One in ten Americans still cannot find work.
The government must deport illegal immigrants, reduce welfare benefits to force spongers to take jobs, and abandon the minimum wage to create many more unskilled jobs.

This recession has also compounded the burdens that America’s families have been dealing with for decades – the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.
Without resorting to the use of statistical tricks, no one can imagine that Americans today are less affluent than decades ago. Everything from cars and home appliances to health care and universities has become better and more affordable. The lower savings rate reflects high consumer confidence rather than hardship, because people are certain they can find a job.

And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today.
That would not have been a bad deal. Say, 15 million more unemployed for three years instead of something like two trillion dollars spent—which is the Obama bailout will cost, including interest. That’s about $40,000 per worker per annum. Even granting the most far-fetched assumptions about unemployment, the bailout was too expensive, and certainly unjust.

More homes would have surely been lost.
True, but mortgages would have gone down, and many young or poor families would have been able to afford their houses.

To recover the rest [of bailout money], I’ve proposed a fee on the biggest banks.
Great. So the stable banks will subsidize the speculative banks. An appropriate fee is already levied on the banks through FDIC insurance. Now, as the government had effectively bailed out the FDIC, it is seeking a parallel insurance scheme, which will follow the same path.

We also took steps to get our economy growing again, save as many jobs as possible, and to help Americans who had become unemployed.
Those are mutually exclusive objectives. Assistance to the unemployed beyond a bare minimum reduces economic growth and reduces the job market.

We extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 18 million Americans.
Why increase unemployment benefits during a crisis when people must be glad they are receiving any support at all?

We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.
Obama did not say that these cuts were minuscule.

Millions of Americans had more to spend on gas.
The administration lacked the guts to push its clients—Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia—to abandon the oil cartel that costs American hundreds of billions of dollars.

Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed.
No one can calculate that number with any certainty.

Two hundred thousand work in construction and clean energy; 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, first responders.
Obama contradicts himself: the alleged two million jobs are either saved in the private sector or, as he says here, were added in the public sector. Such policies are socialist rather than Keynesian. Keynes advocated temporary increases in public spending during crises, but increased hiring enlarges the state sector in perpetuity. No one is going to lay off those police offers or teachers once the crisis is over.

Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created.
Can we get a phone number, please?

I’m proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat.
Community banks are generally more conservative than large banks. Why would they start financing small businesses when large banks see that as too risky? Obama will have to resort to government guarantees, thus effectively distributing the $30 billion as grants to minority businesses.

I’m also proposing a new small business tax credit, one that will go to over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages.
The last thing you need to do during a crisis is to raise wages. The objectives of hiring more workers and increasing wages are contradictory.

Let’s also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment.
The government is going to discriminate against businesses based on their size. That’s a trademark socialist policy—to tolerate small manufacturers, but not “exploitative” big corporations.

I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act.
If the railroad were feasible it would not lack for private investment. Revenues from high-speed railroads do not come from nowhere, but are chipped away from airlines and car manufacturers.

We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities.
That means American goods will be more expensive than those manufactured in less eco-friendly countries.

And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas.
If the administration pushes clean energy, the remaining business will flee en masse. In the corporate legal structure, it is impossible to ascertain whether jobs have been “shipped overseas” or outsourced. Tax breaks make too small a difference for these companies to be willing to suffer Obama’s clean-energy regulation and pay higher wages in America than they would in China.

These steps won’t make up for the seven million jobs that we’ve lost over the last two years.
So why increase benefits for the 18 million who are unemployed? Most of those seven million Obama refers to have found new jobs, so the fallout from the crisis is perhaps two to three million jobs. A two-trillion-dollar bailout seems like too much to prevent that figure from doubling.

We can’t afford another so-called economic “expansion” like the one from the last decade… where the income of the average American household declined… where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation.
Why then does Obama support that housing bubble instead of allowing it to burst? If the bubble is that bad—and indeed it is—then by all means allow the irresponsible homeowners to default, and bring housing prices down. Looking at the number of new cars and houses in the last decade, it is hard to believe that incomes have declined since then.

Germany is not waiting [to revamp its economy].
Germany would be a very bad example for the United States to follow. Its economy is crippled by trade unions, government regulation, and welfare, and is only supported by hordes of immigrant workers. The German economy is quickly losing its engineering edge as the younger generation opts for fashionable MBA specialities.

