The reason it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere is because you aren’t. Look at this breakdown (net worth = assets minus debts) from a new report by the Pew Research Center that explains a lot about the frustration Americans are feeling. For you middle class folks, it might as well be 1992. Except Bill Clinton isn’t in the White House.
And now, for the winners and losers of the last 40 years. It’s better to be old and married, apparently:
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13 Responses to The Lost Decade: Bring Back The Clinton Years
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Four more years of the Obamanation and the trickle up poverty will be complete.
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If Obama wins in November it won’t be a lost decade-it will be a lost generation.
If you consider Litchfield County income dropped 10% last year and single family housing median prices are off 8% to 10% from 2010 prices(above) and you get a much bleaker picture as asset equity and income are eating away at both ends of the middle class.
Balance the Federal budget and properly fund state pensions and unfunded medical care and ooops! The Romney Recession is coming as the Feds cut spending.
Truly bleak outlook overall with 25% of the state under water on mortgages and another 25% who have only enough equity to cover realtor commissions and closing costs and moving costs and not much else after any seller concessions or consideration. Only 1/3 have anough equity to leverage for home equity and much of the refinancing is done. Obama mortgage programs expire starting at the end of the year through December 2013 with no plants to extend them.
The funny thing is that Obama thinks he is bill Clinton
Raise taxes and wella 21 Million jobs
Official. S core clinton 21 million jobs Obama-318,000
Yes…what we need is more of the’mess on the dress’ type of leadership…back then, Congress made a difference and it was the leadership of Congress that made Clinton look good….
My mother-in-law often tells me that “voting Republican is voting against myself.” She’s a lifelong progressive who believes that Republicans are evil by nature (though considering that she’s also an atheist, it strikes me as being philosophically problematic that she even believes in absolute good and evil).
Below is the answer I would give her if she would allow me (which she doesn’t):
Public-sector employees get salaried with our money (via taxes). Part of the public employees’ salaries go to their unions as dues. A good chunk of those dues goes to the coffers of Democrat politicians to fund their future campaigns.
See the cycle? It is essentially money-laundering.
Now, when a public union negotiates for more money or benefits for its members, and a Democrat politician is sitting on the other side of the negotiation table advocating for the taxpayer, who’s going to lose? Nine times out of ten…the taxpayer. This must be the way of things for the cycle to continue.
By giving the union what it wants, the Democratic politician will ensure he (or she) gets what he wants. The taxpayer will always be made to pay more to keep the cycle going.
Union: If you don’t do what we want, we won’t give you campaign money.
Democrat politician: Raising taxes or allowing you to raise fees (like for public transportation) will be good for my next campaign. If I need to go to the people, I will tell them that without the tax or fare hike, essential services will be cut. That threat should scare them into giving us what we both want: more of their money.
Also, unions are a business like any other, with profit as their primary goal. A union gets more profit by collecting more dues through more members.
Eventually, a tipping point is reached (often exacerbated by an economic downturn or an over-saturation of public employees — think Greece). Then, both public- and private-sector employees are in trouble.
But union trouble comes later rather than sooner, as the Democratic politician bleeds the taxpayer dry in an attempt to save the union from any economic troubles and continue the cycle.
In the end, the taxpayer is nothing more than a host for two sets of parasites working together. Though a healthy host is required to keep the cycle going, the parasites are gluttonous creatures of habit which cannot stop their feeding — even when it seems to be killing the host (think Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus).
And that, friends, is how a vote for a Democrat will always be a against yourself. Questions?
Anyone want to celebrate the Clinton years with a cigar?
Cigar…that’s funny Frank!
PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .
Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal legations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good..”
Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.
Barracks, 3 square meals, basic Medical and light government work in either an office or outside would improve the life of many of Americas older and single homeless men. Time off for invterviews? They’d love it. It’s the Salvation Army vision.
The Right would never deliver on Lasky’s vision. It’s too compassionate. Kind of like a New Deal camp. Entirely too compassionate today.
The Left would never deliver on it either: there’s no union VIG or room for payoffs and skim and campaign contributions.
A miltary triage approach would suggest higher greater values than union VIG? Wowza. Dead on Arrival. Gotta pay the SEBAC VIG before anything else! All hail SEBAC!
