American Elephants

President Obama gave a defiant State of the Union speech tonight, full of whoppers. He’s still congratulating himself for ending the War in Afghanistan, as fighters he released from Guantanamo are heading up ISIS in that country.

Several writers have referred to his ‘trolling’ Republicans. Byron York put it clearly:

With no real political clout on Capitol Hill and a job approval rating that has stayed mostly below 50 percent for a long time, Obama is trying to leverage the power he has left to force his agenda on the Republican majority. His big talk, executive actions, and outlandish proposals are the best ways he has to control the debate in Washington.

I think we misunderstand. Obama believes that he has successfully accomplished much of the fundamental transformation of America that he embarked upon, and he considers the two elections he won as validation of that ideology. Remember the extent to which the Democrats extolled Obama as young, fresh, new and interesting.?

I think people voted for the first Black President, and did see him as new and fresh. But I don’t think they were voting for “fundamentally transforming” the United States of America, or if they did, they didn’t mean by the phrase what Obama had in mind. Obama believes he has been quite successful, and Danielle Pletka got it right:

For Barack Obama, many of these are success stories; or to put it another way, isn’t Assad isolated? Don’t we almost have a deal with Iran? Look at Putin struggling, Castro releasing political prisoners. Look at the wars that have ended, China’s cooperation on the world stage, and recognize that while hundreds of thousands have died throughout the Middle East at the hands of terrorists, there has been no attack on American soil.

He has not changed his mind. He is defiant, and expects to combat Republicans all the way. He will attempt to use the tax-increases he wants as bargaining chips, and veto everything else. In the last few weeks, he has raised his approval rating back up to 50% with the help of his lapdog media, who have happily reported an economy in full recovery, (celebrating the phony 5% growth rate); unemployment rate down to 5.6% ( but of an increasingly smaller work force).

The scary numbers came out from Gallup last week. For the first time in 35 years, American business startups have fallen below the business failure rate. That has to be changed, or the American economy is not coming back. The U.S. now ranks 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. And we pretty much know why. Overregulation, red tape, higher taxes, ObamaCare regulation and penalties, too much government, White House policies, bad business climate, muddled government rules. If new businesses are not starting up — where are the jobs supposed to come from?

The ideological Left believes firmly in more and bigger government, more controls, more regulations, and increased taxes to pay for it all. That’s what President Obama was proposing tonight. Leftists sneer at “trickle-down economics”— their name for lower taxes. But it’s far better for someone to use their money to start a business than to use their money to plan for tax avoidance. Lower taxes create more income for the government. Freed of tax avoidance schemes, free people invent, experiment and start new enterprises. They don’t need more government to tell them how to do business. They need government to get out of the way.

A  record 92.9 million Americans are no longer part of our workforce.

Seven years ago, before the recession, the economy was projected to have five million more jobs at the end of 2014 than we do. GDP was projected to be 11 percent higher in 2014 than it is. Annual output was projected to be $2 trillion higher, or more than $6,000 per person. And we won’t see much wage growth until there is a higher demand for workers.

The $8 trillion housing bubble did a lot of damage to the economy, and Obama wants to do the same thing all over again by reducing the down payment for a mortgage from 20% of the cost, down to 3% because he wants to see more people owning their own homes, which was what caused the housing bubble in the first place. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re apt to repeat them.