The first response to my letter to the editor last week and my response to him

A different take on Obama's policies



Published: Sunday, June 05, 2011


Jamie McVickar needs to do a better job checking some facts before he displays abject ignorance presented recently in these pages. He also needs a lesson in the rights of creditors as they related to the so-called bailouts of GM and Chrysler.
Obama thwarted long established bankruptcy proceedings and gave his union buddies favored treatment over more deserving creditors. His statement that GM and Chrysler repaid their taxpayer funded loans is wrong. They merely took taxpayer money out of other government grants and applied them to loan payments. Result: We taxpayers are still owed the money.
His "clear majority of Americans" that approve of Obama's performance is also wrong, and the only reason Obama enjoys his current favorability is attributable to his being dragged kicking and screaming into finding Osama bin Laden, thanks to the Bush interrogation policies Obama so violently opposed.
Last week we witnessed Obama's duplicity when he urged Netanyahu to negotiate with a terrorist just after Obama ordered the killing of another one, quite probably in violation of U.S. law. Even Saddam Hussein had his day in court.


Mr. McVickar tells us more untruths about the Paul Ryan budget plan that he claims will add to the national debt. This has as much credibility as the Democrats ad showing "grandma" being pushed off a cliff. After all, it is Obamacare that steals Medicare funds.
Let's face some unpleasant facts: Obama's "hope and change" has turned out to be a magnified version of the worst of Bush policies, not the least of which are uncontrolled spending and yet another involvement in a Mideast war. To claim that Obama policies work is insanity.

Paul Linsen
Chadds Ford

Here is what I am saying in return, in a letter, hopefully to be submitted by someone else:

Hidden among the usual personal attacks in the recent letter by Paul Linsen, there are very few facts, as he himself proves. He says there is no clear majority of Americans who support President Obama and then goes on to say why there is a clear majority who support him. He takes Jamie McVickar’s point that Chrysler has paid back all the government loans, which is true, and lumps them in with GM, who, despite a miraculous turn-around, now finally posting billion dollar profits, has not yet paid back all the loans, although they are ahead of schedule. Obama helped the workers in the government loans, because his focus is on creating and saving jobs, something the Republicans, despite their successes last November, have yet to propose a single bill to address. Every credible, objective analysis of Paul Ryan’s budget shows that while he tried to get people all excited about gutting Medicare, the bill in the end does more economic harm than good. At least Linsen got one thing right in his letter when he became one of the first right-wingers to acknowledge that it was President Bush’s policies that put us in this whole mess that President Obama has done such an incredible job turning around.

In further evidence of the great job Obama is doing is an article in the New York Times, and echoed in Forbes magazine over the weekend pointing out that “federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950 according to the Office of Management and Budget.” The current tax rates, cut by Obama as part of the stimulus package and again at the end of 2010 for the current year, are lower than under the Republican deity, President Reagan. The article goes on to point out that the United States has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the nations who are a part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including every European country, as well as Japan, South Korea and many others. Oh, and who wrote the column in the New York Times, pointing out that tax rates under President Obama are lower than those of Reagan’s? Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a top treasury official in the George H.W. Bush administration. The answer to our annual debt has never been more obvious. It is time to increase the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans back to where they were the last time our budget ran a surplus, which was during the Bill Clinton administration.