This is the season to be jolly, but almost daily there is bad news that makes it difficult.
The continuing lack of employment is the worst. Don’t be fooled by the slowdown in jobs lost in November and December. The holiday season always creates hundreds of thousands of temporary, minimum-wage jobs that are gone by the start of the New Year.
Most economists predict unemployment will continue to rise through most of 2010. When President Obama distributed billions of dollars to local banks across the country, the expectation was that the banks would use it to make the business loans necessary to generate jobs; instead they locked it away in vaults. Today it is easier to crash a White House party than it is for a business to get a loan.
Another factor that is slowing recovery is that consumer spending is at a record low, and consumer spending accounts for 70% of the nation’s economy. As with business loans, consumer loans, without a perfect credit rating and unimpeachable security, are nearly impossible to obtain. If George Bailey applied for a loan today, he would find banker Mr. Potter was an easy touch. The fact that Wall Street is stable and the giant banks and
investment firms are making big profits is an irrelevancy, the big bankers are like the Roman Emperor Nero, they are dancing while the nation’s economy burns.
I occasionally wonder where Barrack Obama went. During the presidential election he certainly appeared to be an action oriented guy; for instance he was prepared to submit health-care reform legislation to
Congress, was going to quickly bring to an end our hopeless task of trying to create a stable, democratic government in Afghanistan, one of the most primitive nations on earth. Had a program to halt the soaring unemployment, create jobs and cut taxes on the middle class.
As an independent voter, he got my ballot, but was apparently kidnapped and this President Obama substituted. This guy had no health-care reform bill and left it to the inmates in Congress to create one. He didn’t halt our resource-draining efforts in Afghanistan, he transferred troops from Iraq to the quagmire and is now sending 30 thousand more with the military estimate 2012 as possible date to bring them all home. Barrack Obama said he planned huge tax breaks for businesses and individuals with a cost of $300 billion that was expected to grow at least another $400 billion in the next two years. It would be the largest tax cut in history. I was happy to hear that, but President Obama has done no such thing. The president has not closed Guantanamo; he has not stopped sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured for information; he has not changed our policy on telephone surveillance. In short, he is following the policies of George Bush.
The man occupying the White House is not the man Americans believed they were electing; this is reflected in polls showing a decreasing confidence in him. The public is most critical of his efforts to create jobs, and his timidity in taking effective action will continue. One thing that President Obama has done is to creating a foreign policy that consists of him traveling around the world meeting people; he seems to be spending more time traveling than here at home. He meets with virtually any foreign leader, big or small, who’s willing to see him. Afterward he announces that they have agreed to fight global warming, support nuclear disarmament and world peace He has also changed the protocol for greeting foreign leaders, one that has stood for 200 years, that the president of the United State is the equal of any foreign leader and bows to no one. President Obama travels the world bowing and scraping to anyone who calls themselves a king or queen or emperor; I pray he will never visit a zoo with Emperor penguins.
However, despite all the gloom surrounding the Christmas season. LaGrange is surmounting it, our local school choirs and chorales performed songs reflecting that this is a religious holiday without the ACLU suing. LaGrange churches, service clubs and individuals are demonstrating the spirit of Christmas in providing food and gifts for those in need. The city and homes are decorated in celebration not of Santa Day, but the birth of Christ. There is an excess of bad things happening in our country and the world, but here in our city the spirit of goodwill to men prevails.
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