Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

01 November 2009

"All war is based on deception." —Sun Tzu

Obama clearly believes in a corollary to this.  For Obama, "All politics is based on deception."

It has to be.  Obama is a radical socialist.  The American People are not radical socialists.  Examining his major program elements we find that he has applied this principle of politics as deception to each of the following:
  • No one making less than $250,000 a year will see their taxes go up, yet he is trying to tax many health insurance programs for people making much less than that.  He is going to tax individuals for not buying the health insurance that he wants them to buy.  He is going to tax small businesses whose owners make less than $250,000 a year for not offering approved health insurance to all employees.  There was serious talk of added taxes on soda and sugary fruit drinks, which are known to be drunk only by those making more than $250,000.  The taxes on medical clinics, medical devices, and drug companies he is adding are apparently only going to be passed on only to the wealthy.  He is eager to collect huge payments for the right to use fossil fuel energy and has exempted many very large companies from having to pay these payments in the very near future, so the large payments will fall directly on small businesses initially, but all businesses in time.  These costs will be passed on as increased costs for goods and services to everyone, in a deceptive form of taxing us all.  His advocacy for card check for the labor unions can also be viewed as a huge tax on everyone who buys goods and services, whose costs will increase, or who has ownership in the companies to be taken over.  With all the government debt, any future inflation that may result is a deceptive tax on all of us.  Meanwhile, this debt is causing the value of the dollar to drop, so everyone who buys foreign-made goods is going to be paying more for them.  Another form of tax, a very deceptive one.
  • Obama said we needed health care insurance reform to lower the costs of health care and to insure everyone.  The reality turns out to be that everyone, except the very sick currently without health insurance, will see their health care costs go up.  Those who are healthy and can well satisfy their needs with a high deductible plan will see their costs skyrocket as they are forced to buy government approved plans which mandate very low deductibles and low co-pays.  Pressure is being put on the young and the healthy to buy insurance with high premiums so the insurers can cover the costs of the unhealthy, who will jump onto plans only when they need treatments.  The new Obama taxes on health insurers, medical laboratories, and medical devices will make health care more expensive.  The huge increase in paperwork for the benefit of the many government bureaucrats who will be looking over doctor's shoulders will also drive up costs.  The government requirements that more and more procedures and specialist's costs be covered in plans, the path most state interference on approving insurance has followed, will drive up costs.  Doctors, beaten down, will leave their practices.  The demand for health care will go up at first and the number of doctors will drop.  Either supply and demand will be honored with prices going up or health care quality must go down even more than it would otherwise under ObamaCare.  As the costs for health insurance go up, more and more healthy people will go without insurance, even at the cost of paying the uninsured tax.  Thus the number of people uninsured will go up rapidly.  The end result of the political deception will be higher costs and fewer covered, not to mention a great decrease in health care quality.
  • Obama says we must stop poisoning the planet by producing CO2 by using fossil fuels, stop global warming, achieve energy independence, and create green jobs so the economy will go.  All deception once again. CO2 is nothing but beneficial to plants, which are beneficial to humans.  Global warming or cooling is very predominantly due to natural forces over which we have no control.  Some global warming is actually beneficial to humans, plants, and animals, but we seem to be in a cooling cycle now whether we wish to be or not.  The path to energy independence is blocked by reality and will not be achieved.  But, what we can and should do is develop and encourage a great multiplicity of energy sources all over the world.  By doing this, our increased future options will provide more access to energy at lower prices than if we take Obama's restrictive approach with a huge taxpayer funded gamble on solar and wind power, his policy of allowing virtually no exploration and drilling for oil and gas in the U.S., his attempt to put coal out of business, and his failure to remove roadblocks to nuclear power.  The claim that he will create more jobs in green energy than will be lost due to restricting coal, oil, and gasoline use fails entirely to understand basic economics.  First, the solar and wind power industries are heavily dependent upon subsidies and mandates for staying in business and even so, many are failing.  Those subsidies are based directly upon taxes, which cause businesses to have higher operational costs and hire fewer people, while consumers have less to spend on non-energy purchases.  The mandates do the same by forcing higher energy costs on everyone.  Meanwhile, the jobs of those in the coal industry, the oil industry, the mining equipment, the railroads that transport coal, shipping companies that carry coal overseas, oil drillers, oil and gas pipelines, and many another industry will lose jobs as fossil fuel use is discouraged by Obama.  Wind and solar will not replace these lost jobs.  No way!
  • Obama claims to favor the working man.  Yet he is mandating that companies must use union labor for many government contracts, thereby forcing the working man to pay higher taxes or higher prices to cover the higher costs of government.   Obama wants to bring on union card check, which will deprive the working man of a secret ballot to determine whether his work relationship will be between him and his employer or between him and a socialist labor union.  The working man in the private sector has figured out that being in a union means bowing to socialist labor bosses; paying union dues, a good part of which will go to socialist politicians; losing his self-respect by doing his job well; and harming his company, which will hurt his future.  This is why the working man is not joining the desperate unions anymore in the private sector under secret balloting elections.  This is why the labor unions want to end the secret ballot and put their goons to more effectively intimidating workers into checking cards.  But, Obama would try to deceive us with an act claiming to be about employee freedom.  Ha!!!
  • Obama says he wants to make education reforms.  What he wants is more power for the federal government over education and students.  The only really useful reform would be to break the power of the socialist teachers unions in government-run schools and privatize education.  Obama has signed on for some minor improvements, but he has also failed to fundamentally sign on to what is most essentially needed.  He is also bent upon using the schools to further indoctrinate children in socialism and service to the government and those who are downtrodden or victims.  He is using the schools to channel children into his favored charities and into the Democrat Party.
  • Obama took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution.  Yet, he gave a radio interview a few years back in Chicago in which he acknowledged that the Constitution did not allow the kind of income redistribution he wanted.  Despite this, he is happy to ignore the highly limited power restrictions of the Constitution and madly redistribute income and wealth.
  • Again, despite his oath to honor the Constitution, Obama is doing everything he can to subject Americans to the rulings of various bodies of foreign countries who have no regard for the basic rights of the individual, let alone all of the individual rights our Constitution recognizes and makes it its purpose to protect.
The primary purpose of Obama's life has clearly been to become a master deceiver.  He is a magician-level politician.  Despite this, he has come off the blocks so fast in trying to achieve the more important goals of his socialist agenda that the American People are beginning to see through his magic and his deceptions.  Some see this very clearly now.  I hope enough will see before the 2010 elections that we will greatly reduce the power of the Democrats, his very socialist henchmen, in the Congress and at least stop most of his legislative program in its tracks.  He will still be able to do great harm through regulatory powers and in foreign policy and defense issues.  He will also be able to veto any strong efforts to repeal the great harm he and the Democrat Congress will do between now and 2010.

We must throw him out in 2012 and achieve Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.  I recognize that usually less government mischief is done when one house of Congress is controlled by each party, but in this case, we must actually roll back some very bad legislation, as opposed to the usual advantage of stasis.  We must turn back the clock on socialism.  To do that, the Republicans will have to control the presidency and both houses of Congress for at least 2 years.  They will also have to have a clear understanding of why the American People gave them such power and a goodly concern for the fact that we are watching over their shoulders a lot more carefully than we usually do.

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