Demagoguery

During the past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this:  “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”  And President Barack Obama wrote that without a so-called stimulus bill, the current recession will become so severe that “we may not be able to reverse” it.

 

All of which brings to mind the famous quote by H.L. Mencken many years ago:  “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

 

Pelosi’s claim is so asinine that it should incite laughter among anyone who has even a casual acquaintance with facts. Since the entire population of the United States is only 300 million – a number that includes children, retirees, stay-at-home parents, prisoners, disabled, etc. – there is no arithmetic in the universe that could make it possible for 500 million to lose their jobs at all, much less every month.

 

And Obama’s claim is absurd.  Historically, recessions last from 5 to 11 months during which the private economy adjusts to whatever caused the recession, and those adjustments then lead to periods of economic growth which last 4 to 6 years and cause the country to be more prosperous than before the recession.  And it's worth noting that America’s economy has been stronger than the world’s others even when it is going through a recession.

 

Only one time in our history has a recession lasted for years, and it just so happens that time was the only one in which our government responded the way Obama wants it to respond now.  When FDR took office the economy had been ailing for about a year, and he proceeded to usher in unprecedented government involvement in the economy.  The recession then grew into the Great Depression, which was still going on 8 years later.  The unemployment rate during that period was three times what it is today.

 

Conversely, history provides many examples of tax cuts enacted during recessions helping to spur recovery by leaving more money in people’s pockets, and thus available to be used naturally in the economy.  This happened under Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush (Democrats like to ignore the fact that through most of Bush's tenure the economy was much stronger through when he was elected...only to be undone in the end by liberal policies like government mandates in the credit industry, plus Bush's liberal tendency to spend wildly on dubious social programs).

 

Yet, during the past week Obama had the audacity to write this about tax cuts:  “I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”  It is his right to reject the philosophy of tax cuts if he chooses, even if the facts show that choice to be foolish.  But when you consider that one of the main reasons he won the election was that he kept proclaiming he would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, what are you to make of his current statement that “the American people” reject tax cuts?  Of the many conclusions you might draw, none of them say anything good about the self-flattering egotist who occupies the Oval Office.

 

One week before being elected, Obama said that a vote for him was a vote “to choose hope over fear.”  On the day he was sworn in, he said that by electing him the nation had “chosen hope over fear.”  Yet his recent comments (and those of his ally Pelosi) are fear-mongering at its worst, and the mongering is being done to gin up angst amongst the people so the people will pressure Congress to rush through a disastrous bill without scrutinizing it first.  The bill is disastrous because it will greatly increase government’s control over private initiative.  It does much to hurt the economy in the long-term, and nothing to help it in either the short- or long-term.

 

Obama is a Marxist who cares about power and doesn’t give a damn about average citizens, other than figuring out how he can manipulate them into yielding power to him.  I have said it before and I will not stop saying it, because there is a wealth of evidence that supports that statement and none that contradicts it.