Obama’s Problem With Prosperity

(Roger Hedgecock) – Seventy-five Occupy San Diego activists shopped at a crowded local Wal-Mart Friday. As they approached the checkout lines, they abandoned their full shopping carts and began to chant about the evils of consumerism, income inequality and the downtrodden Wal-Mart workers.

They passed out fliers calling shoppers “c-m-sumer whores.” The downtrodden Wal-Mart workers were left with more work restocking the 75 carts of stuff left behind when the Occupy folks finally left the store.

During the Cold War, Russians who fled to the West were stunned by the cornucopia at our stores and super markets. Today’s Occupy movement, taking that consumer cornucopia for granted, has rebelled against prosperity. Abundance to the Russians was heaven. Abundance to the Occupy movement is destroying the planet. Or so they say on Twitter.

This anti-prosperity movement, led by the young, white, guilt-ridden graduates of government schools, has become the new default position of the Obama re-elect campaign. The Occupy movement provides new storm troopers against prosperity. If Obama couldn’t mandate prosperity with government spending and executive orders, then it wasn’t worth having anyway.

Back in 2009, the first Obama plan was to induce prosperity by debt-financed government “stimulus.” That didn’t work. The promised prosperity never happened. Remember the “Summer of Recovery”?

The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, recently revised down the beneficial economic impact of the Obama stimulus. The $835 billion would (as Obama said in a thousand speeches) “ignite spending by business and consumers” and set off “a new wave innovation, activity, and construction” and keep unemployment under 8 percent. The stimulus has done nothing of the kind.

The CBO now predicts that the Obama stimulus will actually hurt economic growth in the long run because of “the resulting increase in government debt.” The stimulus was, and is, a failure using the standards for success set by Obama himself.

The next plan to create jobs and “ignite” prosperity was to funnel billions of borrowed federal dollars into “green energy” companies, preferably run by Obama campaign donors. This plan served the twin goals of creating jobs and saving the environment. In other words, serving both unionized labor and environmental groups vital to the re-election campaign.

This second plan failed as well. The scandal at Solyndra is only the tip of the iceberg.

Billions were “loaned” and granted outright to prop up green energy companies that could not exist in a competitive world. Thousands of jobs were created – and then lost when the money ran out and the companies went into bankruptcy. Obama cronies (all 1 percenters) who backed these companies reaped millions, leaving the taxpayers on the hook.

The Washington Post reported in September that the green energy loan program cost $38.6 billion, but created only 3,500 jobs over two years, not the 65,000 jobs Obama had promised.

This same boom and bust occurred in Spain. Green energy companies received massive government money and preferences. The result? Failing green energy companies, a flight of overtaxed manufacturing companies out of Spain and massive unemployment. Did Obama expect a different outcome here?

Angry Spanish voters recently ousted their socialist government in favor of a conservative one. Does Obama expect a different outcome in next November’s election? Yes.

The new Obama plan is to run against prosperity itself.

Prosperity is just not the good thing those crazy right-wingers say it is. Living in your parents’ basement is a sign that you are more in tune with the survival of the planet. Don’t worry about that student loan payment, Obama will get the rich to pay for it – or at least run against the “do nothing” Congress when it fails to make the rich pay your bills.

If you can’t get a job, get out of your bedroom slippers, put on your marching boots and take to the streets protesting against the people who create jobs. Occupy Wall Street. Defecate on the flag. Makes perfect sense.

Inconvenient evidence that Americans still crave a higher standard of living (or at least a job to pay the bills) and look to private companies for that opportunity must be silenced or ridiculed. The idea that America’s next generation will not see the prosperity or opportunity that their parents had must be interpreted as a good thing and long overdue.

So the media wing of the Obama re-election campaign has swung into action and is selling these noxious ideas.

Over the weekend, for example, the New York Times did yet another article about the problems with prosperity in booming, oil-rich North Dakota. It seems that the North Dakota economy was “growing too big too fast, cluttering formerly idyllic vistas … aggravating … traffic jams, long lines, and crime.”

Obama could only dream that his failed policies had created such a boom and created such “problems.”

North Dakota’s “problem” is a literal gusher of oil coming from private land producing a gusher of $100,000 a year jobs. Even the Times article had to admit (deep in the story) that companies are building worker housing and providing food and health insurance for the men flocking to the state for those jobs.

No government stimulus was needed. North Dakota unemployment is estimated at 1 percent as many good jobs go unfilled, awaiting more immigrants from failed socialist states like Illinois and California.

Obama’s response? The new technologies for successful drilling could be harming the environment and must be studied. In the meantime, all offshore drilling is banned and the Gulf of Mexico off limits, unless you’re the Chinese/Venezuelan consortium drilling off Cuba and tapping into the vast pool of deep oil in the Gulf that Obama has refused to allow U.S. companies to tap.

So Obama’s media ignore his failed policies, blame the continuing recession on the “greedy rich,” ridicule examples of recovery based on common-sense use of our abundant natural resources and try to talk up the virtues of a lower standard of living and the hollowness of so-called opportunity in the American private economy.

To Obama, prosperity means a government job or a government-related job.

Last weekend, the Washington Post ran a story indicating that the Washington, D.C., metro area would add more than 1 million new jobs by 2030 in government and government-related companies in defense, health care and services.

The point of the article was that local governments had better get busy planning for the housing and public transportation these new workers will need. Government must solve the “problems” of prosperity.

By contrast, in North Dakota, private companies are building worker housing and funding roads, schools and municipal services with higher taxes the boom has brought. Minimum planning, maximum doing. It’s the American way.

The choice in November could not be more clear. An American president who has a problem with prosperity doesn’t deserve a second term.

(This article first appeared in World Net Daily.)