Category Archives: Obamacare

by Barry Kelly | October 8, 2014 · 7:30 am

INSIGHTS 163: TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT?

This is your government. You own them. You put them in power to take care of the people.

Are you better off economically? Do you even have a job? Are you feeling safer? Do you trust your government?

That last one is a critical question. If you don’t trust it how can you act on what you’re told? Trust has at last two critical elements:

Do you trust what they are doing?
Do you believe what they tell you?

Of course the second question is the key to the first. If you don’t trust the information the government gives you, how can you trust what they are doing?

We were just told that we are better off now then we were six years ago. Maybe so, considering the financial crises of 2008 and its immediate consequences when the housing bubble crashed. But we are certainly not better off than we were eight years ago. In fact, there were as many Americans with jobs in 1978 as there are today. In 1978 our population was around 222 million. In 2013 the population had grown to 317 million, not including uncounted illegal immigrants. That’s a difference of approximately 95 million more Americans today versus in 1978. The government unemployment numbers show none of those 95 million more Americans who want to work and do not have jobs. Granted, some unknown number work in the hidden cash or barter economy.

When the government, including President Obama, point with pride to the new jobs created, remember we just caught up to the job level of 1978. The government tells us the unemployment number is 5.1 percent. That ridiculous number does not include the number of people who have given-up looking for work and dropped out of the workforce. Only those who are drawing unemployment benefits are counted in the unemployment numbers. The real unemployment number is well above 11 percent. For blacks, women, young people just entering the work pool, and recent college graduates, the unemployment number is much higher.

Many of these new jobs are low-paying. Wage levels have not keep pace with inflation nor the Federal Reserve’s constant weakening the dollar by pumping $86 billion a month into the economy for years to keep inflation near zero. Americans on fixed incomes have seen their buying power eroded by ‘Qualitative Easing’ on the part of the Federal Reserve.

The result is that under Obama, the rich and upper middle class who had the resources to invest on Wall Street have done very well. With all of Obama’s preaching about re-distribution of income and decreasing the gap between the haves and have nots, the effect of his policies have increased the gap between the rich and poor.

Do not believe the Obama spin that is put on all information released by the government. His administration has lied about gun running by the Department of Justice; leaving people to die in Benghazi and lying about their complicity; has used the IRS to handicap Republican political organizations; has unlawfully tapped the phones of reporters; has claimed they weren’t adequately briefed about the strength of ISIS; called it workplace violence when an Islamist murdered others; and guaranteed you could keep your doctor and health plan under Obamacare.

You should not be surprised if we don’t trust them. The Obama government is proving that liberty requires eternal vigilance.

Written by the author of “Insights: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” available now as an ebook, in paperback or hardcover on Amazon.com or BN.com. Follow the author on Twitter @factsfictions80. If you think this message is important, please share it.

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Filed under Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare

Tagged as America, Benghazi, class warfare, ISIS, Obamacare

by Barry Kelly | September 25, 2014 · 7:35 am

INSIGHTS 157 — WHO’S TO BLAME FOR OUR MESS? PART 1

beforeitsnews.com

Most Americans seem to realize the country is in a mess, both domestically and internationally. The evidence is clear to all but the fringe true believers who have totally closed their minds to new or conflicting information.

You don’t have to look far. We have fewer people in the workforce than anytime in the last eight years. Wages have not keep pace with inflation. More people are on food stamps and their numbers are growing faster than ever before. The dollar is losing strength. Only those who can afford to make investments in the stock market are doing better than okay. The president’s Qualitative Easing program has pumped varying amounts as high as 86 billion dollars a month into the economy for the last several years, creating an artificial stock market for the well-to-do, but widened the gap between the haves and have-nots. The progressives have created an ideal economy for their class warfare rhetoric.

Tax reform has been ignored. Social programs and debt servicing are eating deeply into the gross national product and getting worse each year. Obamacare has yet to find a niche where it is actually helping people. Regulations are killing business and driving American corporations overseas in search of friendly business locations. Government is growing at a rate far beyond what is necessary. Power is accruing to the executive branch. The separation of powers contained in the Constitution is being rapidly eroded. Congress, largely due to its timidness, is becoming irrelevant. At least the progressives in charge know where they are driving the country. The Republicans do not.

