Monday, April 23, 2012

Obama Knew Youthful Poverty (?)

Last week our po' boy President let us know how tough life was when he was a child of poverty. Unlike Mitt Romney, he says, "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." There wouldn't have been room in there for a silver spoon because he always seems to have his foot in his mouth.

Not only did poor little Barry Soetoro Obama have to settle for a gold spoon, but when they took that away from him, he had to improvise tiny spoons for his college drug use. And it just gets sadder. He remembers that as a child he had to take subways and buses to get to a place where he could buy fresh fruit (Michelle’s big on fixing that modern problem, ya know). I didn’t even know they had subways in Indonesia and Kenya, but I’ll take his word for it. And if he wanted fresh fruit at grandma’s, couldn’t he just walk out into the fields and grab a nice fresh pineapple? I keep waiting for him to steal Oprah Winfrey's story of eating mashed potato sandwiches.

Mitt Romney had the misfortune of being born into a family that did have money, a great deal of it by the time Mitt was a youngster. But papa George taught his son frugality, which grew out of his own experience of hunger and want during FDR’s Great Depression. And contrary to popular belief, Mitt didn’t have the chauffeur pull the Rolls Royce around to the grand portico to pick him up and take him to the fresh fruit stand for guavas and mangoes (or pineapple, for that matter). During Mitt’s younger years they were more likely to hop into the family Nash Rambler (George was moving up in the company at the time).

Said Obama: “In this country prosperity does not trickle down, prosperity grows from the bottom up. That’s why I’m always confused when we keep having the same argument with folks who don’t seem to remember how America was built.” Obviously he got his history from Howard Zinn and his politics from Marx. How does Obama build that bottom-up wealth? Well, not by trickling. He literally pours federal largess on his poor and oppressed acolytes. He’s like a manic Robin Hood. He robs from everybody who works so he can give their money to people who don’t like to work. He’s confused, all right.

Obama’s idea of how to encourage growth from the bottom up is not particularly new. It was invented by the late Lyndon B. Johnson, President and creator of welfare dependency on a massive scale. He called it the Great Society which has evolved into the Bankrupt Society. Nearly a half-century later, and after flooding them with a few trillion no-strings dollars, the poor are poorer than ever. Obama goes Johnson one step better. He redefines the middle class as “rich,” and steals from them. If this bottom-up plan continues much longer, we’ll run out of rich people to pay the bills for the non-working poor.

As somebody recently said, “I don’t know a single poor person who was able to hire other people.” Well, according to Obama, that’s because the poor person has to pay for his two cars, giant screen TV, filet mignon, six illegitimate children and instant slum dwelling before he can hire anybody to help him spend the taxpayers money. The solution is to take even more money from the “rich” and hand it to the poor so the poor can hire others to spend the taxpayers money. It’s hard work getting into your new SUV to go to the grocery store to use your EBT “free food” card to buy those steaks. And it’s also a hard intellectual exercise to get that quart of Johnnie Walker and those Winston 100s classified as food.

At the same time he was making his Ohio silver spoon speech, he also visited several Cleveland suburbs where unemployment has been very high for a long time. He continued his class-warfare tactics throughout the state. Ohio is a battleground state, and Obama is spending a lot of the taxes from the “rich” to convince out-of-work industrial workers that he is looking out for their interests. In other words, he isn’t campaigning on the public dime, he’s “finding solutions.”

This President is the stiffest, most insincere and uptight man in the office since Richard Nixon was photographed walking along the beach at surf’s edge in a suit and tie, but carrying his shoes and socks to exhibit that he had the common touch. I don’t care if a President was born poor or rich. That tells you nothing about the candidate’s actual capacity for understanding, empathizing and finding solutions other than handouts. I’ve known very wealthy people who were poor in their youth and grew up to simply hate poor people. And I’ve known very wealthy people who were very well-off in their youth as well who truly had a sense of the plight of the poor and how (as the United Negro College Fund used to say) the poor need a “hand, not a handout.”