Obama’s way of beating Romney and Ryan has nothing to do with real issues. It’s pure trash-talking and deliberate flipping of the truth: R&R are poopie kids! Yuck!
Which makes this election about the lowest point in American politics since 1804, when Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel. When rational argument disappears, ultimately you get trash-talking, endemic lies, and violence. This is not open debate. It is cynical mass manipulation.
All of which brings me to the Great Liberal Fat Crisis, an “epidemic” we are told is worse than the Chicago murder rate, scarier than mad mullahs with nukes, more insidious even than the corrupt media, and more catastrophic than the O’conomy.
If fat is the question, what’s the answer? Michelle Obama thinks the answer is to drive the Chicken McNugget out of business. Lib politicians always look for scapegoats. Liberal “thinkers” seem to think fat is the fault of capitalism.
But the starving people of the earth think the real answer is to have more and more wonderful fatty, sugary food.
Gosh, it’s so good!
The fat crisis is another neurosis of prosperity. It runs in the minds of overfed people who worry about their body image. How do I look in the mirror? Nancy Pelosi is the living incarnation of adolescent values carried into the seventh decade of life.
But when it comes to fat, I blame liberalism, the source of most of our neuroses today.
Why?
It’s very simple.
Q. Why do people get fat?
A. They eat too much.
Q. Why do they eat too much?
A. Because they are lonely, isolated, and emotionally needy.
Q. Who made them lonely, isolated and emotionally needy?
A. Liberalism.
Q. How dat?
A. By attacking marriage, pushing divorce, making the welfare state preferable to husbands and fathers, breaking up the normal lives of children, cobbling up artificial families as if they are the real thing, promoting sexual adventurism, seducing the young into the monoculture of the left, spreading destructive personal values, and above all, by slicing and dicing the American people by race, gender, age, class, and sexual fantasies, while scaring and scaring the masses through the deeply corrupt media.
Q. Oh, yeah? And what else?
A. By teaching class envy in the schools and colleges, telling rich innocents there is such a thing as a free lunch, and trashing capitalist democracy, the most benevolent political system ever devised.
Q. How do you know all the mind-twisting has worked?
A. Because Obama has waged the first 100% trash-talking campaign in American history, and half the voters don’t seem to notice anything wrong. They can’t tell the difference between political debate and mudslinging. It is a huge, historic failure. We have some shockingly bad politicians — Joe Biden comes to mind — but what’s even worse is that we have badly corrupted voters.
Q. So are liberals the only fat people around?
A. Only between the ears.
No, the rest of us are just as brain-laundered by the Democrat-Media Complex, so that men are afraid to talk to women and children, and vice-versa; whites are afraid to talk with blacks; rich people are afraid to talk to the poor; and above all, conservatives are afraid to talk, period. Which is what the liberals desire more than anything else, because they live in fear of dissent.
Isolation, loneliness, and divide-and-conquer politics are now so pervasive that conservatives get just as fat as liberals, to make up for lost family and friendships. In the San Francisco Gay Area, it is difficult for men to be friends with men without gay sex rearing its obsessional image, and the same is true for women and women. But same-sex friendship, as Emerson said, “is the masterpiece of nature” precisely because sex is left out of it. Think Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, a fictional version of the many great and lifelong friendships of the 19th century. Friendship was celebrated then, and rightly so. When everything becomes sexualized, something genuine and real is subtracted from everyday life.
Across the board, liberals have imposed irrational, made-up values for normal, healthy, natural values. I don’t care what they do in the hay. The trouble is when their personal instability and hunger for novelty are imposed on the rest of us as the sole standard of conduct. Liberals are imperialists.
If you doubt all that, when is the last time you had a sane conversation with a liberal about politics?
I rest my case.
Liberalism makes you fat.
Remember, a vote for Obama is a vote for fat!
It is hard in the midst of battle for us to see, but we are winning. We ought to win the presidential election this year, and we must do everything in our power to make that happen, but the defeat of the left today is sure. The only way to lose this war is for us to quit, and we are not doing that.
Begin with the basics. Americans, overwhelmingly, are conservative. The latest Battleground Poll shows what every other Battleground Poll has shown for the last decade: Americans, by a huge majority, choose to call themselves “conservative,” even when they can choose “moderate” or “unsure” as well as “liberal.” Look at May 2012, or the twenty consecutive Battleground Poll reports dating back more than ten years in which conservatives have always been an overwhelming majority.
