DISASTEROUS DECADE

Barack Obama's weekend address was .. you guessed it .. about the Republican's Pledge to America. Here's a quote from Obama's address.

It is grounded in the same worn out philosophy: cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; cut the rules for Wall Street and the special interests; and cut the middle class loose to fend for itself. That is not a prescription for a better future. It is an echo of a disastrous decade we cannot afford to relive.

Let's start out with this "worn out philosophy." President Bush did a fantastic job of growing the size of our government and increasing our federal expenditures. If this is such a worn out philosophy, then why did Obama and the Democrats exponentially add to this growth of size and spending?
President Bush cut taxes for everyone. If that was such a terrible philosophy, how come Democrats in Congress are coming out in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone? If tax cuts are a "worn out philosophy" then you would think Americans would be demanding their repeal, same as they are demanding less spending. But the fact is that they are not. Only Democrats like Barack Obama are, and it is all in the name of class warfare.
While Democrats complain that President Bush wanted to de-emphasize the role of government in business, it was President Bush who wanted to create a regulatory agency in 2003 to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and it was the Democrats who refused regulation. It was under George Bush that we got Sarbanes-Oxley and the first bailout and creation of TARP. If the policies of increased government regulation and intervention are a "worn out philosophy," then Barack Obama may need to reconsider his subsequent bailouts and takeover of the healthcare industry and auto industry.
Obama seems to believe that George Bush's presidency was so bad that he called it "a disastrous decade we cannot afford to relive." Yet consider these comparisons from Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters...

• In January 2007 before the Democrats took over Congress, unemployment was 4.6 percent; now it's 9.6 percent.
• In January 2007 there were 7.1 million unemployed people in America; now there are 14.9 million.
• In January 2007 the median home price was $210,600; today it's $179,300.
• In January 2007 the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 12,500; today it's at 10,840.
• In January 2007 the gross federal debt was $9 trillion; today it's $13.5 trillion.
• The poverty rate in 2006 was 12.3 percent; now it's 14.3 percent
• In the final budget created by a GOP-controlled Congress, the deficit was $160 billion; now it's $1.6 trillion.

George Bush's decade is not the one we need to be worrying about. The decades that we do not need to re-live are those that Nancy Pelosi and her cadre are determined to re-impose. The Wall Street Journal writes, "When the Pelosi Democrats regained Congress in 2006, they brought with them the spend, tax and regulate policies of the 1960s and 1970s. They had learned nothing from the policy revolution and resulting boom of the Reagan years, which resumed in 1995 after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton tried a detour and were themselves repudiated by the voters." If you believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats are the ones who will bring our nation back to a prosperous level of growth - growth of the private sector and not of government - then you are sadly mistaken. I don't know if the Republicans can do it either, but at least they can put a stop to this Obama experiment before it permanently cripples us.
And by the way, when has it become a bad thing for anyone to "fend for themselves?" That's what Obama said: "cut the middle class loose to fend for itself." Isn't that what we call personal responsibility and self reliance? Apparently the default, at least according to Obama, is that you should be relying on the government until you are capable of doing it on your own. Funnily enough, once you get the muster to do it on your own, the Democrats will then turn around and demonize you for being greedy. Amazing.