Don't Allow Yourself To Be Caught Up In The Thick Of Thin Things

There is a talk show host where I come from that likes to warn his listeners not to get caught up in the thick of thin things. By this, he means, don't get sucked into a debate about insignificant but sexy issues and then lose sight of the really important ones.

This is especially good advice in the political campaign season because politicians and their handlers love to find a sexy molehill and then spin it into a mountain. A case in point is Mitt Romney's wealth (Breaking: Mitt Romney Still Filthy Rich) or Ann Romney's horseback riding (MS and Romney's Horse). These are "thin" issues meant to attract you and then distract you from the critically important issues in this race: Barack Obama's progressive policies and his economic obsolescence.

In Wednesday night's debate President Obama tried to suck the country into a debate about Romney's economic plan which, according to the President, lowers taxes on the wealthy, raises taxes on the middle class, blows up the deficit and cuts "critical" investments in education and biofuels. 

This is from a man who has no economic plan at all, who couldn't pass a budget in Congress, who presided over trillion dollar deficits each year of his Presidency and engineered the greatest total increase in public debt in American history.

Moreover, although he keeps reminding us that he inherited "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" from George W. Bush, Obama eagerly re-appointed the man who presided over that financial crisis, Bush's Federal Reserve Chairman, "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke.

All this noisy speculation about the arithmetic of Romney's economic plan is a sideshow meant to distract us from the really important issues of this campaign: Barack Obama's failed Keynesian economic policies and progressive ideology.

This is not to say that Mitt Romney is an Ayn Rand-like advocate of the free market. His comment that free economies need to be regulated is oxymoronic. Still, Romney doesn't hitch his wagon of economic recovery to a retread promise of hiring 100,000 new government workers, or creating two million more "slots" in government schools, or converting pond scum into diesel fuel.

The thrust of Romney's rhetoric is economic growth in the private sector. The thrust of Obama's rhetoric is government growth, following the pattern he set in his first term.
 
In 2009 Obama signed a near trillion dollar Stimulus package that stimulated the pockets of Democratic Party special interests but little else.   

In 2010 Obama signed the monstrous ObamaCare act that will serve as a prelude to a single payer, government-run health care system unless it is repealed.

In 2011 Obama proposed a second Stimulus package of $447-billion, this time labeling his effort to expand the size of government a "Jobs" package.

In late December, 2011 Obama told 60 Minutes that his first Stimulus package should have been "even larger."

In an interview with the Daily Caller Congressional Democrat Mike Honda of California and the Congressional Progressive Caucus summed up the Keynesian economic ideology that drives him and, no doubt, the President and his administration:

“We know that if we invest money into this economy and get cash into people’s hands, they’ll spend it and once they start spending the money, it starts to circulate through our economy and it’ll stimulate the economy and we’ve done this other times before. It [The 99 Percent Act] will increase our deficit but we need to increase our deficit right now to make that investment and make that place so that we can get this thing started.”

This is the kind of obsolete and addled economic reasoning that over the last hundred years has gotten us into the mess we're in. This is the kind of economic policy we've had for the last four years. This is the economic policy that Barack Obama promises to continue the next four years.

Don't allow yourself to get caught up in the thick of thin things and lose sight of this simple but critically important truth.