Got Stupid? Americans Embrace Obamanomics

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” — H.L. Mencken.

According to an April 17-19 Washington Post-ABC News Poll, a majority, or at the very least a plurality, of Americans are: 1) insane; 2) brainwashed; 3) really, really stupid; or 4) so naïve that they need to be restrained to keep them from harming themselves.

In this survey, the president has a net favorability rating of 52% (“somewhat favorable” plus “strongly favorable”), this notwithstanding that from January 2009 to April 2011 – the retail price of gas rose 69.6% (in the Chicago area – it now averages $4.17 a gallon) unemployment-benefit recipients are up 22% and the number of long-term unemployed rose 146%.

Still, more than half of Americans have a favorable opinion of the man who’s steered the ship of state during that period. On the plus side, there was no shortage of ice aboard the Titanic – as it sank.

By 45% to 44% Americans say they trust Obama over the GOP to do a better job of cutting spending to balance the budget. Okay, so we padlock the Pentagon, fire the Border Patrol – and then what?

Americans trust the president to “handle taxes,” over Republicans, by 47% to 42%. Dracula would have done an exceptional job running a blood bank.

When it comes to protecting the middle class, the public prefers the president to Republicans by 51% to 39%. As a candidate in 2008, Obama characterized Middle America as the domain of gun nuts, religious fanatics, bigots and xenophobes. So, a majority expect the president to stand up for folks for whom he has the utmost contempt. That’s logical.

Of those surveyed, only 39% think Obama’s views are “too liberal,” 8% think they’re “too conservative” (who knew the American Communist Party was that large) and 49% think the knee-jerk opinions of this doctrinaire leftist are (I kid you not) “about right.”

When it comes to tackling that pesky national debt, 69% oppose cutting Medicaid (medical welfare for the poor) and 78% oppose any reduction in Medicare (medical services for the elderly), but 72% support attacking that combination scapegoat/piggybank – taxpayers making over $250,000 per annum.

At the same time, 44% (a plurality) said the economy is getting worse, 37% (also a plurality) said jobs are getting scarcer in their area, 78% have noticed that retail prices are rising, and 71% said increases at the pump are causing a financial hardship in their household. Not to worry, the president feels their pain – on alternate weeks when he’s not on vacation, which happen to be the safest times to live in America.

What would it take to get the 57% who think our beloved president isn’t too liberal to change their minds: If he went on television Sunday mornings and read excerpts from “Das Kapital” to the kiddies, if he put George Soros on a $20 bill, if he channeled Che Guevara, if he and his pals Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton formed the Marxist-Leninist Chorale Group and sang a medley of old Soviet tunes?

Obama’s 2011 budget is $3.8 trillion (compared to $2.9 trillion for W’s last budget). The president says we must “reduce spending” while he adds billions for infrastructure, schools that don’t educate and green jobs (which require massive subsidies to exist), as well as to reward his loyal constituencies: organized labor, gays, illegal aliens and the abortion lobby.

In Obama’s first two years in office, federal spending increased from 20.7% to 25.4% of Gross Domestic Product. He’s posted the largest deficits in history – $1.1 trillion under his 2012 budget, according to the CBO.

When his fiscal reign of terror began, the national debt was $10.626 trillion, itself a staggering sum. Today, it’s over $14.3 trillion. In other words, in two years and three months, Obama – who says he has a plan to balance the budget sometime in the 23rd century – increased the national debt by over 25%. We’re now spending money we don’t have at the rate of $125 billion a month.

But, hey, who cares about deficits and the national debt, right? It’s not as if it had a crowding out effect on the private borrowing that fuels business expansion and creates jobs. It’s not as if the number receiving unemployment benefits increased 22.2%, or by more than a million and a half, since Obama took office, despite over $1 trillion in stimulus spending. It’s not as if monetizing the debt had sent commodity prices soaring.

Not much.

You’re about to enter another dimension – a dimension of mega-deficits, hyper-inflation, chronic, double-digit unemployment and national bankruptcy. That’s the signpost up ahead. Your next stop: the economic meltdown zone.

Of course, there’s always that reliable socialist standby, tax the rich. Recall that 72% in The Washington Post-ABC News poll think we can close the revenue gap on the backs of taxpayers who are making than $250,000 a year and aren’t paying their fair share, dammit!

How many of those who’ve bought into the class-envy crud have even a vague idea of what the alleged malefactors of wealth are currently paying? More could probably draw a map of Finland from memory.

The top 1% of filers – with an adjusted gross income of $380,354 – paid 38% of all federal income taxes for tax year 2008 (the last for which data is available). The bottom 50% paid a whopping 2.7%.

Forget taking a measly 35%, currently the top income tax rate. Let’s say we confiscated every penny the top 1% earned last year – roughly $1.7 trillion. That would run the federal government for exactly 5 ½ months. Then what? What would the follow-up act be – extraditing fugitive capitalists from Costa Rica and the Cayman islands?

