Well, I’d like to offer my modest proposal of just two items for starters:
1. Truman famously stated that “The buck stops here.” That phrase comes from the slang expression "pass the buck" which means passing the responsibility on to someone else. In my lifetime there has never been a president more willing to "pass the buck" or "spend the buck" than President Obama. Really, please name one thing that he has done which has not gone well for which he has taken responsibility? Even the positive things he has done like killing bin Laden are overshadowed by his undignified grabbing undo credit and his CYA preparation in case things did not go well. His bragging was completely un-Presidential.
The irony will be that if Obama loses re-election it could be due to his inability to admit his mistakes. Even now, if he were to admit that his 1 Trillion dollar stimulus spending was a mistake, the American people would accept his apology and be much more likely to follow him. When he doubles down on his mistakes, he alienates people.
No one has ever blamed more people than Obama. Of course it was Bush, than it was Big Banks, then it was Big Oil and Big Pharma, and just about any other industry that made money. It was those obstructionist Republicans even when he passed the largest, most far reaching legislation without getting a single Republican vote. Really, to avoid getting even a single vote from the opposition takes real talent, Democrat or Republican.
2. There are so many mistakes it is hard to know where to start. People are always interested in money so let’s start there and talk about the failed stimulus spending.
The number one method of creating jobs with The Great Stimulus was increasing unemployment payments. Really, I’m not making this up. Nancy Reed and Harry Pelosi (these names are from James Taranto, my favorite blogger) along with Obama and a few Republicans have been pushing unemployment pay as a way to create jobs. If this is news to you or if you do not believe me, I would like to give you some more information: This is an election year, a really important election year so it is about time to start paying attention.
Obama wasted almost 1 Trillion dollars on his failed stimulus spending. 1 Trillion dollars. I know that we have all become immune to the numbers we hear but let’s think about this just a little. How else could I spend 1 Trillion dollars? I would like to make one suggestion. I think that my idea is a really, really bad idea. However, I think that it is vastly better than how it was spent to pay back Obama’s political friends.
Okay, in the US, there will be about 140 million tax returns filed this year. I know that all my friends file a tax return so this may be somewhat shocking that only that many file, but that is about the right number. If you take out the people who are not citizens, you get fairly close to 100 million tax returns. About half of the remaining people don’t actually pay any federal income tax but they do pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If you take only citizens who actually pay at least $1 of income tax, the number is significantly less than 100 million.
So, of those citizens who pay at least $1 of income tax, we randomly take 1 million of those and make than instant millionaires. That means if you are an income tax payer you would have a better than 1% (almost 2%) chance of being a millionaire. The only stipulation on that $1 million is that you had to spend it in one year inside of the US. One million new millionaires. Think about that for awhile and think of the economic hurricane it would engender.
One Trillion is a lot of money, and we spent about $250,000 for each job it created for one year. We've added over $5 Trillion in new debt over the last 3 years. If you think about how we wasted $1 Trillion and it does not make you want to cry, there is something wrong with you. How about your ideas on how to spend $1 Trillion? Maybe, just maybe, should we have spent it at all?
