That '70s Guy

When I referred to Barack Hussein Obama as "Jimmy Carter's spritual son" a year ago, even I had no idea just how prescient a christening that was.  Because if there's any of those guys on the Federal Reserve notes (no, he's not on any of them - not yet, anyway - but work with me here....) that BO resembles, it's Jimmy Carter.

In, um, spades:

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on Friday announced an “Emergency Economic Plan” that would give families a stimulus check of $1,000 each, funded in part by what his presidential campaign calls “windfall profits from Big Oil.”

Details are in this six-page policy paper.

The first part of Obama’s plan is an emergency energy rebate ($500 to individual workers, $1,000 to families) as soon as this fall.

“This rebate will be enough to offset the increased cost of gas for a working family over the next four months,” Obama said. “Or, if you live in a state where it gets very cold in the winter, it will be enough to cover the entire increase in your heating bills. Or you could use the rebate for any of your other bills or even to pay down debt[."]

You know, I've never liked the term "economic plan."  That's the term invariably applied to any candidate's economic policy platform - "economic plan."  The reason why should be obvious to even the most casual follower of politics: it's socialist nomenclature.  Central, top-down "economic planning" by the state IS socialism.  Casting any economic policy in those terms is loaded mislabeling by definition.  It stacks the propaganda deck against any non-socialist because any policy that doesn't purport to benefit "the poor" - or the "new poor," aka the "middle class" - at the expense of "the rich" and "corporations" is, ipso facto, "special interest-driven" at "the expense of" the "middle class."

True to form, Obamanomics doesn't disappoint.  It combines Jimmy Carter's blatant robbery of the energy industry....

[T]he windfall profits tax was forecasted to raise more than $320 billion between 1980 and 1989. However, according to the CRS, the government collected only $80 billion in gross tax revenue ($146 billion in 2004 dollars). The net amount was actually less than this—roughly $40 billion — because the tax was deductible against corporate income.

CRS also found the windfall profits tax had the effect of decreasing domestic production by 3 percent to 6 percent, thereby increasing American dependence on foreign oil sources by 8 percent to 16 percent. A side effect was declining, not increasing, tax collections. Figure 1 clearly shows that while the tax raised considerable revenue in the initial years following its enactment, those revenues declined to almost nothing as the domestic industry collapsed.

The 1980 windfall profits tax was also found to be highly burdensome for the industry to comply with and for the Internal Revenue Service to administer, especially in years when no revenue was raised. It seems unlikely that a new tax could be designed in a less burdensome fashion. Tax Foundation economists estimate that U.S. companies currently spend nearly $150 billion annually to comply with the federal income tax alone. Enacting a new windfall profits tax would add an additional layer of complexity to the federal tax system.

....with George McGovern's bad check writing.  Indeed, it robs "Big Oil" of the R&D funds with which it would otherwise pursue domestic energy exploration and development of alternative energy sources, which will rob the "wealthy," "middle class," AND "poor" of far more than just one lousy check for a lousy thousand bucks - which we already got once this year already, for all the frickin' good it did anybody - through driving energy prices even higher and slamming their 401(k) accounts, through which the large and ever-growing investor class - aka We, The People - have invested in, yes, the energy sector, among others.

If economics were information technology, Lucifer could be the caveman in the Geico auto insurance commercials.  This "emergency economic" scheme is laughable even as populist claptrap.  The energy policy train left the station a long time ago.  People know why gas prices are through the roof: three decades of Democrat environmental extremism cutting off any and all domestic supplies from domestic exploration and domestic use.  They want to drill here, and drill NOW - which would, if anything, seem to be the REAL "emergency" - and no amount of hyperventilating will distract from what a profound insult to the public's collective intelligence this Carteroid nonsense truly is. 

Which, of course, provides hilarious context for the Chosen One's endorsement of "carefully circumscribed" off-shore drilling that he issued only six hours later.  And about which, of course, he is just as sincere as he is about anything [*AHEM*].  Does this mean that Bright Morning Star isn't the "Obama Hood" at Friday dinner that we thought he was at Friday lunch?