The Gallup Poll findings are just as stark. The last poll in February 2012 showed that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state except Massachusetts, and the one in February 2011 showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state. The one in August 2010 showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every state except Rhode Island; in February 2010, again, conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state. And yet again, back in August 2009, conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state.
Every time the question is asked, by every polling group which asks the question, and however the question is worded, the answer is still the same: conservatives dramatically outnumber liberals. Even polls limited to particular states show that this is true, like in Washington State or New York State or Minnesota. This is a salient fact in American life which separates the United States from every other nation.
The political problem which conservatives have faced reflects an elitist leftist control of the nongovernmental institutions of American life. The establishment media, for example, is not an organ of government so much as government is an organ of the media. Remove the leftist media, and how long could leftism last in America? What has been happening over the last quarter-century is the inexorable rise of a media — sometimes more akin to an underground press — which reflects accurately the conservative values of America.
Moreover, the left has proven unable to stop this rise. Rush Limbaugh, of course, is the ultimate example in broadcast media, and the boycotts, the name-calling, the smearing of Rush have all failed miserably and shown other conservatives how toothless the censors of the left are in American society. Fox News is the most popular television news network, and the leftist media is losing audience rapidly. CNN, for example, now has the smallest number of viewers in ten years.
The left controls academia, but one consequence of that domination is that very little real critical thinking occurs on American campuses — a phenomenon which is diminishing the value of leftist indoctrination passing as education. One result has been the rise of online colleges, which has raised the ire of leftists like Senator Harkin of Iowa. These are often for-profit academic institutions, which means that real market forces drive enrollment and curriculum decisions. These courses are not conservative; the courses, instead, tend to be practical and non-ideological. The education of children is also moving from public schools to home-schooling, which is rising exponentially.
What is true of the media and the educational system is true of entertainment as well: July 2012 data shows that movie audiences have dropped to a 25-year low. Television viewing in May 2012 was reported to have declined for the first time in twenty years. The tools of leftist manipulation of the conservative majority in America are losing their power.
In areas like book publishing, the brilliantly irreverent Regnery Press’s PIG series (Politically Incorrect Guide) tweaks staid and dreary leftism with sharp and clear laser beams, and the Christian Science Monitor reported in late August of this year that conservative books were dramatically outselling liberal books.
But it is not so much that conservatives are gaining control of these media of influence as it is that the left is losing control of these levers. Without totalitarian domination of education, information, and entertainment, the left has only its own disciples, which in most states are about 18% of the population; even in Vermont, such people make for only 28%. Winning these battles — the battle which we fight every day when we turn off the television set, pass up the lame tripe which masquerades as cinema today, sign up for nontraditional college learning, and buy conservative books — and not quitting means winning the war.
There is a final and fatal nail in the coffin of leftism: it has no ideas, and it scarcely pretends to have ideas anymore. Listen, when you can bear it, to the drivel from the Obama campaign. What is true of this presidential campaign is true of the whole of leftism in our land. It is sterile, vapid, and boring. The recent exchange between Anderson Cooper and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Newsweek editorial against Obama show just how sick even the flacks of the establishment have grown from the nausea of leftism.
We will win. Indeed, we cannot lose.
Here’s the definitive question: would Barack Obama have been elected president back in 2008 if he had been white? And before anyone reading this answers with, “Yeah, well, John McCain ran the absolute worst campaign in modern history!,” think about this: no candidate gets to run for president until he has been properly vetted and selected by his particular party. So for Obama to even have had the chance to run against the hapless McCain, he had to have first been “the chosen one” by the Democrats.
In the early months of 2008, long before Election Day, ponder for a minute how the campaigning and debating would have played out for the Democrat Party had Hillary Clinton been running against a half-dozen white guys — instead of a bunch of white guys and a black guy. Imagine Obama as a white guy speaking to the crowds with the exact same words, same inflections, same bravado. Would people have fainted upon hearing lines such as “This was the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”…or would they have wagged their heads and said, “What a bunch of vacuous bullcrap”?
When asked on the campaign trail what qualified him to be president, Obama himself pointed to two things: his experience as a community organizer and the fact that he was running a winning campaign. In other words, he should be president because he’s smart enough to win the presidency. Good old-fashioned circular logic.