[China and India are] making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs.
Not in my universe.

We can’t allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy.
Regulation won’t achieve that end. Financial institutions have long proved their ability to outsmart governments. The only solution is to set up separate currencies licensed for real markets and speculation. This way the real economy will be largely insulated from financial gambling.

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need… [to build] a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.
Offshore oil development is the opposite of clean energy.

It means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.
Clean energy, in Obama’s weasel words, can only become profitable if the government subsidizes it and institutes punitive taxation of traditional energy producers.

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.
Like the evidence forged by East Anglia University.

Third, we need to export more of our goods. Because the more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America.
In today’s technological economy, added value is concentrated in R&D. Manufacturing is outsourced to undeveloped countries precisely because it is not a feasible occupation for citizens of developed countries.

We will double our exports over the next five years.
That recalls the Soviet five-year economic plans.

We’re launching a National Export Initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports, and reform export controls consistent with national security.
American farmers are heavily subsidized, so increasing their exports means increasing subsidies and constitutes a net loss to the economy. The part about export controls is very suspicious: what kind of technology does Obama seek to export without restrictions?

We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are.
Obama the liberal has embraced mercantilism and is willing to apply political pressure in the interests of American corporations.

We will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia.
Panama and Colombia are by no means America’s important trading partners.

And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years.
Students, accordingly, will be given a free pass for taking many of the economically worthless courses available in community colleges. They will be able to study just for the fun of it, without prospects of employment, on public account.

But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums [on healthcare], bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.
Easy: end the AMA monopoly on licensing doctors, set limits on malpractice suits, and allow insurance companies to sell coverage for less-than-ideal treatment. Regulation drives costs (premiums) up rather than down. It is completely implausible that government expenditures would decrease while coverage increases.

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. (Applause.) Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected.
Those are the largest part of the budget.

We’ve already identified $20 billion in savings for next year.
On the background of the expected $8 trillion deficit over the ten years.

That’s why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions—sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That’s why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated.
This is important. Obama uses North Korea as a model for Iran. His idea is that Iran managing to build a nuclear bomb or two does not spell apocalypse. The Ayatollahs won’t be able to use their nuclear weapons, and in the meanwhile will face increasing sanctions that would eventually force them to dismantle those weapons. That strategy so far has not worked with North Korea, which keeps its nuclear stockpiles and exports nuclear technology. Iran’s case would be similar to India and Pakistan’s. The International community cannot afford to isolate politically and economically important countries, and will come to terms with Iran’s nuclear weapons.

Here is the key to understanding the Obama-Chavez embrace: they feel like cousins. Like most rulers, Obama’s allegiance is to his fellows in the ruling class rather than to his people. Especially in Obama’s case, what are his people? He ignores his paternal nation and even his Kenyan relatives to the extent that his brother is left to sell drugs. He cares not for Indonesia where he went to school. He is hardly mindful of Britain, whose citizenship he received at birth and has not renounced since. A Muslim apostate and a friend of Christian radicals, a supporter of AIPAC and the anti-Semitic left, a Harvard graduate posing as the people’s president—whom can he have allegiance to?

Dangerously, rootless Obama instinctively leans toward leaders with strong roots. At the G-20 summit he bowed down to the Saudi king. It is highly likely that he respects Chavez and Ahmadinejad.

Hugging Chavez would come naturally to Richelieu or some other Machiavellian politician, but it is rather odd for Obama the idealist and paragon of honesty. Here is the problem: for high-flown idealists, our earthly problems are negligible. The ideal of friendly relations between the liberal United States and some of the worst dictatorships justifies Obama’s closing his eyes to the very reason why the relations were bad in the first place. The hosting of Russian strategic nuclear bombers, strong cooperation with Iran, nuclear aspirations, the breaking of ties with Israel, and the persecution of political opponents are just minor deficiencies which cannot prevent Obama from developing an ideal relationship with a fellow president. Likewise for Iran: the extortion arrest of an American journalist, support for Iraqi terrorists who kill American soldiers, nuclear and ballistic missile programs, gross violations of civil rights, a professed desire to annihilate America’s only true ally in the Middle East—all those minor issues do not bear on the negotiations.

