Considering the fact that prior to being elected President, Barrack Obama hardly had a job and quite possibly never even worked for a “for profit” company, he seems mighty confident in criticizing Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s record of achievement let alone his net jobs created record at Bain Capital.
The President stood there this week talking about how Romney’s work experiences from Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics to Governor of Massachusetts hardly prepared him to be President of the United States.
President Obama seems to think his three years in office give him the experience edge even in light of the multiple failures of his administration. He can legitimately claim credit for taking out bin Laden. It took ten years to track him down and whether the Bush Administration contributed to the successful outcome or not, US military forces got the job done. So is that the foundation of his Foreign Policy? I read somewhere that right up to the hour before the mission was launched, Valerie Jarret was pushing Obama to abandon the mission.
The Arab Spring will prove to be significant in history as the time when America could have helped shape the evolution of free society in the Middle East but twiddled our thumbs as the opportunity faded away.
Then of course there is the Keystone Pipeline deal that had been through the approval process but needed Presidential approval that fell by the wayside in spite of the tens of thousands of jobs that would be created, the Solyndra half billion dollar debacle, the Fast and Furious guns to Mexico deal and the million dollar GSA junket to Vegas as examples of the President’s record of either personally deciding or delegating decisions to his appointees; example after example of failures of leadership to be sure but indicators also of a seriously incompetent or corrupt administration.
The President can talk about Romney’s record all he wants but how can he not expect us to compare Romney’s record to his own.
I’m still astonished with the way the General Motors deal was done. Rather than letting the company enter some form of bankruptcy protection that would give the share holders and managers time to renegotiate debt payments and labor contracts the President instructed the government to seize the company, infuse it with enough federal stimulus money to get it through the financial crisis in exchange for high priority shares of stock rendering privately held shares relatively worthless while at the same time preserving the labor contracts that contributed so much to the underlying problems. Is that even legal?
The President talks about how he is a job creator but in my mind, jobs that go away when the government money goes away are not jobs. A real job is a man or woman creating something of value that someone else is willing to pay a market price for. A real job sustains itself.
My final issue is the glut of regulation that flows out of the various federal departments. Anyone who has ever been in business knows the impact changing regulations to a business plan. If you don’t know how the Obama Health Care law will impact your business, it’s not likely that you will hire new employees unless your existing workers are being worked to the bone. Unpredictable regulatory times are a huge impediment to job creation. But it isn’t just the changes, it’s the volume of the regulations. Thousands of pages of new federal regulations fly out of the Environmental Protection Administration, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Education and the Department of Transportation each week.
President Obama needs to show us examples of how his buddy politics policies have created jobs since so many of his showcase plays have been unmitigated disasters.
The President should be careful how he characterizes Romney’s qualifications since his own record shows he clearly had no experience at anything except being a slick talking lawyer before he was elected.
I don’t believe Obama has ever served a full term of office in any job he ran for so his record as a legislator is bare as well.
If there were ever a “Do Nothing, Done Nothing!” president, Obama is tops.
No Loss for Words 
Insurance is the Devil of our Society!
by Steve DanaI’ve come to the conclusion that INSURANCE is the root of most evil in our country today. In my view, INSURANCE and LAWYERS together are to blame for most of what’s wrong.
Think about how many insurance pools affect your life. At home you have your home owner’s liability policy, your fire insurance policy and your auto policies covering your liability and your casualty loss. If you have a mortgage, you probably have mortgage insurance. If you are prudent you may have life insurance.
At work you are covered by Worker’s Compensation through Department of Labor and Industries and Employment Security (Unemployment Insurance) both paid mostly by your employer.
Increasingly, Health Care Insurance has come to dominate our lives. Whether you pay for it individually or your employer pays for it, Health Care Insurance is becoming the most insidious form of insurance in our lives.
For a long time the discussion was focused on the “health care” part of the deal. The thought was that the cost of care was driven by health care providers. Then when we looked closer we saw that insurance companies were entrenched in the businesses of those providers it wasn’t about the quality of the care, it was only about what the insurance company would pay.
Who hasn’t heard about Mal-Practice and Business Liability insurance for the doctors, the clinics and the hospitals? It isn’t just the medical related businesses that are affected though; nearly every profession is impacted by Insurance policies.
The Lawyers compound the need for insurance because if someone fails to perform as they agreed in their insurance policy, an ambulance chaser, personal injury, mal-practice attorney will sue you and the insurance company for the failure. Threatened with the loss of your stuff, you toe the line.
Insurance companies have been changing our behavior for many years. Life insurance companies did it with smoking. Auto insurance companies did it with seat belts and motor cycle helmets.
If you engage in behavior they decide is “risky” your rates go up or your policy is cancelled. And that is the central issue of this whole piece.
I guess the other component is not canceling your policy but reducing your benefits; which is happening everywhere we look.
This week, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that sugared soft drinks larger than 16 ounces should be outlawed in New York City, citing the cost of health care paid by our health insurance carriers as the justification. Obese people who are covered get subsidized health care because they are not as healthy as skinnier folks. (Think about how far an idiot could extend that logic.)
The mayor focuses on how your personal bad choices affect insurance premiums paid by everyone. Last time it was trans fats in the cooking oil used by restaurants. Can you see how INSURANCE is becoming the dominant factor in our lives?
Insurance is the binding force that the government uses to change your behavior. By making coverage mandatory you increase the size of the money pool supposedly making the unit cost less while giving the insurance company the leverage over the service providers to reduce their reimbursement rate.
Certainly the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Obamacare will be the deciding factor in whether the government and the insurance companies can require that you buy their insurance and accept their prescribed level of care without competition in the market. It will also determine whether a doctor can set the price for his services or whether the insurance companies will have a strangle-hold on all the actual medical providers.
Don’t get me started about Medicare. We supposedly paid into a pool that should have compounded and grown into a huge fund that would pay for our medical costs when we retired. Unfortunately the government raided the fund and left it with a bunch of IOU’s so the actual cost of care today has to be paid out of current revenue.
Insurance companies will be the downfall of our society if the government requires that we all be covered for all perils.
Lawyers will be the enforcers since they will either sue you or threaten to sue you for whatever meager possessions the government allows you to have.
No doubt I would be in favor of “tort reform” limiting the dollar amount that could be awarded in a mal-practice or liability trial and providing that the plaintiff be held financially liable for the cost incurred by the defendant if the defendant is found to be not guilty.
Do I sound a little edgy? Good!
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