Now Obama says he didn't say "you didn't build that"

[Guest]

Yep, the Obama administration promised while ramming through the stimulus package that unemployment wouldn't exceed 8%.

CFR

That's a reasonable request.

Back in early January, when Barack Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers — leading proponents of a stimulus bill — predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn't quite worked out that way. Last month, the jobless rate in the U.S. hit 9.5%, the highest level it has reached since 1983.

The two advisers who wrote the paper, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, went on to land key jobs in the Obama Administration. Romer is the head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and Bernstein is the chief economist and economic-policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. And the stimulus bill that both economists championed became law in mid-February. What has not come to pass, however, is the boom in job creation that Romer and Bernstein predicted.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1910208,00.html

More than three years later, the unemployment rate is still above 8%. And it would be much higher if so many discouraged workers had not dropped our of the job market.

I was hoping you might have something more than the often-quoted Romer/Bernstein paper that projected the unemployment rate would be below 8% as a best-case scenario.

I wonder how many people would agree that a projection by a couple of future staffers constitutes a "promise"? Or as Romney continues to say, "The president promised that unemployment would stay below 8%."

Clearly these two underestimated how bad the economy really was, and they let hope get the better of them. You can tell this is the case by their projection that the rate would peak at 9% even without any stimulus.

In actuality, jobless numbers were climbing steadily, in almost a straight line, from early 2008 to late 2009. The recession was too deep, and the stimulus was too small to make a difference in a few months. The situation called for a much larger, more aggressive injection of stimulus money.

[_Droopy]

Obama says. "If you were successful somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere along the line in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads an bridges - if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

What Obama is saying is that success doesn't happen in a vacuum. For example, if you own a trucking company, you benefit from the transportation infrastructure that government built. Romney (and the American Standard) deliberately take the quote of context to mislead people about what the President is actually saying

.

On the surface, that's what he appears to be saying, and there are deep philosophical problems with that belief, but I've already posted extensively on that and see no reason to do so further here. What Obama said, and the salient window into his authentic beliefs and attitudes, was this:

if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen

This is the core, a gaffe that was not a gaff, just like his "spread the wealth around" statement. Society, and all its individual members, are a unitary, organic collective. What happens to one happens to all, and no one within that collective actually ever "does" anything for himself at all in a really salient moral, ethical, self-contained sense at all. The individual never builds, constructs, creates, generates, or succeeds "on his own," by which Obama and virtual all socialist thinkers mean that the individual is a cell within a vast tissue, or organic whole, without which the cell would be meaningless. Getting up in the morning, working 16 hour days, learning and educating oneself, struggling, saving, investing, and risking, while they appear to be personal, individual behaviors and actions to which personal ownership, merit, and compensation should apply, are really only the activities of a cell within an organ or tissue mass (society) within which all those personal attributes are but dependent representations or epiphenomena of the workings of the entire organic whole.

Man only has meaning within the state within the tissues of the organic collective. What this means in actual political practices is that, for example, the inventor of the vacuum tube has no claim to any great degree of wealth for having developed and marketed it, even if, as a matter of actual personal behavior, action, activity, and perseverance, he experimented and created it alone in his basement.

Why? Because of the teacher, the public school system, the free and reduced lunch program, Head Start, roads, bridges, storm drains, parents, government coinage of money, whatever it may be. In the leftist/socialist vision, the collective is, in some sense, directly responsible for the individual suceess of any particular component of it. Hence, monetary and other compensation for creative economic activity is to be shared equally with the other members of the society; with the "synergy" that produced and maintains the basis upon which individual economic success in predicated.

Leftists like Obama, however, strictly avoid the ultimate chicken/egg question of where all that government infrastructure and economic synergy came from in the first place; how it came about, how it was put in place, by whom, and by what means.

The entire concept that "you" (Steve Jobs, say) "didn't build that" is nothing more that a vast pretext for serfdom; it is an emotional and psychological pretext and argument for the complete domination of human economic, temporal, and personal life by the state.

[_Droopy]

My co-author recently reviewed a book which show that patent applications took off after Reagan's tax cuts in the 1980s.

Are you serious? Patent applications increased by a larger margin after Clinton increased taxes and they were already on the rise between 1979-1982 before his 1981 tax cuts took effect. Patents went from 100,500 in 1979 to 109,600 in 1982 but then dropped in 1983 to 103,700 and then increased gradually peaking at 139,000 by the end of his term. That rate of increase leveled off between 1990-1993 but then jumped up after Clinton raised taxes, going from 174,000 to 212,000 in two years. By the time Clinton left office that number was 295,000.

But I don't know why you'd tie economic productivity with patent applications anyway. That really makes no sense. Corporations have been abusing patent law, especially those involved with chemical engineering our foods, our drugs, etc.

Economists know that the Reagan tax cut didn't create economic boom. That was primarily due to the fed cutting interest rates, as even Reagan's economists even admitted during that time. It was much later when corporations and wealthy people, looking for a way to deceive people into thinking they should pay less, decided to use the correlation = causation fallacy with Reagan's tax cuts. All that did really was explode our deficit for the first time with WWII.

A few quotes from Kevin's alter ego, Joseph Goebbles, will provide the salient background for virtually everything the pseudo-educated intellectual hack Kevin Graham says:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

And the statement, brilliant in its insight from the Left as to what contemporary political correctness really is and the reason it developed where it developed, in the Academy, public ed, and the media, and why the Left/Right divide is so complete, so rancorous, and so divisive:

Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character