Importantly, the thugs must be big in order to merit Obama’s goodwill. American rapprochement with Syria remains low-profile because Assad lacks the international prominence of Ahmadinejad; the Iranian acutely senses that and drums up his militant rhetoric to draw Obama’s attention. Bubbles are empty, so at least they have to be huge. The bubble of Obama’s ideals calls for mega-solutions: from the three trillion dollars of aid in his first three months in office to engaging the world’s most notorious dictators.

As during WWI, no amount of goodwill among rulers can solve their nations’ conflicts. Rulers have very little influence on their countries’ policies, which are dictated by media and run by bureaucrats. In a sense, good relations are counterproductive, as they force the rulers to gloss over the conflicts rather than solve them. Obama, a friend of Chavez, cannot afford to push him on any of the real issues. Indeed, Chavez embraces Obama only insofar as he tolerates the Venezuelan’s hostile behavior.

The enthusiasm for Obama expressed by Latin American leaders at the Summit of the Americas is revealing: they read him as willing to level the playing field. In other words, they are happy that the United States is stepping down to their level. Such an arrangement is unworkable. Truly stepping down and behaving as one among equals is senseless for the United States, which is not equal to Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Guatemala. Stepping down means accepting their dictates; the US has no reason to submit to the third world countries. If carried out, such a policy would betray American interests.

Obama could state honestly and forcibly that, while the United States cares about their needs and opinions, it remains a supreme arbiter rather than an equal member, and demands respect and submission as such. Honesty, however, is alien to idealist thought, which is used to rejecting the facts.

The American health problem is the overregulation of the medical profession which has led to spiraling costs and cartel prices. Filling a tooth costs upwards of $200 in America, but as little as $10 in Russia, and the quality of the work is comparable. Absurdly long medical education drastically increases doctors’ wage requirements. Plenty of medical operations can be performed proficiently enough by less skilled personnel; it doesn’t take a registered nurse’s training to administer a shot. The relatively low out-of-pocket expenses of insured medical treatment leave patients little incentive to control costs. The medical lobby demands ever higher standards, which increases costs exponentially. Medical professionals use licensing to create both a cartel and a trade union, making health provision the ultimate monopoly. Like any trade union, the medical one increases its profits by milking consumers rather than investors, who simply don’t receive enough profit to be milked. The solution is to break the monopoly: anyone should be able to practice medicine, and patients should be able to choose among various types of providers, such as those licensed by a semi-official association, less pompous licensees, or even Mexican and Indian medical graduates. Medical liability should be legally limited to a sensible amount, which would allow the number of expensive tests to be limited when patients cannot afford them. The government must stop dictating to insurance companies their policies; there is a huge demand for medical insurance that only covers low-quality treatment by non-AMA doctors.

Stories of working single mothers being unable to buy medical insurance for their kids are nonsense. What kind of mother doesn’t buy her child a $50 health insurance policy? That’s not a critical amount even for minimum-wage earners. No doubt she manages to pay $30 per month for cable TV. In order to arrange health insurance for almost all children from poor families, slap a few hundred such mothers with long jail terms for gross negligence and endangering the lives of their children. Just look at the mother’s bank statement, and if she purchases anything non-essential before buying health coverage, send her to jail. Publicize such cases. Many such mothers are paid cash, and their expenses don’t show on their bank statements; search their homes to obtain incriminating evidence. Send their ex-husbands who evade child-support payments to jail, too. Universal health coverage legalizes parental negligence. That’s sort of like the government compensating victims of robbery and abandoning prosecution of robbers.

Poverty has nothing to do with the absence of health insurance. Jews in tsarist Russia were poorer than inner-city blacks can imagine. American blacks and Mexicans are not poor in any meaningful sense, but filthy rich compared to 90 percent of the world’s population. If white society really wants to integrate the blacks, it should make them responsible. Universal health coverage enshrines personal irresponsibility. A mother who routinely feeds her children hamburgers is guilty of manslaughter.

