Author Archives: Martin M. McMartin

I was at an afternoon craft beer festival in downtown Richmond, Virginia this afternoon, just the sort of event you would imagine to find plenty of Obamaroids.At the event i was approached by an attractive young OFA volunteer handing out tickets for a frree John Cougar Mellencamp concert hosted by Mr. and Dr Biden in Richmond tomorrow night(election eve) in Richmond. The response was less than enthused, dozens and dozens of beer festers were offered free tickets and in all but a few exceptions the free offer was declined, over and over again, the beer fest participants declined the offer.

This looks like another Stevie Wonder type debacle for the Obama campaign on the eve of the election.

This is really starting to feel like 1979/1980 again.

“By the time 1979 was entering its final weeks, feelings of gloom were so heavy that even some of President Carter’s detractors had to admit he had a point: the country was suffering from a bad case of malaise.”- GEORGE JOHNSON

California has for some time now been known as unfriendly to business and to the residents who staff them. While it is arguably the most beautiful state in the union, the state and local government has succeeded in creating an exodus from the Golden State. A recent study by The Manhattan Institute summed up the cause of the migration this way,

In sum, we can identify a number of cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—that offer incentives to businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.

Whatever the exact cause is it continues, this week two large corporations, Comcast and Campbell’s Soup announced they are eliminating or exporting 1000 Sacramento area jobs.Comcast citing the high cost of doing business in California is moving 300 call center jobs to other states in the West. Campbell’s is cutting 700 jobs, a result of a plant closing they  claim is necessary to “improve supply chain productivity,” but it is not surprising that the plant they chose to close was in California.

Democrat leadership and it’s big government tendencies, whether in Sacramento or Washington, lead to diminished opportunities to earn a living and provide for yourself and your family and the increased burden of a higher cost of living. So I ask you, once Obama and the Democrats complete their California style transformation of America, once they drive more job creators away, where then will we migrate to?

On the Letterman show, President Obama was asked if we should be scared that we owe over $16 trillion and the answer was alarming to say the least. Obama said, “We don’t have to worry about it short-term, but it is a problem long-term and even medium term.” Wow, just last year former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm.Michael G. Mullen said, “Debt is the biggest threat to U.S. national security”, and now the president is telling the American people that, at least in the short-term, whatever that means, we needn’t worry.

Obama also took the opportunity to announce his plan to eliminate the deficit to the Late Night audience and it really is appropriate that he announced this on a comedy program. He said,

“We’ve got to pare down that deficit, get that debt under control. The only way we ever been able to do that is when you do it in a balanced way, so you cut out spending you don’t need, there are programs that don’t work, I tell my Democratic friends all the time, if you’re going to be in favor of helping the American people, you can’t just assume that every program is working the way it should it can work better, but what is also true is that we’re going to have to ask folks like you (Lettermen) and me to do a little bit more and if you and I are paying the same tax rates that we did under Bill Clinton that helps to close the deficit. And if we do those two things we can manage effectively and get our books in order.”

I have listened to the main stream media badger Romney and Ryan for two weeks for not giving specifics and this president says his plan is to cut funding to programs that do not work and to raise taxes on the most productive Americans and nobody challenges that? There are so many issues with the Obama Plan I don’t know where to start. As for his plan to cut spending by merely improving the efficiency of government programs or maybe even eliminating some of those that he deems as not working, it sounded very familiar. I googled it and low and behold that was part of the Hope and Change agenda from 2008. On September 22, 2008, Obama said,

“I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it’s there… We will fire government managers who aren’t getting results, we will cut funding for programs that are wasting your money and we will use technology and lessons from the private sector to improve efficiency across every level of government… The only way we can do all this without leaving our children with an even larger debt is if Washington starts taking responsibility for every dime that it spends.”

I ask you, if this was his plan in 2008 and our debt increased $5 trillion, what will be different in the next four years?

As for his plan to close the deficit by raising taxes on those making over $200,000 a year to Bill Clinton era levels (35%), the Tax Policy Center has effectively shown that this alone will do little or nothing to impact our debt and without a meaningful plan to cut future spending on entitlement programs we are looking at massive tax increases on all taxpayers and the addition of a Value Added Tax (VAT) to extract money from those Americans not currently paying federal income taxes.