10. Reduce much of what Barack Obama says, advocates, and tries to implement and you find a particular kind of despised but uniquely American species in his cross-hairs: upper-middle class, making $200-800,000 a year, employed as a professional or small business person, living in the suburbs or small town America, children in non-Ivy League private and public colleges, a nice house, perhaps a vacation home, boat, 2-3 nice cars, residing outside the east and west coasts without an aristocratic pedigree, for whom food stamps are as much an anathema as is Martha’s Vineyard or Costa del Sol.
Massive debt, ObamaCare, vast expansions in federal spending, new regulations, affirmative action, open borders, and environmental legislation are all targeted at this profile. He neither generates the cheap sympathy accorded to the distant poor nor wins the envy and admiration of the tasteful idle old money or the new mega-rich. When I see him plugging away on his vacation on a Sierra Nevada highway — a club cab new Chevy V-8 truck pulling a sleek powerboat or fancy trailer with two jet-skies — I think of a doomed wooly mammoth soon to go down amid the ropes, nets, and missiles from a vast array of gleeful hunters.He is writing about my family. And he is right. When I read it I got that sick feeling right in the pit of my stomach, because in the last six months I have seen how we have become the bad guy. How did this happen? How did hard work to build something, employ people, and make money become awful? When did PROFIT become a dirty word?
Unpredictable regulation is killing small business. I believe it is a deliberate attack. My husband has just gone through two and a half months of hearings with a government agency. He's been joined at the hearings by the other major players in his industry. After endless rounds of meetings, tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees for his company (and hundreds of thousands in fees overall) and several weeks of lost time at work, they reached an agreement on the recall of a part that had not caused one single death OR injury.
Then, just last week, he received not one but TWO notices from two other federal regulatory agencies about his parts, including one about the plastic polystyrene. Polystyrene is everywhere, from styrofoam cups to bike helmets. There was a third warning about fiberglass. These notices are good indications of recalls and lawsuits coming in the future.
Add on top of this are the regulations regarding employees, especially the unknowable Obamacare. My husband's company provides good benefits for their employees. I know, because we get exactly the same insurance. But what is coming? We aren't big enough or important enough to get a waiver.
I also read this recently. Atlas Shrugged as truth, not fiction (cribbed from Dan Mitchell's blog):
Nobody professed to understand the question of the frozen railroad bonds, perhaps, because everybody understood it too well. At first, there had been signs of a panic among the bondholders and of a dangerous indignation among the public. Then, Wesley Mouch had issued another directive, which ruled that people could get their bonds “defrozen” upon a plea of “essential need”: the government would purchase the bonds, if it found proof of the need satisfactory. there were three questions that no one answered or asked: “What constituted proof?” “What constituted need?” “Essential-to whom?” …One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused, sold their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who possessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty-three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar, or about a new profession practiced by bright young boys just out of college, who called themselves “defreezers” and offered their services “to help you draft your application in the proper modern terms.” The boys had friends in Washington.
"Friends in Washington." So that's what we need.
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