President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here.

You do not want to cut spending and you only want more stimulus even though it has resulted in failure in the last three years in the USA. Now you are bragging about the results and telling your socialist friends in Europe to do the same.

Obama’s Pro-Growth Illusion

Barack Obama claims to be pro-growth. So does Greece, Spain, and almost everyone else. Why? Because admitting preference for the alternative—crushing, heavy-handed government interference that kills initiative and destroys wealth—is not attractive to any citizen of any country.

The problem lies in the meaning of “pro-growth”. As an unabashed capitalist, and as a supporter of free markets, I believe “pro-growth” means less government interference and more individual accountability where private sector businesses create the jobs and government pretty much stays out of the equation. But it’s increasingly clear that our president has a much different idea and defines “pro-growth” far differently.

Of course, Barack Obama often says he is “pro-growth”—but the question to ask is: growth of what?

After three years in office, it seems rather clear that Obama believes in the growth of government. At the core of all of his policies is a belief that government can allocate resources more efficiently than can the private sector.

According to Obama, only the government can make wise “investments”. According to Obama’s view, private money and private investors are simply not as capable or as wise as is government in choosing the kinds of investments that will lead to growth and job expansion.

Not too surprisingly, Obama’s strange definition of “growth” is actually a call for a growth of government, growth of debt, growth of bureaucracy, growth of taxes and growth of government regulations. Barack Obama simply believes that taxpayers should be required (or compelled) to send more money to Washington where the political class can then decide how best to “invest” the money.

The “growth” that Barack Obama seeks, ultimately, is growth in government’s control over the lives of all Americans. As we have already learned from three years of watching our president try to apply this tragic economic theory, we have seen our economy stagnate as entrepreneurs and small businesses get squeezed. The only “growth” in Obama’s economy has been the growth of economically harmful and dangerous trends.

Obama has overseen a growth in the price of gas at the pump, growth in the nation’s dependency on foreign oil, growth in unemployment, growth in the number of people receiving and the amount of dollars allocated to entitlements, growth in the number of Czars designed to evade oversight from congress, even growth in the number of foreclosures.

In general, after three and a half years of the Obama administration’s “pro-growth” efforts, Americans are poorer and more dependent on the federal government.

Is this really what Americans are endorsing when they hear the term “pro-growth”? This is certainly not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Under Obama federal spending has grown from $1 trillion dollars in 2008 to almost $4 trillion dollars in just three years, without any growth in the economy, without any reduction in unemployment and without any significant improvement in the quality of life or opportunities for the future of Americans.

Under Obama, the public debt has grown to the point where it exceeds our nation’s annual GDP. Nowhere and at no time has this kind of equation ever been a recipe for economic growth.

LUnder Obama, the number of regulations affecting all aspects of American lives has grown. In 2011, the Obama administration put into place over 2000 different rules, statues or regulations affecting everything from the environment to the kinds of paper used for filing federal reports.

Under Obama, the number of czars has increased, even as the number of senate-confirmed leaders has dwindled. Coinciding with the increase in czars comes an increase in the bureaucracy, and an increase in the staff to support the czars, all paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Under Obama there has been growth in the number of unemployed, with minorities and teens hit the hardest.

Under Obama, the regulations affecting small businesses has created an environment of uncertainty and increased cost which discourages, rather than encourages, job creation.

Under Obama, Americans have seen an increase in the frequency of fear-mongering and race-baiting as a Democrat political strategy, designed to intimidate anyone who questions or criticizes Democrats’ flawed policies.

There has been growth under Obama—it’s just the wrong kind of growth. Lots of fine sounding rhetoric that fosters the illusion of growth. One thing seems clear–while we all seem to be speaking the same language the meaning varies greatly between what Obama says and what Americans understand.

When Barack Obama talks about his “pro-growth” agenda, Americans should start to ask just exactly what Obama hopes to “grow”.

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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com

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Real Time with Bill Maher March 16 2012 – Alexandra Pelosi Interviews Welfare Recipients in NYC

Published on Mar 18, 2012 by vclubscenedotcom

It is truly sad to me that we have got to such a low point in our country that you have attempted to get votes by giving away things for votes.  How else do you describe what is going on here?

