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John C. Doolittle: Obama’s radicalism

Obama’s radicalism is killing the country.

Tough words. This is the paraphrased title of a recent editorial by Michael Boskin. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and ex-chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Hardly a lightweight. Whether one agrees with Boskin’s analysis or not, we now are beginning to see what an Obama administration will look like.

In a national interview last Friday, President Obama stated that “he had enough to do without having to worry about the financial system.” Really! Short of war, there is nothing more important right now than the financial system (think economy), and Obama has no time for it? So he’s willing to let the economy continue to fall to some unknown lower level?



Last week, Gordon Brown, prime minister of Britain, was a guest of the president. There was no state dinner. There was nothing but cheap, unmeaningful gifts to the prime minister and his wife. Afterwards, it was pointed out that Obama was too tired to have a state dinner. However, a senior spokesman for the State Department pointed out that Britain and the U.S. did not have a special relationship any different than any other country, and thus the prime minister did not deserve a state dinner. So, our new foreign policy is to insult out staunchest ally. One can hardly wait until Israel and Iran show up at the White House.

Obama campaigned on the promise that he would go over government expenditures line by line to remove any “earmarks” or unnecessary expenditures (think pork). Now we find out that in the recently passed stimulus bill to create jobs, some 15 percent of the jobs (300,000) will go to illegal immigrants. These are jobs primarily in the construction industry, and many of those will be in California. It was not Americans understanding that we were going to spend our hard-earned tax dollars to create jobs for the rest of the world. Although nobody had time to read the stimulus bill, this was not an oversight. This is the new Obama policy.



There is more buyers’ remorse coming. Unfortunately, the economy will continue to fall until this administration stops spending its limited time on noncritical issues. Even as it is, it will take at least five years for the banking system’s net capital to be replaced. The economy will not recover until banking and housing start to recover. We are nowhere near that happening. Until then, real estate agents, construction and manufacturing workers, waiters, cooks and others should prepare to hunker down. Don’t plan on retiring anytime soon or think you can sell your house for what you paid for it. We are all in for a rough two to three years or more, and before this is over, we all will understand that a financial crisis is the worse time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

John C. Doolittle

Steamboat Springs


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