Memo to Obama Supporters: Here’s How Jobs are Created

By Herman Cain
June 18, 2011

Writer Ari Berman of the left-wing magazine The Nation wrote last week that if jobs are the issue that decides the election, Barack Obama should be the winner.

Huh?

OK, it’s The Nation. You weren’t expecting rational analysis, were you? But the piece is worth reading for what it reveals about left-wing thought on how you create jobs. Berman actually tries to make the argument that Obama has a plan to create jobs and Mitt Romney doesn’t.

Here’s where you can read it: http://www.thenation.com/blog/168340/obama-has-jobs-plan-romney-doesn't.

So how does Berman come to this conclusion? Essentially, he views job-creation through a narrow left-wing lens that recognizes only one method of creating jobs, which is for the government to bankroll new hires. If the federal government is going to lay out hundreds of billions that can be used to hire teachers, cops, firefighters, construction workers and so forth, that counts as a plan to create jobs.

If, on the other hand, your plan is to boost economic growth so the private-sector employment picture will improve – as is the case with Mitt Romney – that is not a job-creation plan. What is it? Berman quotes David Madland of the liberal Center for American Progress: “It is a plan from the Republican candidate for president designed to maximize corporate profits. What it doesn’t do is help the middle class or create jobs.”

Got that? Maximizing corporate profits is inconsistent with job-creation in the bizarro economic world of The Nation and the Center for American Progress. Vote for Barack Obama! He’ll make corporations less profitable (mission accomplished) and create lots of jobs as a result (any day now).

But wait, you say, Berman tells us that “even the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal” criticized Romney’s plan. It’s very popular these days for Obama’s apologists to claim WSJ editors have defended him. They made the claim with respect to Obama’s spending, only to be debunked by just about every media outlet in the nation, including the WSJ itself. But what did the Journal really say about
Romney’s job-creation plan in the editorial, published way back in September, and cited by Berman? It said the following:

“The rollout is billed as Mr. Romney's ‘plan for jobs and economic growth,’ and it rightly points out that to create more jobs requires above all faster growth. This may seem like common sense, but it's a notable break from the Obama Administration's penchant for policies that ‘target’ jobs rather than improving overall incentives for job creation. So we have had policies for ‘green jobs,’ or construction jobs, or teaching jobs, or automobile jobs, or temporary, targeted tax cuts for jobs—even as the economy struggles.

“Mr. Romney seems to understand that the private economy will inevitably produce millions of new jobs—in industries and companies we can't predict—when it resumes growing at 3% or more. This is an important philosophical distinction that drives most of the Romney agenda.”

Where the editorial criticized Romney’s plan, it was because they wanted it to be more aggressive and specific about tax cuts – not exactly what Mr. Berman is getting at, is it?

The reason Ari Berman, readers of The Nation and other Obama supporters fail to see a job-creation plan is that they don’t understand how jobs are created. To them, jobs are created when a politician sends a certain amount of money to favored constituencies with the expectation that it will be used to hire people to do work the politician wants done. Another way they think jobs are created is for the federal government to run 47 “job training” programs – as if companies can’t train their own workers, and as if jobs are plentiful if only people go through a government program first.

If Obama’s job-creation strategy worked, then it would already be working. Instead, unemployment has soared during his presidency, and job-creation has now slowed to a near-standstill. Obama complains that this is because the Republican Congress won’t let him spend even more stimulus money. But the real reason is that economic growth remains at or below a paltry 2 percent, which is bad under any circumstance, but is horrible as part of a so-called “recovery” from a recession.

Mitt Romney understands that a robust private sector is the best job creator, which is why he proposes cutting the corporate tax rate, slashing regulations, repealing ObamaCare and ending the explosion of federal debt. If that doesn’t look like a job-creation plan to Ari Berman and other Obama supporters, it’s because they – unlike Mitt Romney – have never been involved in the creation of jobs and don’t know how it works.
Much like their leader.

Mr. President, Your Facts are Incorrect

By Herman Cain
June 10, 2012

If President Obama believed he had a good economic record, he would be presenting that record to the American people as it really is. It tells you a lot that the president is so willing to distort the facts – especially on the matter of his spending.

