Re: Here Comes Socialism

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:34:03 -0800 (PST), mg <mgkelson@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jan 22, 6:22 pm, Sordo?<sordo?@prolefeeder.org> wrote:
On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:54:17 -0800, El Castor <No_...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is nothing in this for anyone to like -- at least not anyone in
their right mind. Unfortunately, as predictions go, it's about as good
(or bad) as any I've seen. )-8

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run
out of other people?s money." ---Margaret Thatcher

Where are we going to get the money to bailout the banks and fight
Bush's oil wars and payoff the $11 trillion dollar debt Bush left us
with then?

Print it, and in the process, run up the debt. As the old saying goes,
better debt than red.

"The Obama presidency: Here comes socialism
By *** Morris
Posted: 01/20/09 06:12 PM [ET]

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as
years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives.
Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and
Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his
administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire
America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United
Kingdom, or Sweden ? a socialist democracy in which the government
dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers
a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher
taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of ?reform? under the rubric of
?recovery.? Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic
Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his
administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country
fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus
packages won?t do much to shorten the downturn ? although they will
make it less painful ? but they will do a great deal to change our
nation.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of
Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but
the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was
enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking
system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in
lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took
office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And
his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty
that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose
to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery,
stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover?s and
Roosevelt?s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The
Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)

But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the
Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have
dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the
creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under
the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other
fundamental changes.

Obama?s record will be similar, although less wise and more
destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals
have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school
renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These
are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for
years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit ? indeed, empowered
by a mandate to raise it as high as possible ? Obama will do them all
rather quickly.

But it is not his spending that will transform our political system,
it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term
stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than
$200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a
refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle
class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal
income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to
more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral
majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare
checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly
limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to
Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of
the American population.

Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to
run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise
taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will
follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and
increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending.
Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that
conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he
will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to
pay them would be rich Republicans.

In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize
it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks
to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand
preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before
common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe
to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for
preferred stockholders ? the government, not private investors. So who
will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills
be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in
the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever
grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever
more under government control.

Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then
he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of
default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).

Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government
instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some
Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to
line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic
system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy
at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the
economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers
priority over the development of laptops.

But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic
and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a
Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through
private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more
doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health
resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and
equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all
but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve
everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price
controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and
equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will
be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare
rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need
and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based
on income and price will be seen as immoral.)

And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in
America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in
America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to
citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt
to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states
like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is
finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30
percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the
Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination
(until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).

And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor
union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections.
The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in
unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12
percent.

Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal
Communications Commission to impose ?local? control and ownership of
radio stations and to impose the ?fairness doctrine? on talk radio.
The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally
change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.

But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when
the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered
the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package
deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a
second recession to cure it.

So Obama?s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And
the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost
power.

But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the
economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of
healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the
crippling of talk radio."
http://thehill.com/***-morris/the-obama-presidency--here-comes-socia...


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