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By Renee Quinn |
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This morning I stopped in at my favorite coffee and bagel place. There is a 48 year old Southern man who is by far one of the happiest and most optimistic men I know. For the last 15 years he has worked the overnight shift as a sheet metal worker for commercial properties. And for many of those years he has worked part time at my favorite coffee and bagel place. So when I stopped in for my tea this morning I was greeted with the same pleasant and ever friendly hug and after he asked me how I was doing he told me he recently lost his night time job of 15 years making $38 an hour. This man has twins in their last year of college and works so hard to make ends meet while paying for his children’s education.
I sat down to eat my bagel and just cried and couldn’t stop crying! How can Obama do this to America? Is he so idiotic that he cannot realize that taking away from the rich to help the poor only hurts the poor even more? Although the tax hikes have yet to occur, those who “have money” are starting to hold onto their money in anticipation of paying higher tax bills, and in anticipation of a long recession. As a result, the discretionary funds of the “wealthy” or “well to do” are decreasing, which inevitably trickles down to those who are less fortunate and most at risk.
When those people in the higher tax brackets start losing money to tax hikes, where are they going to cut costs? They are going to stop spending money at retail shops, which are employed mostly by blue collar workers. And they will no longer employ their cleaning ladies, which are those in the middle to lower income bracket. Or they will no longer be willing to pay others to mow their lawns, which are also usually middle to lower class individuals and legal immigrants with green cards. Do you see a pattern here?
I know several people who work at a prominent retail store locally on a part time basis, yet because people are conserving funds the employees’ hours are being cut, they are getting anywhere from 0 to 20 hours a week . One of the women I know is a full time single mother with 2 children under 13. She’s been trying to make ends meet on a schedule of 14 hours a week at an income of $8 per hour. This is an outrage! I am so angry, so much so, that I was brought to uncontrollable tears. This man was supposed to be the “chosen one”; Robin Hood to the poor; the one who was going to fix everything. His stimulus plan was supposed to stimulate the economy by injecting “$75 billion of stimulus into the economy by getting money in the form of tax cuts and direct spending directly to the people who need it most.” At least that is what his campaign materials promised, but in the 2 months since he’s been in office he has spent more than 10 times that amount and it has done nothing to improve our economy. Wasteful spending without results only makes things worse because it increases the likelihood of inflation and forces us to repay money unwisely spent.
Why is Obama sending $100 million to Latin America, when we can’t even help the people within our own countries boundaries. And don’t get me started on America’s homeless. Why are there so many funds to feed the hungry in other countries when so many Americans, many of which are war veterans, single mothers and blue collar workers who have lost their only sources of income are still lying helpless and homeless on our country’s city streets?
Since September a total of $1.5 trillion has been spent between the Republican and Democratic parties but what good has it done? This doesn’t even take into account the money spent by the Federal Reserve, which brings the total spent by some estimates to over $3 trillion. Why are we “bailing out” companies with no guidelines as to how they can spend the money? It’s no wonder bonuses were paid and retreat trips were planned with that money. Rather than bailing out these big companies who have made their own beds and should now be forced to lie in them, we should be giving that money to entrepreneurs and small business so they can grow and hopefully learn from the big conglomerates and not make the same mistakes. Rewarding irresponsible large companies only punishes responsible companies and means a lack of responsibility actually pays. Is that the message we want to send?
If I could speak directly to President Obama I’d say, “With all due respect, Mr. President, you are making a huge mistake. By taking from the ‘rich to give to the poor’, you are only making the lives of those less fortunate more difficult. How can you not see this? If you would just stop enabling big business by allowing them to screw things up royally without having to reap the consequences of their actions, everyone will fare so much better! And please, let’s take care of our own citizens before we give away money we don’t have to people in other countries!”
Tags: bail outs, blue collar, obama, US Economy
Posted in Economy, Obama, Taxes, US Economy | Comments (0)