A few weeks ago, a writer named Rex Nutting wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch section that made the claim that there really has been no Obama spending spree. According to Nutting, the whole thing is a myth.

This was greeted as exciting news by the Obama White House, which immediately began making the claim that the “conservative Wall Street Journal” had declared he was not a big spender.

How could Nutting make such a claim? Using phony numbers, that’s how. Nutting ignored the fact that much of the spending that occurred in 2009 was requested and approved by Obama after he took office. This allowed Nutting to pretend that all 2009 spending – save for the oddly chosen figure of $140 billion – was the responsibility of George W. Bush.

Because spending increases since 2009 have been relatively small, Nutting’s logic is that Obama has given us tiny increases over a baseline that was Bush’s fault.

It didn’t take long for conservative media to tear Nutting’s deceptive piece to shreds. The piece was so sloppy, it was easy to do. But surprisingly, even mainstream media outlets like the Associated Press and the Washington Post roasted Nutting for his claims, and took Obama to task for citing the discredited column.

And as for Obama’s claim that he was getting support from the “conservative Wall Street Journal,” that was simply not the truth. MarketWatch is an entirely separate section from the WSJ’s conservative editorial page, which weighed in on the controversy after it had festered for several days, ripping Nutting's piece to shreds and castigating the Obama Administration for citing it.

You would think, after all this, that Obama would stop making the claim and stop citing the piece. But he hasn’t. At a fundraiser just the other night, he cited it once again to the roaring approval of a partisan Democratic crowd.

Of course, his claim is ridiculous on its face. The national debt has already risen by $5 trillion in the three years since Obama took office, which is more than it rose the entire eight years of the Bush Administration. To say there has been no Obama spending spree is so absurd, you’d be laughed out of any room full of serious people (apparently Democratic fundraising events don’t apply) if you said it.

I would respect President Obama more if he would stand up and make an honest case for his policies. I’m not saying I would agree with them, but if he thinks spending 25 percent of GDP – which we haven’t done at any other time outside of World War II – is good policy, he should boldly stand up and tell everyone, “Yes, I increased spending this much and this is why I did it.”

Instead, he runs from his spending record because it obviously hasn’t brought the economic benefits he claimed it would, and it’s running up the nation’s credit card at a frightening rate. He is so lost for a justification for all this, that when an obscure columnist writes a sloppy and easily debunked column that attempts to defend him, he references it for weeks on end.

He has nothing else.

That is pathetic. Would it be so hard to admit that your policies haven’t worked and that we need to try something else? Then again, he’s still pushing Congress to give him another $450 billion in stimulus spending, so maybe he really doesn’t understand that his policies don’t work. Maybe he just thinks we need that much more of them.

Congress won’t give him what he wants, of course, nor should they.

Mr. President, with all due respect, your facts are incorrect.

The Obama Likability Trap

By Herman Cain
June 4, 2012

If a pollster calls you at some point during this election season, one of the strangest questions they ask you could be:
“Who would you rather have a beer with?”

And you didn’t know the president would be inviting you to the White House for a beer, or picking you up after work to take you to Joe’s Bar. Because, of course, he won’t. But that doesn’t stop pollsters from exploring the question of “likability,” and it doesn’t stop the media from reporting on it as if it were a relevant factor in determining who should be the next president.

Politicians put a great deal of time and attention these days into trying to be likable, as they’re convinced this will influence a great many voters. This quest for likability can involve everything from looks ($400 haircuts and botox) to jokes on the stump to local sports references at every stop, some of which are guaranteed to backfire – like when John Kerry told a bunch of Wisconsin cheeseheads how much he liked going to football games at “Lambert Field.”

And almost all of this is completely irrelevant to the job of the presidency. In fact, I would argue that the need to be liked can make a leader much less effective – since true leadership is often the opposite of pleasing everyone.

I can’t think of a better example than Barack Obama.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was regarded as the much more likable candidate than either primary rival Hillary Clinton (whom he infamously and condescendingly told, “You’re likable enough, Hillary”) or general election opponent John McCain. It’s hard to say what the basis was for this belief. I’m sure part of it was that he seemed very natural and comfortable when speaking in public. He seemed to have the ability to relate to ordinary people. And by all appearances he does seem to be genuinely devoted to his family, which is great.

