“DEVOID OF HUMAN DECENCY”
by Paul R. Hollrah, ©2012
(Aug. 23, 2012) — Over the past month or more the Obama campaign has trotted out what they apparently feel is the most effective way of destroying Mitt Romney. To interject their spurious charges into the public discourse they had to find a man or a woman so devoid of human decency that they would say or do anything to help reelect Obama. When Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Bill Maher walked away holding their noses and Joe Biden was nowhere to be found, Obama and Axelrod scraped the bottom of the barrel… they settled on Senate Majority Leader Dirty Harry Reid.
The scene in the Oval Office must have been much like the two boys in the old cereal ad of the 1970s. As the boys turned up their noses at the cereal their mother placed on the breakfast table, they looked at their younger brother and said, “Let Mikey try it. He’ll eat anything.”
Harry Reid is the “Mikey” of today’s Democratic Party, so Obama decided, “Let Harry do it. He’ll say anything,” and that’s exactly what Harry did. He went to the floor of the U.S. Senate to announce that he had been informed… by an anonymous source… that Mitt Romney had paid no federal income taxes for ten years. The only thing that would have lent a hint of credibility to Harry’s tale is if he’d described driving half way across the state of Maryland in the middle of the night to fish Romney’s tax information out of a hollowed out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch.
But now the Obama people have taken Reid’s bogus charge and turned it into one of the biggest jokes of the 2012 campaign. Since Romney has balked at releasing anything beyond his last two year’s tax returns, Obama and Axelrod have decided, in the interest of Chicago-style fairness, to demand only his last five years of tax returns instead of the ten years they’ve been yammering about. If Romney will do that, they promise not to agitate for any additional year’s tax returns.
What’s the old adage about giving “the sleeves out of one’s vest?” In reply, Mitt Romney might have suggested that, if Obama will release his college entrance application forms for Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, along with his grades for all three schools, he will not ask to see his college theses and term papers. What is sad, and what leaves decent people in a state of slack-jawed shock, is that the Obama strategists saw their compromise as a serious offer.
What all of this says, and what should be clear to everyone by now, is that Barack Obama and his band of Chicago thugs may advertise themselves as being the brightest bulbs on the porch, but they’re not. Quite the opposite is true. They’re not smart; they’re only crafty, bold, and shameless. It opens the door for some very smart campaigning by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
For example, as Romney and Ryan return to the campaign trail after the nominating convention, they should start immediately to develop their force-multipliers. In order to lure the business community out of the shadows and into the arena they need to explain at every campaign stop that they cannot predict exactly how long the economic recovery will take, once Obama is out of office, but that November 6, 2012 will be the day on which economic recovery begins in earnest.
Why? Because, for the first time since January 2009, business men and women will look forward to making long-term business decisions based on a high degree of certainty.
They will be able to predict with confidence that, on election night, when it becomes clear that Obama and Biden have been soundly defeated, businessmen and women across the country, large and small, will take that as their cue to announce prospective expansion and hiring plans. By making that prediction with certainty, the mere mention of it will be enough to generate a tidal wave of such announcements all across the country. It can be a major force-multiplier for Romney and Ryan. And what will Obama-Biden be able to do to compete? Nothing.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that, in spite of widespread unemployment, U.S. corporations are sitting on cash reserves totaling $1.6 trillion because of a reluctance to expand in the uncertain Obama economy. The Romney-Ryan campaign should take full advantage of that fact, recommending that owners of those reserves begin immediately to make plans for their reinvestment and giving wide publicity to those who are prepared to do so.
It is unclear exactly what Obama could do in less than two and one-half months to make corporations and other business owners loosen up their capital reserves. Obama is the problem; he is not part of the solution and it is unlikely that any businessman or woman is in a mood to do him any favors.
The same is true of overseas profits earned by American businesses that have failed to be repatriated because of high U.S. income and capital gains taxes. It is estimated that more than $1 trillion in overseas earnings are available for repatriation, much of it in island tax havens.
The money, including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. corporations attribute to overseas operations, would be taxed at up to 35 percent when it is returned to our shores. Executives, including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc., say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.
And finally, while it would not be appropriate for employers to meet with groups of employees to predict cutbacks if Obama is reelected, corporations large and small can find ways to get the point across to their employees. Business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Federation of Independent Business should be urged to conduct surveys of their members regarding their outlook in the event of a second Obama term and to publish the results.
It’s clear that the Obama-Biden team is ready and willing to play hardball. Because the stakes are so high, it’s time the business community… from the mom-and-pop stores up to the largest multi-national corporations… learned to do the same.
It is also time that working men and women understood a few economic facts of life. They need to understand that:
- A strong economy is not developed by growing government jobs and government services; government doesn’t produce anything. Government only provides services that are paid for by the taxes of those who create wealth by making things.
- No matter how much unionized workers may love their union leaders, their unions play no role whatsoever in creating jobs. It is only shareholders and business owners who risk their capital to create a business who are responsible for creating jobs.
And finally, it’s time Romney and Ryan urged us all to sit down with our children, our parents, and our grandparents to have a heart-to-heart family discussion about the dangers of reelecting a president who promised to reduce the annual deficit, but who has accumulated $1 trillion annual deficits every year for four years, running our national debt to $16 trillion and our annual interest costs to $500 billion. Given a second term in office, his policies will have a profound impact on family life in America and the ability of many seniors to continue to live independently.
Those in our families who are inclined toward Obama must be made to understand that the Obama administration has done nothing to control spending. In fact, it has used television advertising to extend federal entitlement benefits such as food stamps to more and more people and has wasted untold billions of dollars attempting to pick winners and losers in Democrat-leaning “green” energy enterprises.
Having approached the very edge of the fiscal cliff during the Obama years, it’s time that American workers understood which side their bread is buttered on. To continue to demand European-style labor benefits is to invite disaster.
In spite of what Harry Reid might say about Mitt Romney’s tax payments… which everyone knows to be untrue… it comes down to a choice of who can do a better job of saving the nation from fiscal disaster. Would it be Mitt Romney, who gave his entire inheritance away to charities and to his church, starting from scratch to build a highly successful venture capital business? Or would it be Barack Obama, an affirmative action poster boy who has been given a free ride every step of the way in his pointless life and who has never so much as run a sidewalk lemonade stand? The choice is clear.
Obama must not only be defeated, he must be defeated in a landslide.