Universal health insurance encourages negligence. People who don’t brush their teeth properly are still assured of taxpayer-funded dental coverage. Those who sit for entire evenings in front of stupid TV shows get an ophthalmologist’s help at public expense. Instead, one should have to prove due diligence when applying for public funds—prove that he exercises regularly, adheres to a reasonable diet, and overall leads a healthy lifestyle; McDonald’s customers should not be eligible. The Torah establishes the right to charity only for people who positively cannot provide for themselves, such as widows and orphans in the ancient economy. Following the biblical logic, modern states might offer charity only to people who accidentally lost the ability to work through no fault of their own. Such definition makes old people generally ineligible for public assistance: they should have accumulated enough money during their working lives to provide for retirement and should also have raised enough children to care for them. Drunkards, drug addicts, homosexuals with AIDS, and similarly degraded elements are also ineligible for public help: not only have they inflicted harm on themselves, but the costs of maintaining them are staggering; the money can be more efficiently spent elsewhere. Health coverage, like any paid activity, is subject to limited resources: societies may spend infinite amounts on health care, but can actually spend only so much. Instead of wasting $50,000–$150,000 annually on treating drunkards in emergency rooms, society can just accept the simple fact that every system produces waste—like human waste—and not all waste can be recycled. “If I’m not for myself, who would be for me?”

The government formally submits to criminals when extending free health coverage to illegal immigrants, including children. The case is often misrepresented as “illegals and their children.” No, the children are also illegals. A society has zero moral obligation to those who join it illegally: a duckling among swans must not be treated as a swan. The children might not be contentious criminals like their parents, who entered the US illegally, but they are not members of American society either. Sponsors of legal immigrants to the US are required to prove their ability to pay for the new immigrants’ medical coverage; how much longer until the illegal immigrants care for themselves instead of relying on the public purse? The American defeatism towards illegal immigrants is akin to the Israeli defeatism about the swelling numbers of Israeli Arabs. The question, “What can we do about them?” is absurd. The US keeps millions of its citizens in jails; surely it can deport a few million illegal immigrants. They would go by themselves if the government cracked down on their employers.

Universal health coverage creates an ethical impasse. Society needs healthy twenty-year-olds, but spends mostly on economically worthless eighty-year-olds and drunkards. A rational welfare society would pay for dental care and gym for poor youngsters rather than spend a million-plus dollars keeping Alzheimer’s patients alive in a vegetative state. State-sponsored health coverage forces state officials to solve unsolvable ethical problems, such as whether spend more on dental care for the young or Alzheimer’s treatment for the old; both can consume virtually unlimited budgets. In an ethical society, each person accumulates funds for his own medical treatment and then chooses how to spend them; families and charities can likewise make private choices as to funding this or that treatment. Universal health insurance socializes ethics and puts officials in charge of moral issues.

The relatively wide acceptance of universal health coverage among the American population demonstrates the extent of taxpayers’ alienation from the government. Even among the hardcore liberals, few would willingly part with money in their bank accounts to benefit the illegal migrants and irresponsible blacks. Americans, however, have no problem with the government spending the tax funds it has already confiscated. Americans have already submitted to the government’s confiscation of their money, and so they welcome spending with even the remotest benefit to them, as opposed to pork-barrel spending in Iraq, military procurement, and elsewhere.

Except in very narrow biblical terms, there’s no right to charity, but only a liberty to work. There’s no right to medical care, but a liberty to contract it. Charity is an ad hoc affair which shouldn’t be made into a universal policy. All recipients of charity must be investigated before being granted it; charity is an exception to the established order whereby every man provides for himself and his family. Universal health coverage is another way for the government to usurp responsibility for the people’s lives and rule over infantile subjects.

The most significant part of Obama’s success is that it formalizes the parting with American values. The country no longer insists on its cultural identity. But societies are formed around cultural values and broken around their absence. The post-Obama America will be different from the previous one. After Obama, the discussion on illegal immigration will lose its sense: with an alien president, America might as well admit the tens of millions of aliens who swarm it like barbarians encroaching upon the Roman Empire. From the right of settlement to subsidies to ruling the country, modern barbarians are taking over the United States.

Obama will not necessarily be anti-American or pro-Muslim. He’s the type familiar to Jews: a rootless person who despises his national and religious connections and would readily serve any strong master. We have plenty of such Jewish anti-Semites: Kissinger, Miller, Miliband, et al.

Neither is it critical that Obama follows in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter, whose policies universally failed and who is branded an anti-Semite. The voters are entitled to errors. The only problem with Obama’s election is that it means Americans are succumbing to foreign values.

It will be interesting to see whether Obama’s election produces a lasting Obamamania of the Michael Jackson type, or an immediate backlash as he inevitably fails to meet the high expectations. The latter outcome seems probable as Obama inherits a very problematic economy with no chance of repairing it. But President Roosevelt remained popular even as his absurd economic policies pounded the economy into recession.