One ebullient Democratic spokesman told the press soon after the election that his party had indeed chosen the right candidate (Obama instead of Clinton) because “race trumps sex.” (Granted, a President Hillary Clinton would most likely have been as much a progressive nightmare as Obama, but that’s a whole other article.)
Many on the far left will defend President Barack Obama first and foremost as a black man. Any time during the past four years, if anyone said anything negative about the president’s policies, the far left immediately circled the wagons, saying he was being slammed solely because of his race (most recently, Chris Matthews’ line of defense in his interview with Newt Gingrich). Their reasoning is due to the fact that they know that Obama’s 2008 campaign was centered around “making history” — he had zero experience of leadership, and his star-quality persona was literally only “skin deep.”
A couple weeks back, I had the wonderful opportunity of hearing the former co-chair of Obama’s 2008 election team, Artur Davis, speak at a gathering of about 50 like-minded conservatives. He is an excellent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking speaker, as he demonstrated on Day One of the RNC, and he unabashedly shared with us his tale of transition from Obama supporter to an enthusiastic speaker Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Davis stated that he was, like many, spellbound in the early days of the 2008 campaign, falling hook, line, and sinker for Obama’s message of unity and hope and transparency — but in his heart of hearts, Artur has always been a conservative.
One of Mr. Davis’ observations, however, seemed off the mark. He stated that he believed that even if you were a die-hard conservative Republican, you had to have felt a certain joy that America had gone from slavery to electing the first black president — what an historic triumph.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Mr. Davis (who is genuinely one of the nicest and most sincere guys you’d ever want to meet) when I posed with him for a photo op afterwards that I, for one, never felt anything but impending gloom-and-doom during every stage of the 2008 campaign. And for good reason.
When Obama burst onto the scene, I didn’t care one whit about the color of his skin, so I immediately checked out his background — did my own personal vetting, as it were. I discovered (and with very little effort) that Obama was the farthest left of every single senator in Congress; that he barely voted anything but “present” in the Illinois legislature, and when he did actually vote “nay,” one thing near and dear to his heart was opposing a law banning live-birth abortion; that he had domestic terrorist ties; that he was a follower of Saul Alinsky; and that his pastor (worse, mentor) spewed hate speech from the pulpit.
Mr. Davis came late to the conclusion that Obama was wrong for America — a conclusion most of us reading and writing for American Thinker came to many, many months before Election Day 2008. Speaking solely for myself, I have always seen November 4, 2008 as the day Dr. Martin Luther King began spinning in his grave. “Weren’t you listening to me? It’s content of character, not color of skin, you nincompoops,” I imagined Saint Martin shouting from on high. (Had King lived, by the way, I believe we would have had a non-white president long before 2008 — and someone voted into office based on substance rather than skin color.)
Too many Americans actually believe that the 2008 election proved, once and for all, that America is not a racist nation. I mean, how can it be racist if the voters elected a genuine, bona fide African-American to run its ship of state? Even Glenn Beck recently spent his opening 20-minute monologue (complete with props) proving this no-racism-here actuality.
Racism, however, goes “both ways.” There’s obviously unacceptable racism, the racism that has universal recognition — denying or destroying someone based on the color of their skin. But these days, there’s also acceptable racism — for example, voting for someone to be president based on the color of his skin. Remember the phrase expressed with pride by many Americans four years ago: “Make history by voting for the first African-American president”? I think it’s unfortunate, but on Election Day 2008, America proved just how racist it really was. You do something not because it’s historic; you do it because it’s right. And because of that “history making” moment, America is now paying a very steep price — not just financially, but in terms of renewed racial tensions and divisiveness.
During my opportunity to shake hands with Artur Davis after his informative and motivating talk, I refrained from sharing my belief that race played the most significant role in Obama’s election. I didn’t, however, hold back from saying that with everybody I know, among my family, friends, and professional acquaintances, no one — and I mean no one — “gives a flying crap about the color of anybody’s skin.” We live in a post-racial America despite the fact that Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, not because of it.
A fitting close is to remind one and all of the bumper sticker some patriots are sporting on their vehicles these days. Its message is as clear as its simple, block lettering: “If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not a racist, please vote for somebody else in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot.”