‘You Didn’t Build That’
The Foundation
“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.” –Alexander Hamilton
Editorial Exegesis
“President Obama has a message for all the small-business owners in America who also happen to employ more than half of all Americans: ‘If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ Obama uttered that sentence while campaigning in Roanoke last Friday, to explain how government deserves a large share of the credit for businesses’ success because it provides basic services and infrastructure that businesses use. ‘The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,’ Obama continued. ‘Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.’ Moreover, Obama did not make this statement to argue that government should invest more in basic research and infrastructure. He was calling for a tax hike to fund more failing solar firms, bullet trains to nowhere and most of all the budget-devouring entitlement programs he lacks the courage to fix. He seems to think successful entrepreneurs should be grateful and eager to pay more. Only someone who has never signed the front of a paycheck could make such an ignorant comment. … It isn’t easy to understand what it takes to create jobs while making money, but Obama has proven himself extraordinarily obtuse on the subject. In just his first three years in office, Obama has approved 106 new major federal regulations that cost the U.S. economy $46 billion annually, according to his own administration’s estimate. Under Obama, the per-employee cost of simply complying with federal regulations – before any other expenses or capital investments are accounted for SEmD has risen from $8,086 in 2008 to $10,585 in 2010, according to the federal Small Business Administration. That number will rise again substantially in 2014, when many firms with more than 50 employees are slapped with stiff fines under Obamacare’s ‘employer responsibility’ requirement. Small businesses already pay the price of big government in more ways than one. Obama should understand if its most successful practitioners are less than thrilled to have him downplay their accomplishments while making the case to raise their taxes.” –The Washington Examiner
Upright
“The Obama theory of entrepreneurship is that behind every successful businessman, there is a successful government. Everyone is helpless without the state, the great protector, builder, and innovator. Everything is ultimately a collective enterprise. Individual initiative is only an ingredient in the more important work when ‘we do things together.’” –National Review’s Rich Lowry
“[Obama’s] apologists will say his remarks were taken out of context, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. Though no one can deny Obama’s assertion that all successful people have benefited from others – teachers and other mentors – the thrust of his remarks was directed at crediting government with having an indispensable role in the success of businesses. … He referred wistfully to the Clinton years as a period of unbridled economic growth – and he attributed that growth to tax increases on the ‘wealthy.’ He said that during those years, ‘we created a lot of millionaires.’ We? Created? In other words, government created a lot of millionaires; it wasn’t their ingenuity, and it certainly wasn’t their ‘hard work’…. This is Obama’s orientation. This is his mindset.” –columnist David Limbaugh
“Under Obama’s formulation … private success is nonexistent. There is only the glory of the state, as expressed through collective action. The ditch digger and social worker share equally in the success of the small-business owner and the tycoon. Therefore, they deserve an equal, or at least much larger, share of the fruits of the entrepreneurs’ labor. This is the thinking of a man who views businesses as entities to be milked for the good of the collective.” –New Hampshire Union Leader
“[‘The buck stops with you’] is an interesting line of attack for Obama to be making. Romney is claiming he should not be held accountable for decisions made by Bain Capital from 1999 through 2002 because he was on leave and did not make any of the decisions in question. Sounds straight forward enough. But what about everything that has happened under Obama since he was sworn into office? The murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Fast and Furious. The Solyndra bankruptcy. The GSA Las Vegas spending scandal. Twenty-three million Americans either under or unemployed. 8.2 percent unemployment. Will Obama claim he’s been on leave since 2009?” –Washing Examiner Senior Editorial Writer Conn Carroll
Insight
“I am concerned for the security of our great nation, not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.” –General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
The Demo-gogues
Obama’s philosophy in a nutshell: “[I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. … If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” –Barack Obama (“It would be interesting to see [Obama] stand before an audience of, say, plant workers who lost their jobs because of EPA regs, and remind them ‘you didn’t get to the unemployment line on your own – somebody gave you some help!’” –blogger Doug Powers)
Belly laugh of the week: “When some people question why I would challenge [Mitt Romney’s] Bain record, the point I’ve made there in the past is, if you’re a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money. It’s not to create jobs. It’s not even to create a successful business – it’s to make sure that you’re maximizing returns for your investor. Now, that’s appropriate. That’s part of the American way. That’s part of the system. But that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.” –Barack Obama, who shouldn’t be bringing up economic qualifications
On that inconvenient tax: “It’s less a tax or a penalty than it is a principle – which is you can’t be a freeloader on other folks when it comes to your health care, if you can afford it.” –Obama
Disagreeing with himself: “By the way, if you’ve got health insurance, you’re not getting hit by a tax. The only thing that’s happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies can’t drop you when you get sick.” –Obama, who has long insisted that the mandate is not a tax
The BIG Lie: “In my life, what I have found – sometimes I do boneheaded things, I make mistakes. What I find is when I don’t, when I try something that doesn’t work, then I don’t try it again.” –Obama, who continues to repeat the same bad plan
You don’t say: “Washington feels as broken as it did four years ago.” –Obama
Story time: “It’s funny – when I ran [for president], everybody said, ‘Well, he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?’ And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.” –Obama on his one fault being failure to tell a story
Throwing the middle class under the bus: “[I]f we can’t get a good deal [to raise taxes on the top two income brackets] – a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share – then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013, rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus.” –Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) (So, raising taxes on everyone will protect middle-class families?)