But being president of the United States is arguably the most difficult job in the world. It’s certainly the job that presents the most problems for everyone else when someone does it incompetently. And however likable Obama may have been, there was no reason to think he was qualified for the job. Having served two-thirds of a single U.S. Senate term, with no executive experience of any kind prior to that, simply did not recommend him for the presidency of the United States. Any objective look at the facts should have caused voters to conclude, “This man is going to be in over his head.”

And he has been.

Facing one of the most difficult economic challenges of the last several generations, we elected a man who had never had responsibility for any economy – good or bad, of any size. He had one idea, which was to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money. When that didn’t fix the problem, he was stumped. He knows nothing about economics and nothing about business or job creation. And without executive experience, he didn’t know how to surround himself with knowledgeable people who could guide him to better solutions. He had no idea what to do, and still doesn’t.

He’s been even worse on the foreign policy front. Iran and North Korea are playing him like a fiddle on matters of nuclear proliferation. Russia under Vladimir Putin simply disregards him. And for all his talk about how his predecessor supposedly alienated our allies, Obama has managed to upset the British on the question of the Falkland Islands, the Canadians on the question of oil purchases, the Poles on matters of missile defense and “Polish death camps,” and Israel on just about everything.

How much do you like him now?

But as badly as Obama has bungled the presidency – and that is very badly indeed – we have to recognize he is not the only one with culpability here. When the Democratic Party put him on stage at its 2004 national convention to give the keynote address, which he delivered very well, it was absurd that an obscure Illinois state legislator should have been instantly elevated to the level of “rising star” on the national political scene. Given his almost non-existent record of achievement during his tenure as a U.S. senator, it was ridiculous that he was treated as one of the top-tier candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination – while a candidate like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who had an incredibly impressive resume, was treated as a joke.

Being likable has nothing to do with whether you can lead a nation. It doesn’t mean you can’t, but voters and the media need to look at a person’s qualifications – in the areas of leadership, achievement and ideas – and stop worrying about who they would like to have a beer with. If you want to have a beer, go have one with your friends. Leave the presidency to someone who has actually led something. Likability is not leadership.

In Lieu of a Plan, Our Leaders Make It Up As They Go Along

By Herman Cain
May 28, 2012

Anyone trying to solve a problem, turn around an organization or lead a nation needs something. They need a plan.

Without a plan, you have no roadmap for how you’ll correct things that are wrong. You have no way of measuring whether you’re making progress. You have no method of holding yourself accountable for the results of your actions.

One of the reasons the federal government is functioning so poorly, and causing the nation so many economic problems, is the fact that our leaders have no plan. They are making it up as they go along.

To understand the importance of having a plan, all you have to do is talk to any leader who successfully led an organization, company or movement to the attainment of an objective. They will all tell you it started with a good plan. When I was asked by Pillsbury to turn around a struggling region of Burger King restaurants, the first thing I had to do was develop a plan for how to stop the financial bleeding, how to increase business and how to more successfully manage operations. The same thing was true when I took over Godfather’s Pizza.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments to your plan. Sometimes as you learn and observe things, it becomes obvious that you must. But the plan still has to be aimed at achieving the goals, and it has to be honest.

America’s leaders today do not have an honest plan. In lieu of a plan, they simply make things up as they go along. Consider the current debate over interest rates on federal student loans. Washington politicians are in an uproar because interest rates are about to automatically double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. What they don’t tell you is why that’s about to happen. In 2007, Congress passed a bill that cut the interest rate to 3.4 percent, but in order to mask the true long-term cost of this measure, they set the rate cut to expire in 2012. That was supposedly the plan. But now that 2012 is here, there is of course wailing and gnashing of teeth over the increase, so they’re going to extend the lower rate.

Remember last year’s debate over the debt ceiling? Every year or two, Congress establishes a debt limit. If you took it seriously, you’d think they had a plan to make sure the nation incurs only so much debt, and no more. But of course, they have no such plan. Once they hit the limit, they simply increase it again. The debt limit is a joke. It makes it look like they have a plan for fiscal responsibility, but in reality they do not.