Whatever happens, we must not touch entitlement programs – say an overwhelming majority. With fewer and fewer paying in and more and more taking out, they are the very definition of a fiscal time bomb.

Back in 2008, when ObamaCare was just a gleam in an Illinois Senator’s eye, the United States still had the 3rd highest per capita public-health expenditures in the world. Thanks mostly to Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. provides health care for roughly 30% of the population.

Presently, 47 million Americans are on Medicare, at an annual cost of $468 billion. Over the next decade, boomers will swell recipient ranks by another 14 million. By 2020, Medicare spending will exceed $1 trillion, over a quarter of the current budget. Like most western nations, we have an aging population and a declining workforce. But in the face of this coming demographic train-wreck, 78% say hands off Medicare.

In response to inflation at the pump – and behaving with a predictability that rises to self-parody – on Thursday, the president announced that Attorney General Holder will launch an investigation of oil companies.

“We want to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain,” the president pronounced. But it’s Obama who’s put America on an energy-starvation diet, resulting in price-hikes for current supplies.

The United States has more recoverable fossil fuels than any nation on earth – more than China, more than Russia, more than Saudi Arabia – and a government determined to keep us from recovering them. According to the Congressional Research Service, we have 28% of the world’s known coal reserves (262 billion tons).

Lest the public be swayed by the abundance of this energy-source, on April 19, the president reminded us that, while “very cheap,” coal is also dangerously dirty, causing “all kinds of air pollution” that is “creating asthma for kids.”

Whenever they’re desperate for a dumb-ass excuse, the left invariably tells us they’re doing it for the children. Obama’s junk science is refuted by the National Institutes for Health, which says the cause of asthma could be genetic, or due to a childhood viral infection or environmental.

There’s at least 86 billion barrels of oil and more than 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore – and a virtual ban on offshore drilling. Thanks to the president’s determination to see the price of energy skyrocket (as part of his anti-globalony warming agenda), the Energy Information Administration predicts a 13% decrease in domestic oil production this year. After Shell Oil sank $4 billion into developing an Alaskan find that could contain 27 billion barrels, the EPA just denied it a drilling permit.

In the meantime, at Obama’s direction, the U.S. Export-Import Bank has invested over $2 billion in Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance off-shore exploration. Gulf CEO Joe Petrowski told Fox News’ Neal Cavuto: “But why Brazil, when we could have jobs and foreign exchange in this country is rather puzzling – and I’d say almost humorous.” I can’t stop laughing.

The president of the United States has no idea of how wealth is created – how business expands and jobs are generated – just how to redistribute it. Thus higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” thus cap and trade, thus ObamaCare, thus economic stimulus that siphons funds from the private sector to reward loyal constituencies of the party of plunder…thus, thus, thus.

Beating up on oil companies for “excessive” profits – AKA: let’s create another scapegoat, this time a scapegoat for our anti-energy policies – epitomizes Obamaism.

In an interview in Financial Times earlier this year, 3M Co. CEO George Buckley described the man who’s never created a job (but is a whiz at destroying them) as profoundly “anti-business.” Said Buckley, “We know what his instincts are – they are Robin Hood-esque.”

Ken Lagone, one of three businessmen who started Home Depot in 1979, a firm that now employs more than 325,000, says his company would never have gotten off the ground under Obama.

Lagone lambastes the president, for his obsession “with repealing tax cuts for ‘millionaires and billionaires.’” But “contrary to what you might assume, I didn’t start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know.” The Home Depot co-founder reveals that his first job, more than 50 years ago, was as a day laborer on construction of the Long Island Expressway. “The wealth that was created by my investments wasn’t put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefited our employees, their families and our community at large.”

The International Monetary Fund just announced that the “Age of America” will end in 2016, when China’s economy surpasses our own. Makes sense. They make things, earning foreign exchange. We spend money we don’t have. They develop resources. We investigate businesses for shortages our government has created. They’re proud of their achievements. We have a president who’s embarrassed by America’s past greatness.

Obama believes American preeminence is based on exploitation at home and abroad. He thinks we use too much of the earth’s bounty. He thinks Americans have too much and he’s committed to seeing that they have less. FDR said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” JFK said, “Ask what you can do for your country.” BO says; “Trade in your SUVs; drive fuel-efficient vehicles. The ‘Age of America’ is over, stupid!”

And 49% of Americans, think the president’s views are “about right.”

Author Joseph Heller said: “In a democracy you get the government you deserve. Alternately, you deserve the government you got.” Francisco D’Anconia, a character in Ayn Rand’s anti-collectivist novel Atlas Shrugged, put it more succinctly – “Brothers, you asked for it!”

This article originally appeared on GrassTopsUSA.com and is reprinted with permission.