Is This What Obama Intended?

By Austin Hill
"There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses…now is not that time. And that's a message that I intend to send directly to them…"

Those words were uttered by our President on January 29th of 2009. He was reacting to the news that some American corporations, even some that had received government “bailout” funds, had both posted profits, and had paid bonuses to their executives.

And those were extraordinary words. They implied that, so far as President Obama is concerned, there are times when it is appropriate for American companies to not earn a profit, and times when it is appropriate for workers to not be compensated for their labor.

And now, after twenty months of our government’s policies being driven by Barack Obama’s very counterintuitive economic thinking, and with the national unemployment average approaching ten percent, I’m left wondering: is this what our President intended?

These days, Mr. Obama is saying some very different things. Speaking at the University of Texas at Austin earlier this month, the President stated that “we need an economy that puts Americans back to work, an economy that's built around three simple words -- Made in America…because we are not playing for second place. We are the United States of America, and like the Texas Longhorns, you play for first -- we play for first…”

Some twenty months in to his presidency, Barack Obama apparently feels it is necessary to reassure Americans that he still wants a robust U.S. economy, and that he actually wants America to be “first” (we still are “first,” by the way – but that’s beside the point). It’s not surprising that Americans have doubts about our President’s support of America, but again I’m left wondering: is this what President Obama intended?

For as long as Barack Obama has been a household name, he has devoted much of his time and energy to maligning American free enterprise. While campaigning for the presidency, Senator Obama traversed the country preaching, among other things, his economic doctrines. And the recurrent themes from these economic messages were quite clear: A) our nation’s greatest enemies were not terrorists or hostile nations, but American corporations; B) American oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and businesses that “shipped jobs overseas,” were among the worst fenders; and C) victory over these enemies would not be achieved until he, himself, could control these various sectors of our economy.

Recall that in 2008, global oil prices spiked upward, creating a sharp rise in gasoline prices, and candidate Obama’s “solution” to the problem of four dollar-a-gallon gasoline was to raise taxes on oil companies.

E-mail: Austin Hill


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