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The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had an excellent aricle on this on May 20, 2012:

Government takes care of us

By Bradley R. Gitz

This article was published May 20, 2012 at 3:09 a.m

LITTLE ROCK — The Democratic Party campaign video “The Life of Julia” performs a public service by informing the public of the Obama administration’s vision of the ideal society.

It is not a pretty picture.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, the video traces the life of a fictional “Julia” from birth all the way into retirement, with government providing for her care and comfort (even her contraceptives) each step along the way.

As National Review’s Rich Lowry puts it, “Julia’s central relationship is to the state. It is her educator, banker, health-care provider, venture capitalist and retirement fund. And she is, fundamentally, a taker. Every benefit she gets is cut-rate or free. She apparently doesn’t worry about paying taxes.” The end result is a pathetic creature more closely resembling a whining infant in its cradle than a free, adult human being.

Implicit in this “cradle to grave” view of government is the goal of creating, in Lowry’s words, “a nation of Julias,” dependent, needy and forever being succored by the nanny state. The more people depend upon government for their sustenance, and the more extreme the level of typical dependence, the closer we will have moved toward the ideal political order.

Charles Krauthammer calls this “free-lunch egalitarianism.” Mitt Romney has referred to it as “the entitlement society.” By whatever term, it represents a radical shift in Americans’ understanding of the role of government in their lives.

Barack Obama may claim that these are “American values,” but they most certainly aren’t the values of our Founding Fathers; indeed, it might be difficult to identify any ideas further removed from those that influenced the delegates at Philadelphia back in1787.

Perhaps never before has an American political party more nakedly offered up a life on the dole as a morally desirable condition for able-bodied citizens.

Implicit in the “Julia Nation” is a number of sub-themes-that Americans have lost any sense of self reliance and can’t fend for themselves in even the most trivial ways; that government should always grow bigger because of this incapacity; and that there are no adverse social or fiscal consequences flowing from, or even logical limits to, the growth of government spending.

For those of us with an interest in political ideology, the cradle-to grave concept explicit in Julia’s life also represents the final extinguishing of any remaining differences between American “progressivism” and European social democracy.

Cradle-to-grave security has, of course, been the abiding promise of European social democratic parties since at least the end of World War II. A term first coined by British Labor Party leader Clement Attlee, “cradle to grave” would represent the fulfillment of the European socialist movement without all of the nasty “dictatorship of the proletariat” and violent revolutionary stuff. It was the logical ideological descendent of Eduard Bernstein and the Fabians, if not Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

By so openly embracing this concept, American Democrats have now removed any doubt that they have become and have actually long been such a party.

Those who take umbrage at such claims are free to identify for the rest of us any fundamental differences between the program and aspirations of American Democrats and those of the British Labor Party, the German Social Democratic Party, or Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party in France.

Irrefutable logic tells us that, if the American Democratic Party is a social democratic party, and social democracy has long been understood as a strain of socialism, then the American Democratic Party, and its titular leader, President Obama, are clearly socialists of at least some sort, too.

They just won’t, until now-until “Julia”-admit it.

What this also means is that what we call American liberalism has come to have scant relation to the classical liberalism of America’s founding. The central tenet of liberalism historically is restraints upon the size and power of the state for the sake of individual liberty; the central tenet of both American progressivism and European social democracy is the creation of a huge and powerful state for the purpose of providing cradle-to-grave security. Understood properly, liberalism and socialism are antithetical, not complementary, propositions.

So we should thank Democrats for the “Life of Julia.” They might not have intended to be, but they are now finally being honest with the American people about what ideology they subscribe to and where they wish to take the nation under the slogan “forward.”

Thus, the central question that Obama’s re-election bid poses is whether we want the transformation of America into a full-fledged European-style social democracy to continue. It is that issue, not the Romney family dog, women’s contraceptive tab, or Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage that matters most.

There was, once upon a time, not even all that long ago, something disgraceful about able-bodied citizens living off the labor of others (“going on the dole”). Obama and his party now unapologetically and enthusiastically invite all of us to do so.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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