But wait, hold on a second, I've got to stop myself before I go any further.  I'm really not being fair here - to Jimmy Carter, that is.  There's more to Obamanomics than just stealing from everybody and pissing away the booty; he wants to make sure we're stripped of the ability to accumulate any wealth to begin with:

Obama refers to “big oil” and the need to reduce our use of oil by 35% over the next twenty years.

How do we get there?  Keep inflating those tires, folks:

• Increase Fuel Economy Standards
• Invest in Developing Advanced Vehicles
• Build Biofuel Distribution Infrastructure
• Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities

Read this as mandates, mandates, mandates, all to avoid drilling for abundant resources we have at our disposal.  Obama’s plan assumes that car manufacturers need government direction to build cars that will get 250 mpg, and that government should “plan” communities so that people don’t [i.e. are forbidden to] drive themselves to work.  It relies heavily on the biofuel concept....even while current government subsidies drive food prices to the point where people now starve.

....Obama wants to sink a fortune into expanding public transportation, top-down community planning, and remove the need for automobiles. [emphasis added]

Whether we like it or not.  And to think that even I thought at times that my reference to public transit as "herding the people into cattlecars" was hyperbole.

I don't know what else you can call this, straight from Heaven's Gate itself:

Over the longer term, we know that the amount of fuel we will use is directly related to our land use decisions and development patterns, much of which have been organized around the principle of cheap gasoline.

....which His Eminence is determined to deny us - for our own "good," as he defines it:

Barack Obama believes that we must move beyond our simple fixation of investing so many of our transportation dollars in serving drivers and that we must make more investments that make it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access other transportation alternatives. [emphases added]

We "must" make the "investments" HE decrees are "best" for us.  We "must" be herded onto public transit buses and "light rail" commuter choo-choos and forced out of our cars, which will be easy since he'll make sure the auto industry is destroyed by so loading it down with regulations and mandates that no family will be able to afford to own a car, let alone keep its gas tank full.  Which will "make it easier" for us to "walk" and "ride bicycles" to work, which will be so practical in a continental nation where the average commute from the suburbs and exurbs is - what - ten, fifteen, twenty miles each way daily?  My commute to my last place of employment was forty-six miles each way; yeah, I had to wade through gridlock every day, but it's not like I could have hopped on a pogo stick and gotten there any faster.

But let's look beyond commuting.  What about family vacations?  Holiday travel?  Sunday afternoon drives for the hell of it?  Isn't the automobile one of the quintessentially American expressions of rugged individuality?  Who the bleep is Barack Obama to tell me I have to put on a government-mandated brain dish and climb on my unicycle hybrid and row myself to church every Sunday?

And guess what?  Most, if not all, Americans feel the same way.  And guess what else?  That's why transportation policy, to the extend that it isn't an appalling waste of resources to begin, middle, and end with, is tailored to "serving drivers".  THAT'S THE TRANSPORTATION MARKET AS IT IS.  You don't serve a market by trying to dictate to your customers what products they're going to "buy" from you; you serve a market by selling them the products they want.

But not in Obamerica.  He doesn't believe in markets; he believes in himself.  He's GOD, after all, and it's not our place to question his "divine" wisdom.

Do not be afraid, though; remember the Obama dynamic: he puts out the Marxist drivel in which he really believes; it triggers a firestorm of outrage and public indignation and pushback; then he retreats, flip-flops, and declares that he never said it, and when you play the clips proving he did, that's proof that you're a racist.

Just ask John Sith McCain, the "tool" of "Big Oil":

As opposed to Barack Obama, the tool of "Big Green".

Or just plain "tool".

Is a majority of Americans REALLY going to vote for this puerile pinko?

UPDATE: The Mittster helpfully explains just how big a tool BO really is....