Obama: ”We built this country together.”

In the beginning there were the 13 original colonies. It was those intrepid people who were the foundations of this country. They came to this country for many reasons. Some came to escape religious persecution, while others came to be free of oppressive governments. For whatever their reason they sometimes formed small communities and worked together to build their small portion of the country. These people later formed local governments which have become the foundations of this country.

In time these colonies decided it would be in their best interested if they formed a partnership to provide for a common defense and create free trade agreements. Many knew that tariffs among the young colonies could be their downfall. For these and other reasons the United States of American was formed.

With a long history behind this great country we can look back and look at the mistakes and the great things that have been done by this young country. As we look at our past we have seen individual names filling our history. It was only through great effort by individuals that this country became what it is today.

President Obama gave a speech where he told us all the wonderful things government has accomplished. He told us how we explored space and put men on the moon. As a country we did land men on the moon, but it was only through great individual and corporate accomplishments that this could have been achieved.

Without Sir Isaac Newton and his gravitational theories could mankind have ever ventured from the surface of the Earth? Without corporations like Lockheed and McDonald Douglas could we have explored our solar system? We must now ask what part government played in these endeavors. Government did three things, they created the need, provided the money, from which they took from citizens, and built the bureaucracy known as NASA.

We enter the present where NASA is handing over ISS supply and crew transport to private corporations, the reason why is that corporations can do the same job cheaper. Private corporations now have a vested interest in space because there are individuals who wish to travel there. Space is now filled with satellites that provide for profit services to people of all countries.

Why did the government first provide the need to enter space? The space race was about the military advantage that space gave any country that could develop the technology. Only two countries at that time had the resources to reach space.

Obama talked about building the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, both of which were built by private corporations. In the case of the Hoover damn it took six private companies to build the damn. At the time no single corporation could provide the $5 million needed for the bond. It wasn’t government that provided the knowhow to build the dam, but individuals within the construction companies that designed and overcame obstacles to build the dam.

People of this country have accomplished a lot, and often simply for their own satisfaction. Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. He didn’t do this because he wanted to make the country richer; he did it because he was curious. He did it for self satisfaction. Thomas Edison discovered the electric light bulb, not to make the country richer, but for his own satisfaction and then for his own profit.

Obama wanted to tout nuclear energy as one of government’s greatest accomplishment. The government wanted nuclear power for a single reason, to kill people, which they did. Without Individuals like Albert Einstein we would not have nuclear anything today. He came up with the theories, for one reason, he was curious. It is the curiosity of individuals that has built the world. Government wants you to believe it was some collective society that built today’s world. Most of the things we have today have a single driving force, the desire for profit.

Yes the government builds roads, bridges, and railroads. We have to ask, do we need a central government to build things? States and cities are capable of building the roads and bridges they deem necessary. We have the Interstate highway system which was originally built by the federal government, but again, that was done for military purposes.

People like Obama want us to believe that the country is better as a collective where we work only for the collective. This is communistic thinking. There is only one thing on which we can agree about humankind and that is in the end they care only about their self interest or the interest of those they love. Our mothers and fathers don’t work for the world collective, they work for their families.

THE PRESIDENT: No, no, look -- I mean, we’re having a good, healthy, democratic debate. That’s how this works. And on their side, they’ve got a basic theory about how you grow the economy. And the theory is very simple: They think that the economy grows from the top down. So their basic theory is, if wealthy investors are doing well then everybody does well. So if we spend trillions of dollars on more tax cuts mostly for the wealthy, that that’s somehow going to create jobs, even if we have to pay for it by gutting education and gutting job-training programs and gutting transportation projects, and maybe even seeing middle-class folks have a higher tax burden.

This statement is disingenuous, or he is really poorly informed. He is right that there is a difference in the philosophies. Let’s start with the tax cuts. Republicans want to keep taxes at the current rate. Obama and the democrats want to raise taxes on people earning more than $250,000. If the tax went into effect tomorrow that would be an additional $80 billion annually, while the annual deficit is $1.4 trillion. This would raise about eight days worth of spending for the federal government. This tax is simply a political baseball which means nothing in the scheme of things. Government knows only how to spend money.

The tax rate has been the same since 2002. How can you call not raising taxes in 2012 a tax cut? Every economist will tell you the same thing, even Bill Clinton agrees; you don’t raise taxes in a recession.

If the democrats really wanted these taxes they would have raised them in 2009 – 2010 when they controlled both houses. They would rather use the tax issue as a political baseball to demonize those who have worked hard to earn a good living or to build their small business to the point they earn over $250,000. Revenue raised from such a tax is negligible.

Currently the USA has a 30% corporate tax, which is the highest in the world. Government buys favors from corporations by dolling out tax deductions to corporations who are willing to pay for them through campaign donations. If the left really wanted to tax fairly they would go to a flat tax or some form of national sales tax. This won’t happen because both parties need those campaign donations.

The president goes on to ridicule the right’s call for less regulations that keep businesses from expanding. He inferred that the problems of today are a result of those reduced regulations. Let’s take a moment to talk about those regulations. We have Bernie Madoff who for over a decade ran a pyramid investment scam with the blessings of the SEC. He wasn’t hiding anything. Everyone in Washington and New York knew what he was doing. A regulation that no one is willing to enforce does nothing to stop corruption.

We then had the subprime loan scandal that is the direct cause of the economic crisis. This was also done with the blessing, and sometimes insistence, of the federal government. There were people from both parties who begged congress to fix the problem, but they would not even admit there was a problem.

President Obama, you need to understand something. The only way government can create a job is to pay the employee with money they took from other Americans. Government produces nothing but laws and regulations that burden Americans that wish to earn a living by creating their own business. The woman that owns the Salon isn’t the problem, its government, especially the federal government.