When a business owner has to pay $50,000 a year for a simple clerical employee as salary, benefits and payroll taxes, he always has to be cautious about hiring new personnel. In bad economic times made worse by the government’s hostility toward business, crippling regulations, and love of taxes on the “rich,” that same business owner is simply unlikely to hire anybody new and may have to lay off or terminate valued longtime employees. He can pay more in taxes, or he can hire new employees and retain older ones. But he can’t do both when the future has been rendered dangerously uncertain by leftist social engineering schemes.

Silver spoon or not, Obama simply doesn’t understand that poor people almost never create wealth. Poor people who get jobs because wealthier people with money and businesses are anxious to hire them or invest in them then have the opportunity to create wealth themselves. But wealth doesn’t spring up from the bottom by spontaneous generation. Romney does understand that, so if he was actually silver spoon fed, I’ll forgive him.

23 comments:

Tennessee Jed said...

sadly, there are people who feel capitalism concentrates wealth in too few hands, and it is hard to disagree that can happen. The problem is that it's opposite, socialism or (worse) communism tend to enslave people and drag everybody to the lowest common denominator. When B.O. whines about growin' po', I cannot help but think of Limbaugh's parody using the Jefferson's theme song "movin' on up."

Tennessee Jed said...

I know this link will not be clickable but it is on this subject and is a true hoot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h8O7V-WxWQ&feature=youtu.be

Unknown said...

Tennessee: Capitalism can become monopoly or oligopoly if left to its own devices. But the Constitution allows the people and their elected representatives to prevent too much concentration of power and money into too few hands. Congress has the express power to regulate interstate commerce and we have anti-monopoly and anti-restraint of trade statutes to help prevent that. Like everything in a system of government designed to provide maximum freedom with minimum ability to impose on the rights of others, the balance waxes and wanes. Right now, the balance is tilted toward socialism, but a Republican victory would quickly move it back toward free enterprise (but not predatory capitalism).

I'm one of those entirely unimpressed by the log cabin meme. It's old, it's hackneyed, and in most cases largely untrue.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: Clickable link: Reagan Instructs Obama. Very funny, and very apt. Thanks.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: Were you asking me? LOL

T-Rav said...

Somehow, I don't think it will matter to the Democrats what Romney does with his money or how frugal he is personally. The fact that he has so much is enough to condemn him.

Unknown said...

T-Rav: True enough. But the appeal isn't to the Democrats. It's to those Independents who will probably be the deciding factor in the election. I think Obama has made another serious mistake by thinking that the majority of those Independents are as envious and lazy as the Democratic base.

CrisD said...

Hi LawHawk!
Need that T-shirt by Mother's Day! I will win first prize among my siblings :D

We had some great news here on the job front (after one full year of contracting-way too long for someone with my husband's credentials). Son is employed with a part-time and is attempting to balance a second part-time as I speak. College grads are looking at about a 50% unemployment level. Not good!

Romney has to have better instincts than zero. I don't care who grew up with macaroni and cheese from scratch and who had it from a box.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

Great t-shirt!

BevfromNYC said...

But LawHawk - The "poor" create wealth for OTHER people from the sweat of their brow and with no reward because the "evil rich people" ("ERP")take it all for themselves. That's what he means by "bottom up wealth creation". - The "Sweat Equity" school of economics. The little poor person physically makes and sells the products by the sweat of his/her brow, but the Bossman/ERP reaps all the rewards.

AndrewPrice said...

The Democrats are big on class warfare. What the Republicans need to do is remind people that it's the evil rich who provide jobs and security and pay for their benefits.

Unknown said...

Cris: Good to hear that things are looking up in the employment department in your family.

I've quoted this before, but it's worth repeating. My mom went through some very hard times, both as a small child and then during the Great Depression. The lesson it taught her, in her own words, was "To be poor but proud is a virtue, to be poor and proud of it is a vice." Politicians like Obama encourage the latter vice, and we have multigenerational families who only know the words "I'm entitled, and I know my rights. Give me 'my' money." Ptui!

Unknown said...

Joel: I was thinking of ordering one for myself and each of my kids. The grandkids will have to get their own. We're teaching them that you have to pay your own way in life. LOL

Unknown said...

