When it comes to wages, jobs and America’s debt, the crisis among America’s youth continues to intensify. The Obamacare debacle and new regulatory regimes coming out of Washington are stifling job growth. People are looking for leadership. What’s this President doing? He’s trying to play it cool.
People want a President, not a talk show host, and America’s youth are smarter than apparently Barack Obama thinks they are. That’s the good news.
Year after year, this President demonstrates a complete unwillingness to focus on the important policy issues facing America, but instead seems more interested in desperately trying to recapture his 2008 mojo with young voters. His “Between Two Ferns” appearance online last week was the latest in a long line of campy talk show spots, video messages, Vine posts, Reddit chats and other digital propaganda forays to convince America’s youth he’s working on an economy that has suffered under his watch — that he’s working diligently to get them out of their parents’ basements and really, truly, out on their own.
But watching Obama trying to be cool, now five years into his Presidency, is like watching Howard from “The Big Bang Theory”: no matter how much the President tries to relate to struggling young people, he looks forced, calculated, cheesy and awkward. He is diminishing himself and the presidency in the process.
Worse yet, he’s caused millions of young people who had hoped for change they could believe in to lose faith in their own government. Still, he soldiers on, appearing on webcasts and commissioning multi-million-dollar marketing strategies to further inflate his image and desperately save his signature piece of legislation.
It’s been said before, but if “Pajama Boy” didn’t convince Millennials that the President thinks they’re idiots, what will?
America’s real economic problems continue to go not only unsolved, but, with the exception of a few thin, catch phrase-laden programs like “My Brother’s Keeper,” there is no strategy to put young people back to work. The massive amounts of proposed spending certainly won’t make life easier for those looking for work. If anything, the President seems to be doing everything in his power to make future job opportunities more scarce, while saddling these underemployed young people with ever-increasing amounts of future fiscal burdens.
The national debt is roughly $17 trillion, and yet the President seems unable and unwilling to cut federal spending. His proposed budget shows that rather than address the very real fiscal problems America faces, Obama wants to continue to increase spending, not cut it. This will hit the youngest Americans the hardest, since they’re the ones who will not only have to pay the bill when we face a Greek-style economic collapse, but their future prosperity will suffer the most.
The bleak job market is only exacerbated by Obama’s apparent fetish for taking over segments of the economy. First it was heavy industry — and we’re seeing how that played out as it becomes clear that federal regulators ignored the very real problems with their pet project, salvaging General Motors. Then came the healthcare scheme which was founded on the flawed principal that young people would be clamoring to get their “free” healthcare. The President’s instincts were wrong again and America’s young people have responded with resounding rejection of the plan.
Now we have small-dollar lenders. The President wants to grab the short-term lending industry and remake that in his own image! With all the pressing concerns over jobs and the economy, Obama ought to be looking at segments of the marketplace that work, and looking to replicate their successes elsewhere. Instead, in this case, the President is looking to destroy an important segment of the lending industry and replacing it with a strange combination of the Post Office and the next generation of ACORN. Imagine — Obama wants to move an industry that is flourishing in the online world, and force it back into a business model firmly rooted in the 18th and 19th centuries – the U.S. Postal Service!
Even worse, he wants you to pay for this anachronistic folly! We’re talking about tens of billions of dollars, perhaps $50 billion annually of taxpayer-guaranteed money being doled out by government-spawned entities with no experience loaning money or any track record getting those loans paid back — only people with the most limited experience in business, economics and finance would offer up the preposterous solution of using the U.S. Post Office as the nation’s savior for small-dollar, short-term, high-risk lending!
What the President doesn’t want you to know and doesn’t think you are smart enough to realize, is that between Obamacare, the short-term loan takeover, student loans and the host of so-called consumer protection regimes being established by the administration, the government is obtaining more direct access to your sensitive, personal financial information than ever before. Contemplate that for a moment — the same government that even staunch supporters of the national security state are growing to heavily mistrust — would now have even greater access to your financial information, in a system at least partially supervised by the people who deliver your mail.
No number of late-night talk show appearances or photos with Hollywood celebrities is going to make this President cool. The posters in the dorm rooms have long since come down. He just doesn’t understand America’s youth are just not that into him anymore.
