Our Problems: More "Us" than Obama and friends

Rick Newman has an excellent article documenting many themes I have presented in Muccings over the years.

• We (our younger people especially) don’t want to work – we think we are too golden for that
• A larger proportion of us than in the past don’t want to sacrifice
• Too many of us are uninformed – and informed only by our uninformed pop cultural icons
• Too many of us feel “entitled”; entitled to the “best” and entitled on someone else’s dime

Read the excellent article below and see if you agree.

4 problems that could sink America

American ingenuity has solved daunting problems before and could again. But it would be a mistake to assume that American prosperity is on a preordained upward course.

[Related content: financial crisis, Barack Obama, recession, health care, China]

By Rick Newman, U.S. News & World Report

If we're lucky, the recession is winding down, and life will start to feel a bit more comfortable before long. But that doesn't mean things will go back to the way they used to be.

The global recession that began in America's housing market has shaken the world's economic order and possibly knocked the United States down a notch or two. The spendthrift American consumer is out of money. American wages are flat. Despite some hopeful signs, the U.S. economy could muddle along for years.

Meanwhile, actions in China -- rather than in the United States -- may have been the trigger for a global economic recovery. Many other nations will grow faster than the United States over the next few years and command an increasing share of the world's resources.

"The message to Americans," says Mauro Guillen, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, "is you need to redouble your efforts to be more competitive."

American innovation has solved daunting problems before and could again. But it would be a mistake to assume that American prosperity will continue on some preordained upward course. Nations rise and fall, often realizing what happened only in retrospect.

Here are four problems that are undermining our future prosperity:

We don't like to work

Sure, now that jobs are scarce, everybody's willing to put in a few extra hours to stay ahead of the ax. But look around: We still expect easy money, hope to retire early and embrace the overly simplistic messages of bestsellers like "The One Minute Millionaire" and "The 4-Hour Work Week."

Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn't sending as much money our way as it used to, which makes it harder to do less with more.

Kids in Asia spend the summer studying math and science while American mall rats are texting each other about Britney and Miley.

White-collar jobs are now migrating overseas just like blue-collar ones. Kids in Asia spend the summer studying math and science while American mall rats are texting each other about Britney and Miley.

"We need a different mind-set," says Guillen. "People need to invest more in their own future. Instead of buying stuff at the mall, spend the money on evening classes. Learn a language or skills you don't have."

I recently interviewed entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, who transformed his father's neighborhood liquor store into a $60 million business anchored by the Web site winelibrarytv.com. An overnight success? Hardly. Vaynerchuk has big plans, and he works at least 16 hours a day to achieve them. "If you want to work eight hours a day," he says, "you're going to get eight-hour-a-day results. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't want to hear you bitch about money if you're only willing to work eight hours a day."

Vaynerchuk is only 33, but he has something in common with John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard mutual fund company, who's 80 years old. I talked to Bogle recently about how Americans need to change their approach to work and money. He told me this: "We need more caution, more savings and we may have to work harder. Maybe we need more people who like to work and don't count down every day till retirement."

Nobody wants to sacrifice

Why should we? The government is standing by with stimulus money, banker bailouts, homeowner aid, cash for clunkers, expanded health care and maybe more stimulus money. And most Americans will never have to pay an extra dime for any of this. Somehow, $9 trillion worth of government debt will just become somebody else's problem.

When he was campaigning, candidate Barack Obama dabbled with the "personal responsibility" theme, and in his acceptance speech in November he called for a "new spirit of sacrifice." But now that he's in office, there's less interest in such quaint ideas.

During Obama's prime-time news conference about health care reform in July, a reporter asked the president if ordinary Americans would have to give up anything in exchange for better, more widely available care. Obama's answer: "They're going to have to give up paying for things that don't make them healthier." Hooray! Something for nothing! He may as well have said, "Here's a magic pill that will make all your problems go away."

Obama's plan is to get a tiny portion of the American public -- the wealthy -- to pay higher taxes for the benefit of the majority. Hey, while we're at it, let's see if we can convince 1% of the population to bear the entire responsibility for fighting two open-ended wars that are supposedly in the interest of every American. It would just be too uncomfortable to tell the middle class that if they want something, they need to earn it themselves.

We're uninformed

The health care smackdown -- sorry, "debate" -- is Exhibits A, B and C. The soaring cost of health care is a problem that affects most Americans. It's shrinking paychecks, squeezing small businesses, bankrupting families and swelling the national debt.

Yet outraged Americans seem most concerned about fictions like death panels and government-enforced euthanasia, while clinging to the myth that our current system of selective availability and perverse incentives somehow represents capitalist ideals.

But let's take a break from that burdensome issue to examine the likelihood that President Obama was born in a foreign country and hoodwinked America into believing he was eligible to run for president.

People who lack the sense to question Big Lies always end up in deep trouble. Being well informed takes work, even with the Internet. In a democracy, that's simply a civic burden. If we're too foolish or lazy to educate ourselves on health care, global warming, financial reform and other complicated issues, then we're signing ourselves over to special interests who see nothing wrong with plundering our national -- and personal -- wealth.

The iCulture

We may be chastened by the recession, but Americans still believe they deserve the best of everything -- the best job, the best health care, the best education for our kids. And we want it at a discount -- or better yet, free -- which brings us back to the usual disconnect between what we want and what we're willing to pay for.