If anything good is happening domestically, it is hard to find. The president, the attorney general and profession racists raise the race flag at every opportunity. The once-prestigious New York Times and Washington Post have become ideological supporters of the progressive agenda. Selective omission and slanting of the news is an everyday affair.

Our universities are no longer bastions of free thinking and speech. They too are turning out left-wing ideologues, rather than graduates who have learned to question orthodoxy and think outside the box. Pride in America is hard to find in progressive ranks and the history of our country is, according to Obama’s progressives, something we must apologize for. The progressive party refers to our armed forces in Iraq as an occupying force. At a time of real dangers in the world, President Obama is cutting the armed forces back to pre-WWII levels.

Internationally, nothing done by the president’s direction has gone right. First, the do-nothing but travel everywhere secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the “never saw a situation he couldn’t make worse” John Kerry, have made a shambles out negations with Iran, Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians, Russia, China, Europe, and the Middle East. If there ever was gang in the White House that couldn’t shoot straight, this is it. Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Benghazi come to mind. The foreign policy list of unbelievable gaffs could go on much longer.

Read my next blog to find out who is to blame for all this mess. Coming later this week.

Do you like and understand what you’re reading? Share it with your friends and leave me comments here or on Amazon. I read them! You can also visit my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter. This content and more is available in my latest book, “INSIGHTS: Transforming America.”

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Filed under Barry Kelly, class warfare, Conservative views, foreign policy, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, political solutions, Politics

Tagged as Benghazi, Bush, class warfare, Congress, Iran, iraq, Middle East, transformation, White House

by Barry Kelly | September 17, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 153

OBAMA’S SCORECARD – PART 1

washingtontimes.com

It will soon be six years since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The traditional way of evaluating a president is to judge how he has done as a leader to solve problems concerning the economy, national security, and foreign policy. We could do that here, but that wouldn’t be addressing what President Obama has been doing. To be fair, he should be scored on what he has been working to accomplish. To do that, we have to use the tasks relevant to progressive goals, for those are what is important to President Obama and his legacy.

President Obama’s overall goal is the transformation of America. That term means very little unless you examine the steps that are required in the process of transformation. The first step is to marginalize his opposition, the Republican Party, by a skillful manipulation of issues. Remember, the progressive mantra is “the issue is never the issue.” In short, that means you don’t try to solve problems or issues, you simply use every issue to instead attack the opposition. Changing sides on issues or lying about what you said previously about the issue doesn’t matter and happens often. To progressives, the end justifies the means as long as your intent is to seize power and wealth from those who have it and give to the have-nots. This goes for both individuals and nations.

Domestically, Obama has done this by:

increasing taxes on the top earners
instituting death taxes so families cannot pass on wealth to heirs
put forth regulations to hamper business expansion
raised minimum wages
increased unemployment benefits
expanded food stamp recipients
Obamacare
internationally signing treaties in the area of climate change
taxes on burning carbon
providing payments to the United Nations and other groups and nations that do not share our goals.

Obama, so far, only gets a “C” for his redistribution of wealth goals, but he is making progress.

Another progressive goal is to weaken America in the international arena among its allies and adversaries. A major task in this goal is to destroy America’s ability to project power outside our borders. The value of our word in foreign affairs is at a very low point. No one, enemies nor allies, believes us. They see our will and resolve as non-existent. Our unwise withdrawal from Iraq, Obama’s haste to get us into Afghanistan and then withdraw on a meaningless time table, redlines that disappear and negotiations that have no substance have been effective in reducing our world power. In the president’s drive to diminish American power and prestige internationally, he deserves an “A.”

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog, coming later this week, which will score Obama on increasing government control; expanding the executive branch; and weaken the U.S. military.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, Politics

Tagged as government, Obama, Progressive, Republican, Saul Alinsky, socialism, transformation

by Barry Kelly | September 9, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 149

THE GOP NEEDS TRANSFORMING

Is America in trouble? I think so.

How did it happen?

Well, you cannot blame President Obama for everything that’s happened under his watch. The Republican Party insider group is also guilty. The House of Representatives has the total Constitutional power to appropriate money. Everything the progressives have done with Obama’s leadership had to be funded. The government runs on money, our money. The House is supposed to be the place funding requests begin.