The same thing is true with Medicare. When the federal government puts out long-term projections concerning the cost of Medicare, the numbers are always fictional because they are based on a “plan” Congress will never follow. You may have heard during the ObamaCare debate about the Medicare “doc fix.” Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors are scheduled to be slashed dramatically every year or two. When the federal government puts out Medicare cost projections, it pretends these cuts will actually happen and reports the numbers accordingly. But the cuts will never happen. Every time they are scheduled to kick in, Congress enacts the inevitable “doc fix” and the current rates stay in place.

This is what’s sometimes called flying by the seat of your pants. Congress and the Obama Administration make it up as they go along. That’s why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit in recent congressional testimony that the Obama Administration has no plan for dealing with the federal deficit or debt, informing Congressman Paul Ryan (who actually does have a plan), “But we know we don’t like yours.”

Of course, this is largely a product of politics. Candidates are afraid to put specific plans before the public because their opponents and the media will assail the plans – often inaccurately – and turn what should be a campaign strength into a liability. I experienced that firsthand during my presidential campaign when I put out my 9-9-9 plan for replacing the tax code. The plan was attacked and often misrepresented. But a funny thing happened: Without question, 9-9-9 helped me more than it hurt me, not only because many people like the plan, but also because people had the sense that I knew what I wanted to do.

This is something politicians need to remember: Just because people criticize your plan doesn’t mean they don’t respect you for putting it out there. People understand that leaders need plans. That is more true than ever today. Given the weakened state of our economy and the dire nature of our debt/deficit situation, it is simply stunning that the Obama Administration has no plan whatsoever for what to do about it.

I couldn’t have turned my Burger King region or Godfather’s around without a plan. Mitt Romney couldn’t have turned the Olympics around without a plan. And neither of us would have been successful if we had peddled phony plans we had no intention of following – as Congress does with regularity.

This is why we face such difficult economic circumstances, and such a massive debt problem. You can’t get anything right if you simply make it up as you go along. You need a real, serious plan. We’re not going to get one, though, until we decide to elect leaders who know how to plan, know how to execute and know how to succeed.

There is an old saying. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Our federal government is failing us.

Reform doesn’t cut it: America needs to replace, restructure antiquated programs

By: Herman Cain
May 21, 2012

One of the worst tendencies of Washington politicians is to purportedly “fix” big problems with small solutions.

Who can forget members of Congress, announcing at the conclusion of last year’s debt-ceiling showdown that they had agreed to a deal that would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over 10 years? When you consider that the forecast deficit for that same period is well over $10 trillion – and even that’s assuming the phony “out year” spending cuts that never actually happen – a reduction of $1 trillion is not much of an achievement.

That’s because Washington doesn’t solve problems. It tweaks things – calling this “reform” – when these things need to be completely replaced and restructured.
If you want to understand why Washington does this, consider the reactions to Congressman Paul Ryan’s proposed entitlement restructuring, or to Gov. Scott Walker’s changes in the collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin. Democrats aired TV commercials depicting Ryan dumping a wheelchair-bound old woman over a cliff. Unions have successfully forced Walker into a recall election.

Most politicians, regardless of party, don’t want to deal with that kind of political blowback. So they settle for weak half-measures that allow them to say they “did something,” even though the actions taken don’t really solve anything.

This, I fear, is what will happen with all three entitlement programs. Politicians will tweak the programs and claim they have “reformed” them, when they really haven’t done anything to prevent the long-term fiscal train wreck that’s coming. It isn’t enough simply to tinker with the benefit formulas or to adjust the way revenue is raised. Social Security was created 80 years ago. Medicare and Medicaid were created nearly 50 years ago. The world was a different place back then, and basic facts of life that might have applied in those days are not necessarily applicable today. It makes no sense to cling to old models, and yet the very same people who cry “FORWARD!” in their quest for re-election insist on clinging to these models of the past.

America needs to stop thinking in terms of reform, an all-purpose term that is too easily applied to meaningless gestures, and start thinking in terms of replacing and restructuring outdated programs and processes that simply cannot be salvaged.

