Wow! Are We Not Getting It!!

Let’s be more specific. The topic of today’s essay is: Obama, and most, if not all, politicians, just do not get it.

His airplane metaphor was so bad that even he couldn’t get it from the teleprompter to his brain and out his mouth without stumbling over the lines. His sputnik moment analogy does not work. Sputnik was a crude use of minimal satellite technology (it beeped; its batteries ran down in about three weeks) coupled with a successful display of rocket thrust science (several prior rocket launches failed.) In other words, the rocket finally stayed on course and left the pull of the earth’s gravity. Beyond that, it didn’t do much. If you think that is analogous to the economic power of Germany, China, India and South Korea and Brazil and Russia and the other new and strong “competitors” that are handing us our well padded collective fannies each day in the commercial, competitive marketplace; well, then we can well understand why you may buy into his “investment” plans.

This man did not and chose to not address the situation; the real status of the union. Why? The story is not pretty. The deficits are spectacular when compared with the revenues our nation is taking in. That is just a different way of saying that the economic power that produces the nation’s tax revenues are so desperately lagging behind the spending levels that we cannot discipline ourselves to rebuild a strong wealth creating, economic growth foundation for the future because we are addicted to a comfortable mythology about who and what we are. Our education system now lags behind at least 20 other vigorous, competitive nations. Our health care costs per citizen are double and in some cases triple the cost of our major competitors without anything to show for the higher costs. We have successfully built a culture of offering apparent legal protections for large groups or classes of our population and suggested that the benefits of those “protections” are a good substitute for jobs, wealth creation and strong economic growth. And, to placate all those powerful but needy groups of special interests, the lawyers and the teachers and the public employee unions and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association and SEIU and AFSCME, we settle for his concept of “investments” which is just code for more government spending. By the way, why isn’t our sputnik moment the realization that we have sold our economic competitiveness to these greedy special interest basterds so that a few fat politicians can stay in power a few months longer? That would be a real sputnik moment!!

We are deceiving ourselves at the very highest leadership roles in the country. But are the leaders really clueless? Are we just kidding ourselves by saying that they don’t get it? What if they do get it and they are manipulating us with this mythological pablum and claptrap about our future prospects? Did you ever think that all they really care about is themselves? That they know darn well that our future is bleak? That they think that as long as they keep talking about our great and glorious past and pretending that we have a great and glorious future we will ignore that not a one of them, much less a gathering of them, has an ounce of the fortitude necessary to deliver the message that we had better retool ourselves at significant cost to our government spending; our silly and costly and nonproductive health care spending and education spending and our absolutely dopey catering to special interests like attorneys suing over claimed discrimination matters and claimed sticky accelerators and all the other nonsense that turns on the trial lawyers of this country. There is not one piece of competitive value in any of these activities. No jobs growth; no economic activity; no wealth creation. One of our supporters/readers has a one word description for these activities: parasites. Look up the word parasite: ‘ a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.’ Source: http://www.dictionary.com/

Enough folks. It is truly depressing to witness such nonsense. What happened to sacrifice? What happened to “...ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” What happened to savings and frugality? What happened to doing without today to build for tomorrow? For decades now, we have not had a leader, nary a one, who will lead this country in a changing and challenging time. We have settled for politicians. Why don’t we want a leader?

235 years ago, a group of our own people decided that they needed to do something about their situation. They did not ask someone to do it for them. They knew that if the job was to be done they would have to do it. They knew that it would be risky and that they could lose all. But they did it. They chose the road of setting their own course. They chose to stand on their strengths and rely on their abilities to compete and survive. And, in closing their statement of their purpose, here is what they said, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

No one is asking us to pledge our lives to this effort. Just a bit of our fat fanny comfort. Our fortunes are already declining. Should we wait until they have declined another 20 or 30% before we decide to do something? The way we’re borrowing and printing currency, ours will easily devalue by that amount in the next 5 or 10 years. As to honor, ask yourself what you value. What is your definition of honor? Is honor following a politician or a union leader or a greedy businessman? Or is honor saying I did without so that my children and my grandchildren can have an opportunity for “an opportunity.”