that kind of money, that most assuredly can never be paid back, lay a stronger foundation for for our economy and prosperity?
It would be nice to have something other that the usual evading the question type answer given at one of his press conferences.
President Obama Proposes Largest Budget Deficit In History
President Barack Obama just last week proposed the largest federal budget in history with the largest deficit in history, 4.5 times that of George W. Bush’s last budget deficit and then in announcing his gargantuan monstrosity, Mr Obama made this statement:
“…one of the pillars of this foundation is fiscal responsibility. We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter and waste is not our problem. We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration — or the next generation.”
What!?! I don’t even know how to react to such inane words (Please go read them, you won’t believe it). Are we living in an alternate universe where the president of the United States can do one thing and then make a statement as if what he just did is completely different than what is actually taking place? Apparently we are. If you are maxed out on all your credit cards, have 2 car payments and owe everyone you know money, it’s probably not a smart thing to get a home equity loan so you can take that cruise to Alaska. You would want to show some financial restraint, unlike the federal government is capable of doing.
What the President should have said to match his actions is, “We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter, but I’m going to do it anyway because I won the election and I’m the frickin’ President, so get use to it.”
It is clear from the President’s actions that deficits don’t matter to him when the projected deficit for his budget now stands at $1.8 trillion. But beyond that, what’s really going on here is the current administration simply trying to manipulate the public into believing the economy isn’t as bad as it really is and the President isn’t spending more money than we can possibly supply him through the current tax structure. If you think Mr Obama can spend this kind of money (while blaming the past administration) and still keep his campaign promise of a tax cut for 95% of Americans, you should take a basic course in economics. Simple math tells me you can’t get $1.8 trillion extra that you don’t have from only 5% of the US population, you need a little bit bigger base.
The most disturbing part if this whole thing is that The President is flat out lying to the American public when he tells us that we need to spend this kind of money to fund the government. We don’t. The President is doing more that funding the government, he’s growing it to unprecedented levels. At some point, if we continue to spend money like this, there will most surely come a day of reckoning and we will simply run out of money. And then what’s the US government going to do?
Maybe it’s time to buy gold coins and gold bullion before this train wreck goes off the cliff it’s heading for.
Did The Federal Reserve Cause The Current Economic Crisis?
A lot of blame is going around as to who or what has caused the current financial crisis and almost no one seems to be looking at the underlying system that is the bedrock cause of the entire meltdown. That would be the Federal Reserve, the organization the manipulates the economy by constantly tweaking the money supply.
We are supposed to live have a free market economy in he United Sates, but because of the way the Federal Reserve messes with the money supply by lowering interest rates and printing more dollars, the free market does not actually control the economy at all. With these policies, the Fed has created the credit bubble causing people to act completely irrationally. The fact is, there was too much money in circulation allowing banks to lend to people that never should have been given a loan under any circumstances.
In a normal free market there would be a limited amount of money to go around and banks would have had to have been much more selective in their lending policies. But because of the huge amounts of essentially free cash created by lower interest rates, banks made risker loans and Wall Street had a complete investing orgy continually demanding more loans regardless of the risk and this eventually led to the current financial crisis. Firms on the Street demanded these loans so they could bundle them and create a higher rated investments to sell to unsuspecting buyers and end up making huge commissions.
While Wall Street executives and brokers are certainly culpable for the mess their greed has caused, the bulk of the blame rests on the shoulders of the Federal Reserve for allowing more money and more perceived money (credit) to be in circulation. If there hadn’t have been so much money and credit available, because of the Fed, there simply could not have been the problems we are having to deal with right now.
You can get a better perspective on what one investor thinks of the Federal Reserve, watch Jim Rogers interview on CNBC.