An original American

Lloyd Marcus is an unusual American, a black conservative.  He is also a talented graphic artist and singer and above all he's a full-blooded patriot.  Reading his biography on line reveals a life's journey that took (takes) great courage and fundamental believe in the goodness of man and in the country we live in.  He has written frequently for American Thinker on line magazine, his latest column here.  He surely pegged our incumbent president accurately four years ago.

Replay of the 1930's?

Investors Business Daily provided one of the more insightful analyses of Obama's oration at the DNC Convention here.  Any objective history of FDR's New Deal (and there are a few) credits all the deficit spending through the alphabet programs tried by New Dealers as abject failure.  It's well to remember at this time that the Great Recession started with the stock market collapse of 1929 and really only ended after WWII, although some claim at the onset of that conflict.  All of Hoover and FDR's interventionist programs (begun under Republican Hoover), served only to prolong the recovery making it in the end the longest in history by far.  It is not surprising that Obama, who has no clue how wealth and jobs are created, is reduced to dredging up the failed policies of the Democrats of another era.  Since Obama is at best a Keynesian, and since his sense of history is most likely the result of reading liberal historians like Harvard's Arthur Schlesinger and Yale's Paul Kennedy, how would he know how misguided those '30's economic nostrums were?  If one likes the current economy and votes for Obama, expect a repeat of the '30's and a recession/depression that will last 10 years or more.  Not much of a choice.

The record of a loser?

Here is a partial list of the Obama administrations record, to date.  Can anyone in his right mind vote to reelect the authors of this horrific record??

23,136,000: The Number Of Americans Who Are Unemployed, Underemployed, Or Have Stopped Looking For Work. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

12,544,000: The Number Of Unemployed Workers. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

8,031,000: The Number Of Workers Working Part-Time For Economic Reasons. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

5,033,000: The Number Of Workers Who Have Been Unemployed For 27 Weeks Or Longer. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

1,043,000: Construction Jobs Lost Since President Obama Took Office. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

582,000 Manufacturing Jobs Lost Since President Obama Took Office. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

368,000: Workers That Dropped Out Of The Labor Force In August. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

261,000: Jobs Lost Since President Obama Took Office. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

41,000: Downward Revision Of Jobs Created Over The Last Two Months. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

15,000: Manufacturing Jobs Lost In August. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

1981: The Last Time The Labor Force Participation Rate Was At Its Current Level Of 63.5 Percent. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

43: Consecutive Months The Unemployment Rate Has Remained Above Eight Percent. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

39.2 Weeks: The Average Duration Of Unemployment – Nearly Double The 19.8 Weeks When President Obama Took Office. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

14.7 Percent: The Real Unemployment Rate, Including Those That Are Working Part-Time Due To Economic Reasons. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

11.2 Percent: The Unemployment Rate Had Labor Force Participation Remained Steady Since President Obama Took Office. (American Enterprise Institute, 9/7/12)

8.4 Percent: The Unemployment Rate Had Labor Force Participation Remained Steady From July. (American Enterprise Institute, 9/7/12)

8.1 Percent: The Unemployment Rate In August. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

7.8 Percent: The Unemployment Rate When President Obama Took Office. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12)

5.4 Percent: The Unemployment Rate President Obama’s Advisers Predicted If We Passed His $787 Billion Stimulus. (Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, “The Job Impact Of The American Recovery And Reinvestment Plan,”1/9/09)

Two questions: 1) Has there ever been a more comprehensive failure than Barack Obama? 2) Why would the Romney campaign ever run an ad that doesn’t include at least a couple of these figures?

A critical election

Both the DNC and GOP conventions are history.  After a few days (hours?) of post mortems the candidates will be hitting the campaign trail for the last sixty days of what seems an interminably long, painful process.  Painful because of all the lies and distortions oneness to wade through to decide who has the best path forward for the country. It should be clear to just about everyone that Obama's policies over the past four years have not worked, in fact, cannot work.  One would expect him to offer a different set of policies for the next four years.  Surprisingly in his convention speech he chose instead to simply ask for more time for his policies to finish the job.  Since most of his policies are have been tried in Europe and in outright socialist countries over and over and have always failed, it does seem a bit cheeky for him to ask the citizens for more time to prove he's right.  However, since the welfare state policies and programs of the past 75 years have created a huge constituency of dependents, and given that the Democrat Party has more or less perfected the ability to promote and pander to these voters, he stands a pretty good chance of reelection.  His election will take the country further along the road to socialism and the inevitable ruin that social order produces.  Romney's election, on the other hand,  providing he makes good on the reforms needed to get us back to a more honest, free enterprise capitalism, should provide the course correction desperately needed.  Four more years of Obama and his crown should just about be the right amount of time to turn our economy into the basket case economies we now see in Europe.  This is an important election.

Wisdom from a Progressive

These paragraphs from a Thomas Sowell article quoting Woodrow Wilson, the champion of progressives everywhere, should be required reading for every Democrat and politician in the country:

President Woodrow Wilson himself urged Congress to reconsider whether very high tax rates are in fact "productive of revenue" to the government. He said that, beyond some point, "high rates of income and profits taxes discourage energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures, and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils." That sounds a lot like where we are today.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents once warned that high tax rates can reduce economic growth. And Secretaries of the Treasury under both Democratic and Republican administrations once pointed out that higher tax rates do not necessarily bring in more tax revenues than lower tax rates. Yet this lesson from more than 90 years ago has still not been learned by those who advocate higher taxes on "the rich" as the answer to our fiscal problems.

In today's global economy, it is even easier for genuine millionaires and billionaires to escape high tax rates by investing in other countries. Not so for the other nine-tenths of the people hit with higher tax rates, such as small business owners or independent professionals such as dentists or realtors, whose sources of income are necessarily local.