Bev: That's their thinking. Don't get me started on the constant liberal repetition of Marx's totally-discredited theory of the "labor theory of value." In today's techno society, it essentially means that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should have been paupers, but their computers should be the richest creations on earth.

Unknown said...

Andrew: They need to hammer on that theme over and over until the unaligned voter stops listening to "sounds good, ain't true" socialist propaganda and starts realizing that poverty doesn't create wealth. Wealth alleviates poverty. But nothing can reach those who believe their entitled to the fruits of other people's work. The Republican message from wealthy candidates like Romney should be "come and join us." That's the opposite of class warfare, and the opposite of Obama's politics of resentment.

Unknown said...

Cris: I guess we come from a different era, or at least a different way of thinking. I never pled poverty. But the wolf was at the door, and I didn't even know it. When I was fifteen, my dad passed away from a massive heart attack and stroke. We found out rather quickly that he had quite literally worked himself to death trying to cover up the fact that his business was failing.

Nobody told me to go out and collect all those wonderful goodies (and there were a lot fewer of them then) the government gives to widows and orphans who would rather mourn for the rest of their lives rather than do what needed to be done. The only words I heard were "you're the man of the family now, and your mother needs you to take charge."

So, I didn't look back, and the lesson I learned was self-reliance. My mom went to work for the first time in twenty years, and I took my first real job. The last thing on earth on I taught my kids is that if something happened to me and/or their mother, they should immediately go to the government to replace us and our incomes.

So pardon me, po' boy Obama, my brush with poverty taught me to get off my comfortable butt and go to work. It sure as hell didn't teach me that the government is my savior. And I never resented rich people, I just wanted to be one of them. Never quite made it, but I got a lot closer than I would have had I gone on the dole.

Individualist said...

It is funny but does not our Messiah remember wat he said about the poor over 2000 years ago

"The Poor will always be with us"

Unknown said...

Indi: Why would he? That was said by a false Messiah, but Obama is the real deal. Or something like that. Obama's version of the Sermon on the Mount is "blessed are the poor, for the gummint shall feed, clothe and house them, and the rich shall pay for it and become poor." Unfortunately, he neglects to tell us what happens after the rich no longer exist.

He has also turned Kennedy's inaugural address on its head. "Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you without your having done a single thing to earn it."

T-Rav said...

The labor theory of value (wrongly attributed to Locke) is the logical flaw at the heart of Marxism, based on a complete misunderstanding of supply and demand. Ol' Karl must have been out of it the day he wrote that one down.

Tehachapi Tom said...

Hawk
I did not read the constitution as regulating inter=state commerce as controlling same. Instead regulating was to mean inter-state tariffs or refusal was to be controlled. The assurance of unfettered inter-state commerce is what the founders wanted to insure.
Trickle up is stupid, gravity won't allow it.
And bo is stupid to even attempt to support such a bankrupt concept.
He refers to him self as rich, he did not earn any wealth thru constructive gain but instead as a leech on others.
As for the shirt name for him I think "ass" is to good, close but in my view he is just passing thru.

Unknown said...

T-Rav: I think Marx was out of it a whole lot of the time. And when he was conscious, he was just recycling Hegelianism with a twist.

Unknown said...

tryanmax: The vast majority of business people (those not sucking at the federal teat) see that as a complete barrier to new hiring and even retention. So what hiring there is is largely in the public sector or in Obama-friendly industries with big federal assistance. If it goes on much longer, the economy will collapse and private enterprise will be dead forever.

Unknown said...

Tehachapi Tom: As I said, the use of the interstate commerce clause waxes and wanes with the administration in power, but the Supreme Court was instrumental in making the expansion a distinct possibility. Our current Supreme Court is chipping away at that expansion, but it will be decades before it can get the whole thing back under constitutional control. How we read the interstate commerce clause is not very significant compared to the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Obama is rich (and will get richer after he's evicted from the White House) solely because of his crony socialism. Needless to say, that wealth won't trickle up or down for those of us who believe in free enterprise.

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