I said during my campaign, and I still say today, that America should look to the Chilean counterpart of Social Security, which relies much more heavily on private accounts and gets better results without putting the country in fiscal jeopardy. Yes, this is a very different kind of idea. There’s nothing wrong with that. When President George W. Bush proposed in 2005 that we go to partial privatization of Social Security, you would have thought from the reaction in Washington that he’d proposed to make seniors eat dog food for the rest of their days.

In fact, Bush’s proposal represented a good start but didn’t go nearly far enough. Yet the change-averse culture of Washington had an absolute meltdown over even such a limited reform as this. That’s pretty ironic considering how many of these same people get elected and re-elected squawking about “change blah blah blah.” Apparently change is a great idea as long as you don’t actually try it.

Now let’s be honest. It’s not only in Washington where people deny the need to replace and restructure models that don’t work anymore. Kodak was once the king of the photography industry, but they refused to accept that digital technology was about to revolutionize the industry, and they didn’t get out in front of the change. Once they got so far behind that they couldn’t catch up, they ended up in bankruptcy.

The newspaper industry has suffered in much the same way. Forward-looking people were predicting nearly 20 years ago that the way people get their news would change dramatically as a result of technology. Most of the newspaper industry refused to believe it would happen. Many newspapers invested in shiny new printing presses as recently as seven or eight years ago – thinking it would save them to have the color photos “pop” better on the printed page. Now they’re trying to lease out capacity on those printing presses to coupon companies while they desperately seek to catch up on their digital media strategies.

In both cases, it was a combination of short-sightedness and arrogance. People thought their models would always work because they always had worked. Why would that change? But of course, business models become antiquated over time, and so do government programs. It’s not enough just to change them. You need to completely replace the old model with a new one.

If America is to deal with the challenges we face, we need to change our mindset. Mere “reform” of outdated, antiquated models won’t get the job done. When Social Security was created, it was unheard of for people to have televisions in their homes. When Medicare and Medicaid were created, only super-rich people had color TVs. These programs are relics of another time, and yet we act as if they are sacrosanct and must be kept in their original form forever – even though the numbers clearly tell us they are going to bankrupt the country.

That makes no sense. America has never been a timid nation, so why are we so afraid of accepting anything other than timid “reforms” when what we really need is to restructure, and replace old models that no longer make sense with no models that work and fit the times?

Forget reform. Replace and restructure! If we do not begin to seriously replace and restructure the tax code, government programs and regulations, then there will be nothing left to reform but a bankrupt nation.

Will American voters follow Europe’s suicidal fiscal path?

By Herman Cain
May 14, 2012

I believe in democracy, and in the wisdom of ordinary people to make good decisions when they have all the information and understand the situation.

These are core principles for me, so I found them challenged this past week when voters in France and Greece acted in a way that seemed to clearly demonstrate otherwise. With much of Europe facing massive debt crises, and having agreed to abide by strict debt limits under terms of the European Union fiscal pact, French and Greek voters elected new governments that vowed to defy planned spending cuts and reject the debt limits.

This is especially egregious in Greece, which is supposed to be adhering to terms of an EU-sponsored bailout but cannot get its spending policies under control to save its life – and let there be no doubt, that’s what’s at stake here. Greece has built up so much debt bankrolling its welfare state, and has caused so much government dependence, it endured riots when it reached the inevitable point when the government had to admit it could no longer continue its reckless spending.

France is not in as much trouble, but in some ways the French election result is even more troubling because French President Nicolas Sarkozy was one of the authors of the EU pact imposing the strict debt limits. The election of socialist Francois Hollande represents a rejection of the very idea of fiscal responsibility, and leaves Germany in the precarious position of championing spending restraint and limits on debt while sentiment throughout the Eurozone seems to be moving entirely in the opposite direction.

What is going on here? Is my faith in people misplaced? And have I been wrong to express as much faith in the people of the United States – when we too face huge fiscal challenges and there seems to be little support for reform of the spending and entitlement programs that are driving the crisis?

I do not believe my faith in We the People is misplaced, but I do believe it’s important to remember the whole equation. The people will make good decisions when they have all the information and understand the situation. To the extent that people rely on politicians and the mainstream media to get their information – Houston, we have a problem.