Rationing is a dirty word, so we can't have a system that officially rations something as vital as health care or education. Instead, we have unacknowledged, de facto rationing that directs the most resources to those with the best connections, the most money or the savvy to game the system.

What keeps the rest of us content is the illusion that we, too, will eventually be able to game the system -- as long as the government doesn't interfere.

Solutions that serve some public good -- like Social Security and bank deposit insurance in the 1930s and Medicare in the 1960s -- usually require everybody to give something to get something. If it works, the overall benefits outweigh the costs.

Good programs leave individuals the option to pay more if they want more. Bad programs promise more than they can deliver. But often we don't know that until it's too late.

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Update: Just a day after posting this, the veracity of this article was confirmed in a small way via a brief conversation in a restaurant with a recently retired couple and their 30-something daughter. During the course of conversation about current events, the trio showed vague understanding and no insight, and the daughter was entirely clueless as so many of us remain.

Paradigm Shift: More Than Obamanomics

A paradigm shift is what appears to be a sudden shift of values of what is right and true.  A “paradigm shift” is occurring in our nation’s economy, health care, religious values and national defense, all at the same time.  I will coin a new word for this:  Megadigm shift.

To provide some perspective, here are several examples of “paradigm shifts” that have occurred in the social sciences:

• The movement, known as the Cognitive revolution, away from Behaviourist approaches to psychological study and the acceptance of cognition as central to studying human behaviour.

• The Keynesian Revolution is typically viewed as a major shift in macroeconomics.^[2] According to John Kenneth Galbraith, Say's Law dominated economic thought prior to Keynes for over a century, and the shift to Keynesianism was difficult. Economists who contradicted the law, which inferred that underemployment and underinvestment (coupled with oversaving) were virtually impossible, risked losing their careers.^[3] In his magnum opus, Keynes cited one of his predecessors, J. A. Hobson,^[4] who was repeatedly denied positions at universities for his heretical theory.

• Later, the movement for monetarism over Keynesianism marked a second divisive shift. Monetarists held that fiscal policy was unimportant for economic stabilization, in contrast to the Keynesian view that both fiscal and monetary policy were important.^[5]

• Fritjof Capra describes a paradigm shift presently happening in science from physics to the life sciences. This shift in perceptive accompanies a shift in values and is characterized by ecological literacy.^[6]

  ^{(Source: Wikipedia)}

Barack Obama is either blamed for or credited with our current megadigm shift.  But in reality, he is merely the spokesman and facilitator for it.  This shift has been brewing for several decades. I’ve known of Obama’s radical, socialist, communist, racist and terrorist connections since he first began his presidential campaign – he wrote about them in his second book that my daughter gave me two and a half years ago for Christmas.

Most of the people who elected Obama knew of his radical associations – they were not kept secret. A man with this kind of background would not have been elected if this “megadigm shift” had not been brewing within the American psyche for some period of time.  Our current president didn’t come to power via a coup.  He was elected by American voters.  While there was considerable deception via his public rhetoric, most of his value system was already on the table.

The American voter was part of the megadigm shift now unfolding on the national stage:

• Shift from capitalism to socialism and beyond
• Shift from private sector to public sector services and ownership of major corporations
• Shift toward quadrupling the national debt in less than a year
• Shift from being a “Christian nation” to being a “Muslim” nation (in the president’s view) or at best, not a Judeo/Christian nation.
• Shift from discernment in morals and sense of right and wrong to a belief that those are outmoded concepts that are “judgmental, bigoted, and intolerant.”
• Shift from winning wars as a logical and essential objective, to winning becoming a poor, archaic objective because we no longer have the stomach, the sense of purpose enough to sacrifice to win.

These and other components of our megadigm shift are the ultimate consequence of a democracy that lost its self discipline – a consequence of losing faith in our own value system and believing every else’s values are just as good or better.  The people of this nation have lost their sense of history and purpose to the point of accepting the “un-American” principles we fought against for the past six decades.  We are at the point where what appears to be the easy road – the government doing for us what we should do for ourselves – is the most appealing.  And Hussein Obama, with his hoard of czars and community activists will help lead us down that path.  He is leading us toward losing our liberties.

God help us…if half our population can recognize Him.

The Decline of Post WW-II US Will to Win

I'm rather slow when it comes to realizing certain things. After reading this article titled North Korea May Attack US; South Korean Ships, it finally dawned on me, 56 years late, that the US has not decisively won a war since WWII.

For the past few years, here I was, concerned about the "recent" decline of US power and influence in the world, when the reality is we have been declining since the Korean War. We never won that war. We executed a half-assed truce - a draw - a war that resulted in BS - nothing. The belligerant enemy was left to fight another day. Why should I feel bad about the US "tail tucked between our legs" defeat in Vietnam? Or the pending realization that Iraq will likely revert to fundamentalist Islam in the next couple of years, or the quagmire in Afghanistan, or our impotence concerning Iran and North Korea.

Yes, back to North Korea - a situation that should have been resolved 56 years ago. The "another day" for North Korea to fight is in our faces today.

Is our failure to decisively win any war since WWII due to our declining power and weakness, or is it due to badly chosen conflicts? Badly chosen conflicts have hastened and continue to hasten our declining power. Was Korea a badly chosen conflict? Probably not. A close ally was attacked. We responded "proportionately", that is, with just enough power to lose thousands of men and not win the war. We could have won, but our will was awol. Since then, we have suffered from the dual curse of poorly choosing our fights, and an awol will to win. Hence, a greatly weakened America.