The damaged economy has proved to be a boon to Obama: the normally pro-McCain working-class voters see Obama as a Harvard messiah even though McCain’s own fortune is a better indicator of his economic senses. The working-class Americans imagine that a cosmopolitan with Muslim connections and a Harvard diploma will lower the price of gas and solve their problems. Desperate, they come to trust the opinion of Obama’s college-educated supporters. They also erroneously see him as set against the Wall Street sharks who brought down the economy—as if he didn’t receive his donations from the rich. Obama will disappoint them. His Harvard education has no bearing on practical matters, as seen by his indiscriminate affiliation with thugs and radicals.

Education broadens horizons, brings new perspectives, and abrogates traditional values. As the population is increasingly college-educated, it becomes cosmopolitan, loves the rootless Obama, and scorns the traditional McCain. Scores of immigrants also support Obama, a fellow immigrant. Their support is probably less among traditionalist Chinese and racist Russian immigrants.

Obama is new, which is important to voters who have lost hope in lying politicians, especially after the years of Bush’s cynicism. With Democrats and Republicans responsible for the Fannie Mae crisis, the political system corrupt and closed to change, Obama-the-outsider seems to be the only hope for change.

Obama’s case demonstrates just how wrong the system of primaries is. Alternatively, a party must choose its candidate depending on the other party’s choice. McCain could beat Hillary easily, but a different type of candidate is required to beat Obama. In primaries, the voters should be given the opportunity to choose pairs: our candidate would be X if the opponent fields candidate A, or Y if he fields candidate B.

Obama is very bad for Israel. He firmly opposes a strike on Iran, and recalls the idealistic and anti-Semitic Carter, who wrested the Sinai from us. His range of advisers includes the people most unfriendly to Israel, who have great passion for rights of the Palestinian terrorists. The fact that the majority of American Jews intend to vote for Obama in a time of nuclear crisis testifies to the futility of Holocaust education.

Obama personifies many common traits of native Blacks – not their American variety grown arrogant on the incessant concessions and affirmative action. Obama is nice and soft, dislikes conflicts, all for peace. He would rather suffer than make others suffering. Critically, Obama shares a prominent feature of people from underdeveloped nations: he tries to ingratiate himself with white, advanced Americans; yes, a servant syndrome. Various “experts” proclaim that the third-world people hate America. On the contrary, they admire America and mask their admiration and jealousy with superficial expression of hatred; that hatred evaporates after a half-hour discussion.

Obama feels out-of-place in politics similarly to Jimmy Carter. Both approached the real – cruel – world with moral standards developed for mutually respectful and compassionate communities. Both are equally dangerous champions of the left who try to mould the world into being nice. Carter twisted Menachem Begin’s arms into Sinai capitulation: Israel won the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 against Egypt but relinquished a huge buffer zone of Sinai for unreliable Egyptian promises of peace. Barack Obama revealed the conference of Jewish American politicians that Israel needs a just solution with the Palestinian Arabs rather than seek controlling them through fear; the Jewish anti-Semites applauded him.

The Democrat’s another presidential choice, Hillary Clinton, is equally lame. A woman is naturally anti-war – but in the real world peace comes through war. Clinton’s Methodist family background predisposes her to rational, peaceful means; they do not work in foreign relations. Clinton is fussy. Unable to formulate realistic policy suggestions, she travels to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to imitate political activity. Hillary Clinton reminds of her husband who forced mildly suicidal Wye River memorandum on Israel just to show himself active on the international arena. Hillary Clinton recalls Golda Meir: leftist, female, indecisive, willful, vindictive, cruel. Clinton, however, lacks Golda’s common sense and charisma: a Jewish grandma leading the world’s oddest nation with one of the world’s strongest armies. Clinton would rather push the client states like Israel or Iraq into the mold of her political preconceptions than admit her political failures. So far, Hillary Clinton did not come up with coherent or sensible foreign policy proposals, but only criticizes the war in Iraq and calls for talks with hostile regimes. She is ready to apply harsh measures against those who refuse her urging: Clinton accepts bombing Iran, but could equally decide to punish Israel, if it is not sufficiently forthcoming.

Both Obama and Clinton proclaim goodwill toward Israel – but only to a very particular Israel: obedient, suffering, and peaceful. To Israel that suicidally dances the American line of the peace process with the committed Arab enemies. A good part is that neither a female nor a black president would be strong enough to push Israel to the national suicide of the peace process.