Where has it been? Republicans did not provide a single vote to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Yet they funded every bit of its implementation. Obamacare couldn’t have survived just on the funds that were appropriated when it was passed. The government had to pay for all the overruns, including the rollout. Instead of providing good stewardship of our money, the Republican leadership whined and complained about President Obama’s executive orders and the greatly increased scope and power of the HHS, EPA, IRS, DOJ, and Labor Department but was afraid to use its appropriation to bring Obama’s transforming of America to a near stop.

When they did try to bring Obama’s spending under control by refusing to raise the debt limit unless the president delayed a part of the ACA, the president refused to sign the appropriations legislation with the Republican amendment to raise the debt ceiling. He then began shutting down the parts of the government that would dramatically affect citizens, parts that could have been easily funded. Congress offered to help with authorization by allowing the president to shift funds to where they were needed. He refused and cleverly and successfully passed the blame onto the Republicans for shutting down the government. Not only did the American people accept the blatant blame shift, so did the Republican leadership. Now the speaker of the House and the Senate minority leader are afraid to use their Constitutional powers to defund certain parts of federal spending. With an opposition as timid and as inept as the current Republican leadership, we cannot look to them to act as a check on the growth of the federal government and spending.

The Republican Party leadership in and out of government is afraid to rock the boat. None of them would have signed the Declaration of Independence. (That is my yardstick for judging the courage of politicians.) In my state of South Carolina, several politicians and Republican leaders would have signed. Among them are Representative Joe Wilson, Senator DeMint, now the President of the Heritage Foundation, Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Representative Trey Gowdy. It is this kind of courage that is needed.

President Reagan believed that “Government isn’t the answer. Government is the problem.” Of all the threats we face today, big government is the biggest threat to our freedom and economic growth. The Republican insider group just doesn’t believe this. While the size of government has grown spectacularly under President Obama, conservatives must remember that the eight years of President Bush saw large increases in the size and scope of government. Term limits would fix a lot of problems with the Congress.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, centralization, Conservative views, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, political solutions, Presidential Debate

Tagged as Bush, Congress, government, Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, president reagan, Progressive, Republicans

by Barry Kelly | July 28, 2014 · 8:20 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 133

VETS AND TRANSFORMING

There is something about duty and honor that all veterans understand. It starts with “who can I trust to have my back and who keeps their word?” Those who fail those two measurements don’t serve with duty and honor. They just do the time and collect the retirement pay.

I have to be careful here, for it has been a long time since I saw a gun fired in anger and attitudes change. I can’t get inside the head of a young veteran who is three or four decades younger than I am. But I can speculate on the issues they are facing. The big one concerns their ability to provide for themselves and their families. Thousands of well-trained, battle-savvy soldiers, sailors, Air Force personnel, and Marines will be summarily discharged by a commander-in-chief who dislikes and distrusts the American military. He has traveled the world apologizing for their actions over the last several decades.

The damage to the security of America caused by this unjustified downsizing is bad enough but the hardship this progressive ideology places on our best citizens, current and future, is a national tragedy. It is also dishonorable. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should resign rather than preside over President Obama’s ideological motivation to make American more equal to the rest of the world. Active duty troops discharged against their wishes is despicable treatment for their service. Troops facing this surprise attack must resent the leaders who betrayed them.

Where will they find employment? Medical care for them and their dependents? From a dysfunctional VA? This government-run service has been operating since the Civil War. It is an ironclad example that the no government can or should run a large medical system. Once Obamacare takes hold, we will ALL be in a VA-like system. At least we will be sharing that hardship with our veterans. The high odds of newly discharged veterans finding employment commensurate with their needs are not likely to improve under Obama’s anti-business administration. Training programs are of questionable use and unemployment compensation does end. Will our veterans discharged for a president’s ideological whim view their predicament as anything but the government’s breaking of a promise? I hope they will use their talents and skills to elect a government that will keep its promises.

The Republican Party needs to outline what it will do for these troops. The best plan would be to cancel Obama’s plans to severely cut military troop levels. Next in line would be to pass a G.I. education bill that will enable all who have kept their part of the bargain to get an education that will make them employable in the civilian economy. Unless the Senate and the White House are retaken by the Republican Party, I’m afraid we will find our young veterans turning to food stamps and other government subsidies. Having our veterans become dependent on the government is fine with the progressive ideology of the president and his closest advisers. Is it okay with you?

Read “INSIGHTS Transforming of America Is this what we fought for?”