Obama Was Against Layoffs Before He Was For Them

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Obama Socialized Medicine Election 2012 Big Government

President Obama sounds as if he were two different men at times.  His actions do not always match his words.  On Wednesday, he spoke to the Air Force Academy’s graduating class and no mention of the layoffs planned by his administration for the U.S. Military.  On the very same day, “A Pentagon official signaled on Wednesday that the Army could lay off as many as 24,000 enlisted personnel and up to 5,000 officers within five years to meet a projected reduction in the force driven by budget cuts“.

      One would think with all the layoff plans by Obama, that he would not throw any stones from his glass layoff house, and yet he did.  Just one day later (today), Obama has now taken the position that layoffs are bad and what got us into the economic troubles we are in now (under Obama’s watch).  At a Redwood City California Fundraiser, President Obama took the opportunity to attack Romney in regards to layoffs.  Obama stated, “What Governor Romney and my opponents don’t seem to understand is that a healthy economy doesn’t just mean maximizing the profits of some, that’s important that’s part of our free market, but not if it’s purchased at the cost of massive layoffs“. (this quote is at 11:28 in the video)  Personally, I am no fan of Romney, and most of us are no fans of layoffs, however, the hypocrisy of Obama’s despair and maintain tour is staggering!

In one last bit of wisdom from Obama, as he stopped by Newton Iowa today, “our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every year that I’ve been in office“.  Just a couple of questions are needed to clarify why our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every year that Obama has been in office.

1) How much was a gallon of gas the year Obama was sworn in as President?

2) How much has a gallon of gas increased each year Obama has been in office?

If our Founding Fathers had only known that someone like Obama could become President and some others along the way as well, then perhaps they would have made one requirement to be President a test on simple economics!

Obama is no Robin Hood but Makes a Great Prince John

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Obama Socialized Medicine Election 2012 Big Government

Many people confuse President Obama’s socialist policies with Robin Hood.  The confusion comes in to play with the concept of “giving to the poor”.  Robin Hood was a character that wanted to stop a tyrant (Prince John) from taking the money from the people.  The Sheriff of Nottingham levied taxes upon the people that were so high it was unreasonable to see how the people could pay them.  This effort by the Sheriff was done to carry out the wishes of Prince John.

     In modern day times you could say that Prince John would be Obama and the Sheriff of Nottingham would be the IRS.  The horrendous spending done by President Obama and the U.S. Congress will lead us to taxes that are so high it will be unreasonable to see how the people can pay them.  Another probable consequence of the out-of-control spending in D.C. is inflation and then hyperinflation!  Socialist policies never make the poor richer they only make the rich poorer and everyone’s standard of living declines.

How You Know When Government Has Gotten Too Big!

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Obama Socialized Medicine Election 2012 Big Government

How do you know when government has gotten too big? When they collect so many fees that they just tell the clerks to keep the money collected. This is not a conspiracy theory story spread rampant across the Internet, this is happening in counties in Georgia and perhaps other states as well.

When it comes to passport fees, I have always assumed that once they were collected they would go to fund government; whether on the local, state, or federal levels. Here in Georgia that is not the case. In Chapter 10 in our textbook we learned that state and local governments collect 67.6% of their revenues from sales tax, personal income tax, property taxes, and federal grants-in-aid. (Magleby 2012, 213) The textbook states the rest comes from “charges to users of government services”, and gave the example of tuition from students in public universities and colleges. (Magleby 2012, 213). A passport-processing fee is a fee that people who wants a passport has to pay in order to obtain a passport. Again, you would think, this fee would go to the county, state or some level of government; it does not.

An email that I receive from an active community watch group, that watches local government in the next county over in Rockdale alerted me to this problem last month when their “County Clerk of Courts Ruth Wilson… proposed to retain just 50 percent of the thousands of dollars in passport fees that she has previously taken as personal income, with the other half to be divided between the clerk’s office administration and the county’s general fund.” (Jones 2012, n.p.) Wasn’t that very generous of her? To offer back the money taken from the citizens of the county, back into their government!

This is not isolated in just Rockdale County but all over Georgia it is perfectly legal thanks to a “little-known part of Georgia’s law allowing court clerks to supplement their income with passport processing fees”. (Davis 2012, n.p.) At twenty-five dollars per passport this can add up quite nice for the court clerks, especially in the bigger counties. For example, “in 2008, Hall County commissioners discovered the clerk, whose salary was $122,000, had made an additional $86,000 from the passport fees in 2007”. (Davis 2012, n.p.) Hall County made a change in clerks and policy and “requested he repay 75 percent of the passport fee money he had legally collected since the office began processing the documents in 1991. When a new clerk, Charles Baker, took office in 2009, he changed the process and began submitting the fees to the county for the general fund.” (Davis 2012, n.p.)

In conclusion, this is not a post attacking court clerks but to bring to light that if government gets too big, it can collect fees that it does not even use and basically gives away to the court clerks. When the issue came up in Rockdale County, perhaps the question should have been asked why not just eliminate the fees for passports and process them for free? The county had not received the money, the court clerk gets paid a salary regardless of assignments designated to the clerk, and if the county has not needed the money by now then perhaps they did not need it to begin with! One other consideration that must be pointed out is, in some counties taxes could be being raised and at the same time county clerks are taking home tens of thousands of dollars; perhaps if they left that money in the county then taxes may not have needed to have been raised?

*This is a post by one of our contributing writers ~ Elizabeth C. Allen

Works Cited

Davis, J. (2012). Clerks’ passport profit examined. Retrieved from: http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-government/clerks-passport-profit-examined-1358320.html

Jones, A. (2012). Clerk offers to share passport fees with county. Retrieved from: http://www.rockdalecitizen.com/news/2012/mar/27/clerk-offers-to-share-passport-fees-with-county/

Magleby, D. B. (2012). State and Local Politics, 15th Ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall.