Print
Category: Times Leader Unpublished
Hits: 3686

Other than in the past on a professional basis, when he wrote highly technical articles about IBM's AS/400 computer system, Brian Kelly receives no compensation for his work. Additionally, Kelly has not taken any donations or contributions other than for his US Senate Campaign of 2012. Mr. Kelly has recetly canceled his write-in campaign for the US Senate, and instead he  endorses Tom Smith for US Senator from Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey Jr.  If you would like to donate to the closed campaign to help defray costs, feel free to go to www.kellyforussenate.com and click the DONATE button. Your donations are most appreciated.

Additionally, if you would like to help Mr. Kelly in his efforts to continue to write free patriotic articles and to write additional patriotic books for the good of America, feel free to visit this site or that site to purchase Mr. Kelly's patriotic books. His latest book, Saving America, the How-To Book is available from this site. Thank you.

Please enjoy the rest of this article.

------

No matter how much Mr. Castagna likes the President, Barack Obama is the cause of our economy not recovering. After four years, Bush is not the blame. To attempt to prove his point, however, Castagna took his argument all the way back to the Clinton/Bush era.   

Bush did inherit a budget surplus but there is a lot more to the story. The surplus came about because Republicans had control of the House and Senate during Clinton’s second term, and Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America had everybody in Washington, including President Clinton trying to balance the budget. A Republican Congress and President Clinton in one of the last bipartisan agreements in recent history gave us all a balanced budget with a small surplus. 

President Obama is no President Clinton. He does not even measure up to Jimmy Carter who blamed his failures on the American people. After almost four years, Obama still takes the easy road by blaming Bush. He takes no responsibility for his failures. 

Obama could not get a single Democrat vote for any of his own treasury busting budgets. None passed either the House or the Senate.

Castagna also forgot to mention that Clinton also handed Bush the beginning of a recession. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) set March 1, 2001, less than two months after Bush’s inauguration as the official date of the recession though members of the group see the real start date as November, 2000. Either way, Bush did not do that. It was a Clinton recession.

The Bush tax cuts were passed on June 7, 2001 to end the leftover Clinton era recession and this short recession was over by November 2001. The Bush tax cuts did the job as intended.  Additionally 9-11 was not Bush’s fault but it was an American tragedy and a major economic setback. Another event that began in Clinton’s term and ended in Bush’s first year was the complete “busting” of the dot com bubble, and Bush had to bail us all out of that mess. The difference between Bush and Obama is that when given a poor hand, Bush made the situation a bit better while Obama made it worse. Obama's legacy is that right now,  about ¼ of the US population is unemployed or underemployed. Those lucky to be working are being paid about $4,000 per year less than in the Bush years.

In the seventh year of the Bush presidency, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress. Obama was one of the new Senators that began the big progressive spending spree.  These big spenders are responsible for the huge deficits and the spike in the quoted unemployment from 4.6% when Republicans controlled Congress to 7.2 percent in just two years. Two years later, in the Obama presidency, the quoted rate was up to 11.4 percent unemployment.

By December, 2007, the errant spending and the loose banking regulations by the Democrats caused another recession. This one is nicknamed the “Great Recession.” It supposedly ended in June 2009. Yet, those of us out of work still feel its pains and our economy is still in a state of disarray.

The Democratic controlled government, not Wall St., and not your local bank created the major financial crisis that brought banks to their knees in 2008. Government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been encouraged to expand and become a force in the market by purchasing mortgage-backed securities, including those formed with the risky subprime mortgages. Barney Frank, the Finance Chairman, “rolled the dice” one too many times.  It was an inevitable ending to the Clinton-era push to lend more to poor people who clearly could not afford a mortgage no-way and no-how.  When people cannot pay their mortgage they default and the banks or the government (taxpayers) get stuck bailing them all out.

Without the government's intervention, there would have been no housing crisis. It was a nice idea giving people a home but the government is not a charity as Democrats believe it is.

The fact is there is no pot of gold in the US treasury to sustain nice charitable ideas. Barney Frank and his cohorts in Congress did their best to meet the demands of activists like ACORN for an easing of underwriting standards in order to make home ownership more accessible to more people. That again is code for giving mortgages to people who could not afford them and then having Fannie and Freddie (Taxpayer funded) buy up the bad paper. Eventually it all crashed because it was not sustainable.

Perhaps Mr. Castagna does not know that in February, 2008 the Bush proposed Budget contained an increase of just 3% spending over the prior year.  Fiscal year 2009 ran from October 1, 2008 until September 30, 2009.  President Obama’s term began on January 20, 2009. When the budget was finally approved and implemented by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities, they had jacked up the spending from the Bush submitted 3% number to a whopping 17.9 percent increase for fiscal 2009! Government spending in the form of bailouts and stimulus has not helped this economy. 

Over-spending is a progressive / Democrat disease not a conservative disease.  Mr. Dress’s only comment on unemployment is that more people need it with Obama. There is no implication that he disagrees with the idea of helping the unemployed.  Likewise, I saw nothing in Mr. Dress’s letter about Medicare and Medicaid. But, it is mentioned in the Castagna response as if Dress is against it. It is widely reported that Obama stole $716 Billion from Medicare, which is already failing and he put it into Obamacare for people who have never contributed a dime to Medicare. I can go on and on as Obama’s record is one bad decision after another. Each decision has hurt America and Americans while this President smiles; ignores the problems that he creates, and goes on with his all important campaign for reelection.

Just because Mr. Castagna would like Obama to be a good President, does not make him one. He has created more misery and pain for America than any other President and he has presided over the longest recession in American history. It is really not over yet. It will never end with Mr. Obama in charge as his ideology will not let him help America.

And, so, I commend Mr. Dress for suggesting that we solve the problem by taking the Clint Eastwood solution:   "When somebody doesn't do the job, you gotta let `em go," Eastwood said at the RNC Convention Thursday night. Well said Mr. Dress and Mr. Eastwood! I could not agree more.