Dezinformatsia
The BIG Lie II: “I’m actually sad that we’re spending so much time talking about taxes because one thing that’s not going to get us some kind of a growth boom is a tax cut. I mean, it hasn’t worked in the last three or four years. It really hasn’t worked since 2001 when you had much broader across-the-board tax cuts.” –TIME’s economics and business assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar
Blaming Mitt Romney for the tax code: “There is one great strength here that Romney does have, and I think it’s been overlooked. And that is, the Republican position has been, we want to increase revenue without raising the rates. So that means closing tax loopholes or tax expenditures. There’s nobody who knows more about tax loopholes and tax expenditures than Mitt Romney.” –PBS’s Mark Shields
The apple fell far from the tree: “Well, there might be a variety of reasons why [Obama’s] been less than successful at telling his story as he put it. … It … might be that the Republicans have put the White House a bit on the defensive. You’ll remember when he made the call on Osama bin Laden and announced that we had gotten bin Laden in a rather low-key kind of way, the Republicans immediately jumped on him and accused him of taking a victory lap, and doing unseemly things, and politicizing all that sort of thing. It might also be that the media is not giving him enough credit for telling the story that he has told.” –MSNBC’s Ron Reagan Jr.
Sycophant: “Everything [Obama’s] done is clean as a whistle. He’s never not only broken any law, he’s never done anything wrong. He’s the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect American. And all they do is trash the guy.” –MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
Newspulper Headlines:
Shortest Books Ever Written: “The Best Case for Obama’s Tax Plan” –Salon.com
Too Much Information: “Obama Hoping to Continue Love Affair With Iowa” –Washington Post
News You Can Use: “How to Make a Big Mac at Home” –ABCNews.com
Longest Books Ever Written: “Obama’s Spectacular Failure” –Caroline Glick syndicated column
Shortest Books Ever Written: “The Mind of Your Basic Hollywood Liberal” –Larry Elder syndicated column
Breaking News From 1929: “Chicago Hunts for Answers to Gang Killings” –The Wall Street Journal
Bottom Story of the Day: “Silence From Congressional Turkish Caucus” –Commentary website
(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)
Village Idiots
The BIG Lie III: “[The stimulus] is widely recognized to have broken the back of the recession.” –White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
Climate fear-mongering: “A grid that was resilient for the weather of [the past] is not resilient enough to withstand violent storms that climate change and global warming in our atmosphere are causing today. Because of our reliance on the exponential increase in fossil fuels, we have the added variable of much more violent weather than what our parents and grandparents faced.” –Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley
Just like the bloody French Revolution! “[Republicans] have had a policy of obstruction from the day the president arrived. When the president is re-elected, it will be a rejection of the politics of obstruction. There’s this reign of terror going on in the Republican Party.” –Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod
Pot and kettle: “What [Romney’s] saying is, ‘well, I left [Bain Capital] before they actually moved these jobs to China and to Mexico, and I’m not gonna be held responsible for it.’ You know, Harry Truman had a plaque on his desk saying, ‘The buck stops here.’ If Mitt Romney became president he would have a placard on his desk saying the buck stops there.” –David Axelrod
Say what? “I mean, hope doesn’t get actualized in three and a half years. If that were the case, we’d be out of luck as a country.” –Michelle Obama
Hollyweird: “I guess it goes back to Robin Hood. People that are fighting for the middle class and for the Have-Nots. It’s something that we see even playing out in the presidential race. And if you don’t vote for Barack Obama, you’re insane. Cause without him, I think the middle class will completely disappear. And you look at Romney – and I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but I think he’s like The Thing – he only imitates human behavior. He’s not actually human himself.” –actor Mark Hamill, a.k.a. Luke Skywalker
Short Cuts
“When Obama gets heckled, the heckler is a racist. When Romney gets heckled, HE’S a racist. Keep it straight, cracker.” –Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher
The Obama White House deserves credit for its consistency, if not its performance, on jobs. Since November 2009 it has told Americans not to read too much into a monthly jobs report a staggering 30 times. … Fair enough then, don’t read too much into one monthly jobs report. But how about 41 straight months?“ –Pajamas Media’s Bryan Preston
"President Obama canceled his vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, saying he must focus on his re-election campaign. It calls for a special counsel. If the president suffers an injury that’s preventing him from playing golf, the country has a right to know about it.” –comedian Argus Hamilton
“During a recent speech, Vice President Joe Biden said ‘I believe this election will come down to character, conviction and vision.’ I agree. Biden is a ‘character,’ Holder just got ‘convicted’ by the House, and none of them have the ‘vision’ to see what’s about to happen to them in November.” –Fred Thompson
“Obama wants you to know that if you’re rich and successful, it’s not because you’re smart and hard working, it’s because government helped you out. So why isn’t government helping me be rich? What is it with Obama and his lazy stupid government making so few people rich these days? I pay my taxes; make me rich, Obama. I’m waiting. Oh! I got something from Obama in the mail! I bet it’s about making me rich… No. It’s just food stamps.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team
