Unemployment
Despite billions of tax payer dollars spent and several extensions of unemployment benefits passed through congress, we still have held fast to a near 10% unemployment rate for the country for nearly the entire year. Of course the real unemployment number is significantly higher as one takes into account those people that have stopped looking for work or are under-employed. Meanwhile, the federal government has done nothing to help ease the economy so as to be able to create new jobs. Indeed, their actions have largely exacerbated the problem.
Gulf Oil Spill
The Obama administration dithered and refused domestic and international help in containing this oil spill and looked only to fix the blame rather than to fix the problem. President Obama only made the economic impact of this oil spill worse by issuing a moratorium on off shore drilling, all the while he provided billions of dollars to help Brazil’s Petrobas Oil begin offshore drilling in their waters, while Democratic donor, George Soros, benefitted financially from this arrangement. See HERE.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
DADT was finally passed and is supposedly to be signed into law today. This social engineering program from the left removes a working policy that was a seemingly good compromise and enacts a politically correct program that will cost millions of dollars to implement, degrade troop morale, ruin unit cohesion, and weaken good discipline within the military.
Affordable Health Care Act
Obamacare was passed ostensibly to provide health insurance to millions of Americans that were without coverage and to stop the rising costs of our health care. Instead, this travesty of a law has already created increases in health care costs and is well on the way to ensuring that rationing of care will be the norm as many doctors leave the field of medicine. The only bright spot thus far was the recent federal court ruling that stated what we Americans already knew. The law’s mandate that all Americans must buy insurance is indeed un-constitutional.
Financial Reform
This is one of those feel good sounding pieces of legislation which effectively gives control to the president to decide if he should seize control of any private company if the president deems its “imminent collapse” to be detrimental to the nation’s economy. In other words, the president unilaterally now has the power to decide who is too big to fail and act upon it as he deems necessary.
Student Loans
One of the often overlooked parts of the Obamacare Act was the section that also removed the power for banks to provide student loans to prospective college students. Now, only the federal government has the power to provide such loans. The potential for misuse or future indoctrination through “government-approved colleges or courses of study” just increased remarkably accordingly.
START Treaty
The pending likely ratification of this nuclear reduction treaty with Russia leaves the Russians with a significant nuclear missile strategic advantage over the United States and has some concerning verification issues. In its current form, this treaty is not in the best interest of the United States and weakens our nuclear deterrent accordingly. The utopians in congress are seemingly oblivious to this fact.
Border Security
The federal government still has done nothing but pay lip service when it comes to securing our national borders; indeed, they have actively tried to thwart states such as Arizona when that state sought to enforce existing federal law on the issue. Obama’s justice department spent more time harassing those trying to secure our borders than it did trying to actually do its job of protecting America’s borders.
Quantitative Easing
The federal reserve has begun buying our debt through quantitative easing which effectively will create very damaging inflation. Quantitative easing is typically a move done by third world countries right prior to total economic collapse. Hardly a peep has been mentioned about this while congress continues to spend our tax-payer dollars with reckless abandon.
On the good side though there is indeed a few bright spots and some hope that the future is not all doom and gloom. Some of these bright spots include:
DREAM Act
This bad legislation which would effectively grant amnesty to untold numbers of illegal aliens was denied passage in congress.
Terrorism
We have luckily been able to thwart any major terrorist attacks in America, with the exception of one involving a Muslim Army Major killing soldiers at Fort Hood.
Bush Tax Cuts
Congress finally realized the necessity to reauthorize the Bush tax cuts rather than letting them expire and further hurting millions of Americans while still deep in the arms of this recession.
The Conservative Ascendency
The awakening of millions of Americans to the foolishness of our government and the desire of We The People to finally start holding some of these knuckle-heads accountable is very encouraging. Congress has at least taken notice, and many members are appropriately scared that they cannot continue their corrupt business as usual now without reaping the consequences of being thrown out of office. The fact that people are now more politically aware than they have been for decades is a wonderful thing and gives me some hope that we can restore America to its greatness and derail the associated Marxists, progressives, and corrupt politicians to the sidelines where they no longer will be a danger to our representative republic. Hopefully 2011 will be the year where we begin to restore America and save it from plunging into the abyss. We shall see.