Quite simply, it seems to be the modus operandi of the political class just about everywhere (and I include the mainstream media when I talk about the political class) to downplay the fiscal problems brought on by excessive government spending. To them, there is no problem that more government outlays cannot solve, and if there is not enough money on hand, it’s just because the people are too resistant to higher taxes.

As a case in point, the Associated Press reported on May 13 about the serious crisis facing the State of California, which finds itself $16 billion in debt. AP reporter Judy Lin offered a classic MSM take on the matter, saying the situation “will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.” (Emphasis mine.)

According to the AP, voter refusal to accept even higher taxes will mean the public, not the free-spending politicians, has failed. The real failure, of course, rests in the hands of public officials who not only refuse to limit their own spending, but also refuse to be honest with the public about the situation.

Let me give you a perfect example that’s been in the news in recent weeks. You may have heard that interest rates on student loans are scheduled to double automatically unless Congress acts to rescind the increase. Democrats are screaming bloody murder and demanding that Republicans support a measure to keep the interest rates where they are. What they don’t tell you is that Democrats put the scheduled increase in place five years ago, and the reason they did so was so they could claim the original lowering of the rate would not explode the deficit over the long term. They do the same thing with physician reimbursements for Medicare. The long-term plan always calls for a huge cut in the reimbursements, and they use this to claim that deficits in the “out years” will go down. But when the time comes for the spending cuts to happen, or for the interest rates to double, they always stop it from occurring.

That’s how politicians put projections in front of the public that make the situation look less dire than it really is. The worst example comes from ObamaCare – big surprise, right? – in which Democrats counted $500 billion as a “spending cut,” then counted the same $500 billion as money to fund the program. The mainstream media were well aware of this deception, but did not call ObamaCare supporters out on it.

It’s hard to blame to voters for the decisions they make when politicians hide the truth from them, and the media – which are supposed to hold politicians accountable for what they say and what they do – instead act as their propaganda ministry, assisting in the deception by ignoring the worst of their dishonesty.

Having said that, voters have to look harder and more critically at the information they’re being given. It has to be the responsibility of the public to be better informed and less willing to accept the party line of the political class and its media enablers. I still believe that the people will make the right decisions if they have all the information and understand the situation. In France and Greece, that did not happen this week because the people obviously don’t understand the stakes.

The people of the United States can and will do better. I refuse to believe otherwise.

Abuse of Power

By Herman Cain
May 7, 2012

Remember when Democrats, including a certain senator named Barack Obama, used to scream that President George W. Bush was abusing his executive powers?

Those were the good old days!

Since becoming president, Obama has turned the abuse of executive power into a high art form – especially since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and rendered him incapable of getting the most extreme elements of his left-wing agenda through Congress.

Obama is especially brazen in his use of executive orders, and most astonishingly, he makes no bones about the fact that he does so – telling a gathering in Las Vegas last October, “We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.”

In Obamaspeak, “dysfunctional” is a euphemism for “won’t give me everything I want.” So what are the big emergencies that require Obama to act on his own without congressional approval? Here are nine of the most egregious examples:

Force federal contractors to disclose their political contributions. This is an example of how the government can abuse its role in business relationships to do things it could never do in the normal course of governing. Lots of firms want to do business with the federal government. While Obama cannot get away with an executive order requiring everyone to tell him the candidates or causes they supported financially, he can make it a requirement for bidding on federal contracts. Once he knows where everyone’s political donation dollars go, who do you think has the best shot at the contracts? Exactly. And what else might he do with the information he gathers? Here’s one thing . . .

Publicly attack financial backers of Mitt Romney. In April, the Obama campaign launched a web site publicly naming, and attacking the integrity of, eight private citizens who contributed money to the Romney campaign. The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel reported that Obama accused these people of having shady reputations, making insinuations pertaining to things like outsourcing of jobs and foreclosures. Strassel rightly compared this tactic to Richard Nixon’s notorious “enemies list.” Obama may insist that he takes these actions as a candidate and not as president, but that is a load of crap. The fact is that he is president, and he is attacking private citizens for exercising their right to participate in the political process.

