Andy Kessler offers a fine explanation of the concept of creative destruction and how new efficiencies, technologies and imagination lead to productivity, the means by which we’ll grow our way out the mess “Progressives” have made.
President Obama faulted ATMs, airport kiosks, and too few buggy-whip makers for the state of our current economy. OK, he didn’t mention whip makers, but for lack of time we suspect.
The President in another blazing example of the corroding effects of a Punahou, Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law education, argues that no individual has ever created a business; not through ideas, not with hard work, not because of perseverance, not by unabridged imagination, not at all. If one has ever received help from another in any way, it is the collective effort that succeeds.
President Barack Obama addressed supporters in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday afternoon and took a shot at the business community. President Obama dismissed any credit business owners give themselves for their success:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Several months back former house speaker Newt Gingrich charged that the President has presided over an “unprecedented” rise in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the appealing euphemism for “food stamps.” Immediately labeled a racist by the president’s apologists, acolytes, and mainstream media lick-spittles, the Speaker simply responded with facts that were ignored by “Progressives” who don’t argue, but attack.
From the report:
On average, 45 million people received SNAP benefits each month in fiscal year 2011, which represents a 70 percent increase over the roughly 26 million people (or one of every 11) who received benefits in 2007. Outlays for SNAP benefits (not including administrative costs) more than doubled during that period, from about $30 billion to $72 billion.
John Stossel puts into terms even Progressives can understand why “taxing the ‘evil’ rich” can’t solve our financial fiasco:
Progressives say: If you’re so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! But it’s a fantasy to imagine that taxing the rich will solve our deficit problem. If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion. That’s only a third of this year’s deficit.
He failed to note that in year two, the available cash sweep would be dramatically smaller resulting from lack capital investment. Each successive year would decline quickly and we’d still have colossal deficits, millions fewer jobs and a collapsing society . . . not to mention a mass exodus of job creators outsourced to foreign lands…
Nature, a scientific magazine favored among the left has published a study debunking decades of Progressive propaganda blaming man and the industrial development for “Global Warming” because there is none. In a more reader friendly analysis, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has illuminated incandescently the study of 2,000 years of earth climate changes and concluded a two millennium cooling of planet Earth.
San Bernadino joins Stockton, Mammoth Lakes and Vallejo in seeking bankruptcy protections as California sinks slowly into the abyss.
What do these four cities share in common? All are repositories of Democrat social experimentation, fiscal mismanagement, union obeisance, and Progressive fleecing of those who produce the only source of income . . . private enterprise.
The Democrat National Committee Chairman with the unwieldly name, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, demanded breathlessly that Mitt Romney come clean! He’s a “tax cheat” she and her colleagues shriek. Too much fun folks! She is the tax cheat, and if not, she better prove it!
Consistent with the newest dishonest assault – and don’t take it from me, read Politifact or FactChecker – she and every Democrat flack on Sunday who wallowed in the new charge that Romney has offshore assets to avoid U.S taxation and to create jobs overseas should now be “taxed” into disclosing all of their offshore investments. Of course it’s untrue; he pays all U.S. tax due irrespective of the country of origin and presumably DMS does too…
Scranton Pennsylvania, childhood home of our vice president, Lunch Bucket Joe Biden, is broke. And in a delicious irony, the Democrat mayor, unable to grease a tax hike through his city council, has taken to using city employees, the “public servants” so adored by the Democrat Party, as blunt instruments, cutting their pay to minimum wage.
Without commenting on whether that’s a valuation of their contributions to civic society it does cause a chuckle. The President borrows from China to fund local public employment – and collect the campaign contributions provided by the public employee unions – and the mayor cares not a wit about serving the taxpayers who elected him.
Nearly every large municipality has been managed to the edge of bankruptcy by 50 years of Progressive politics.
And, Atlas Shrugged.
Sane and Insane 