Friday, September 9, 2011

We're Number Five! We're Number Five!

"There's no substitute for victory." "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Outdated notions like those should not be allowed to get in the way of America's slide into mediocrity. The Obama administration put America in fourth place last year in global competitiveness. Fearing it might offend other "lesser" nations, they have succeeded this year in dropping the US to number five.

In its scramble to the bottom by way of rabid egalitarianism and bureaucratic control of business and free enterprise, the Obama administration has come up with a new mantra: "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you throw the game." Switzerland came in at number one in competitiveness, again. I guess if your major attractions are chocolate, anonymous banking, cuckoo clocks and Nazi stolen art, your competition isn't going to have much of a chance.

Singapore came in second (they cane you there if you don't produce), followed by Sweden (a socialist nation, no less) which had previously held the second-place spot. America got pushed out of fourth place by economic powerhouse Finland. The rankings come from the World Economic Forum which bases its conclusions on input from 15,000 global business executives analyzing complex economic data. Don't let the Forum's headquarters in Davos, Switzerland affect your opinion of the accuracy of the survey.

The Forum has been producing these rankings for about three decades now. In almost every instance, America ranked number one. As recently as 2008, America was still number one. Refresh my memory. Did something happen in 2008? Oh, yeah, now I remember. America elected a President who had no business experience whatsoever, no executive experience outside of "community organizing," and who surrounded himself with advisers who hate capitalism.

The Obama administration has modeled its economic program after that of Greece, which is currently holding its own in 90th place. Germany, which is quickly undoing its worst democratic socialist enactments is in sixth place, shooting to push America out of the fifth position next year. Also close on America's heels are Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands and England, all of which are rapidly abandoning the policies which the Obama administration has embraced and is shoving down America's throat through legislation and executive order.

While America continues to slide, countries which were considered hopeless just a few years back are gaining. Moving up are China, Brazil, India and Russia. Though none of those four would be considered paragons of enlightened capitalism, they are moving in the opposite direction from America. While the Obamists feed bureaucratic proliferation, over-regulation and over-taxation, each of those four nations is removing its own roadblocks from the path of competitiveness. At this rate, they'll be able to abandon slave labor, forced work, starvation wages and environmental ignorance in just a few years, making them true competitors.

When the premier of China, officially still a communist nation, has to lecture the President of the United States on fiscal responsibility, poor economic conditions, high unemployment, and low productivity, it should come as no surprise that America is on a downhill slide lubricated by foreign oil. This condition gives all-new meaning to the words "slippery slope."

Perhaps Barack Obama can solve this problem by making another speech, this time in front of a joint session of Congress and the United Nations General Assembly.

15 comments:

Ponderosa said...

Obama for Secretary-General!

He could do for the UN what he's done for the US!

Win-win!

Writer X said...

But in Obama's mind, his good intentions are all that matter.

It's truly amazing how much destruction this idiot boy-child President has done in 3 years.

BevfromNYC said...

Please...PLEASE...make him stop talking!

USArtguy said...

Last night was the first Obama speech I watched in it's entirety. He's just had nothing I wanted to listen to for the last two years. I didn't really want to watch him last night, but I've been out of a job for 9 months now. It was more of a curiosity for me as I knew his "jobs" speech couldn't/wouldn't have any "hope or change" for little old non-union, middle class, white American male me. I heard about construction (union) jobs and teacher (union) jobs, but that was about it.

I immediately thought of this US slip in ranking to number 5 by the Forum when he said "We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom... America should be in a race to the top."

Ironic, aint it?

T-Rav said...

I think the fact that we're losing to Sweden should be proof positive that something is wrong with our economic policy. But then again, Tom Friedman and Ezra Klein don't seem to think so, so I guess maybe not.

Unknown said...

Ponderosa: Ya know, I really think that Obama would like to have that job, and would consider it a much higher honor than being merely the President of one insignificant nation about to go broke.

Unknown said...

Ah, Bev: Would that I had the power to do that. Now that I'm an official redneck, I have plenty of duct tape to do the job.

Unknown said...

USArtguy: I'm really sorry to hear you've been out of work that long. It's hard to win the race to the top, when you've slathered the course with slippery regulations, government interference, and bureaucratic roadblocks. The Great Prevaricator's speech yesterday did very little to comfort anyone who is out of work or encourage anyone outside of unions and the government employment sector. Next, he'll be telling us how many of the phantom temporary jobs are shovel-ready.

Unknown said...

T-Rav: For all their socialist policies (which are slowly being undone), the Swedes have always been an industrious people. Still, their resources are much fewer than ours and their population base is immensely smaller than ours, so it just doesn't make sense that they should have a higher competitiveness index than ours. But I'll have to defer to Friedman, Klein, Krugman and their ilk for the explanation.

rlaWTX said...

my grandmother asked me the other night, "Isn't all that money that was spent on banks and companies for stimulus part of the debt?" I answered in the affirmative. Then she asked why Obama didn't "own" that debt, claim it. I explained that because it was spent while they "meant well" it doesn't count against them. Good intentions do not get applied to the debt responsibility. She was confused by the reasoning, but I think it stands up: The gummit means well with all of their mad spending and bailing so the used up money cannot be counted against the gummit when figuring how bad off we are. It simply isn't their fault because they meant well...

And we all know that good intentions lead down the garden path, and (organic) gardens are good! Right!?!?!?!?

AndrewPrice said...

This is exactly the kind of thing Republicans need to fix.

Tennessee Jed said...

Hawk - in a way, your post encapsulates everything one really needs to know about President Obama except his true motives (oh wait, we don't really NEED to know that other than for pure curiosity sake.)

I remember having the CEO of the fortune 500 corporation where I worked talk to those of us in our management group. In a calm, almost nice, but firm way, he informed us that our stockholders didn't really give a rat's ass about our good intentions or how hard we tried. They, essentially, expected us to provide results for their invested capital in our little enterprise. I often think of this whenever I hear the president and his liberal buds blather on about economics.

Unknown said...

rlaWTX: Good intentions and utopian ideals trump reality, at least in the minds of Obamists and Keynesians. Unfortunately, we live in the real world where we have to deal with real numbers. These people are like the idiot who is told by the bank that his checking account is overdrawn, to which he replies: "I can't be out of money, I still have checks left."

Unknown said...

Andrew: The Good Lord willing, it will be so nice to have a new President who actually understands how business and accounting work.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: I had a professor who said that economics is what you do after you've failed basic accounting. I also had a CEO tell me when I had my first management position that "the job of a manager is to manage." I almost felt insulted that he would say something that flippant to me. Years in management and practice taught me just how wise that statement was. Obama doesn't know that simple dictum. He has also been willfully deaf to the expression "actions speak louder than words."

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