Require private companies to give unions employee phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Since the 1960s, the National Labor Relations Board has required private companies who are the target of a unionization effort to give unions the home addresses of their employees. That is bad as it is, but it’s not enough for Obama-appointed NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce, who told the Associated Press in January that he now wants the companies to also give the unions their employees’ home phone numbers and e-mail addresses. So they can harass them in even more ways. Why stop there? Why not just threaten to shut down operations entirely if they are not unionized? Since you mentioned it.

Let the NLRB threaten to shut down operations entirely if they are not unionized. You may have heard about this story from South Carolina. Boeing’s attempt to open a plant in South Carolina was frustrated for months by the NLRB, which filed a lawsuit against the South Carolina project only to drop it immediately after Boeing agreed to build its 737 Max jet using union labor in Reston, Washington. The NLRB is supposed to be an independent board, but under the control of Obama’s appointees it is used to blatantly do the bidding of labor unions.

Use ObamaCare money to hide the forcing of Medicare Advantage participants into regular Medicare. Medicare Advantage is the program in which participants are covered by private insurance for which the government pays the premiums, as opposed to the government directly paying the medical bills under regular Medicare. It is a much more efficient system. But under ObamaCare, many recipients will be forced off of Medicare Advantage (so much for “if you like your plan you can keep your plan”) and onto regular Medicare. Bad news for Obama: This was scheduled to happen three weeks before the election. So Obama found more than $83 billion worth of ObamaCare funds and announced a “demonstration project” that will keep these recipients on Medicare Advantage until after the election – hiding the truth from them just long enough for him to get their votes.

Force private citizens to provide free services to the government in time of “emergency.” There has been some overreaction to an executive order Obama signed in March, which seeks to mobilize national resources in time of emergency. It is not the onset of martial law as some have claimed, but there are some things to justify concern. For one thing, Obama claims the right to compel private citizens to provide consulting services to the government without compensation. Isn’t that the sort of thing Congress should have a say in? It also makes clear that this can only be implemented according to established rules, but then declares a rather troubling exception – unless determined otherwise by the president or his national security advisor! So Obama signed an executive order giving himself more power to make unilateral decisions. That is not right.

After ripping Bush for using technology to track potential criminals, do even more of it. The issue here might be hypocrisy as much as anything else. Perhaps you can make an argument for Obama’s move to track cell phone and Internet use to catch those suspected of involvement with genocide. This order, issued in April, is supposed to be focused on those in cahoots with the governments of Iran and Syria, although there’s at least the theoretical possibility it could be expanded to be used against American citizens. I’m not inclined to scream bloody murder over potential abuses of such power. But I remember a lot of people who were during the Bush presidency. One of them was Barack Obama.

Make recess appointments when there is no recess. Obama was highly critical of Bush for making recess appointments, in spite of the fact that such appointments are entirely constitutional. These are appointments a president makes when Congress is in recess. They don’t require Senate confirmation but automatically expire at the end of that congressional session. Bush made several of them to get around Democratic opposition to his choices. Obama denounced him for doing so. So guess what Obama has done? He announced a recess appointment to name Richard Cordray as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – even though the Senate was not technically in recess.

Use the IRS to harass your political opponents. Would President Hope-and-Change do that? You bet he would. Despite protests on the House floor from more than 63 Republican congressmen, the IRS has been mailing letters to Tea Party chapters around the country demanding identification of all their volunteers and donors. This is outrageous. Even if there was an issue with their tax status, the IRS would have no reason to demand information like this. It’s pure and simple political harassment.

But that’s Barack Obama. He observes no limits to his own power because he thinks the preservation of said power is the most important thing he can ever do. When he protested Bush’s use of executive power, he was obviously 100 percent insincere. Now that the power is his, there is no way of using it that Obama believes is inappropriate.

This is a long ways from the “hope and change” business people bought in 2008. But that’s because the real Obama is a long ways from what he portrayed himself to be. There is no excuse for anyone to buy it again in 2012.

Nine horrendous Obama decisions Mitt Romney would never have made

By Herman Cain
April 30, 2012

As we move into the general election campaign, with Mitt Romney facing Barack Obama in the presidential race, it’s important not to lose perspective on the very real differences between the two. That starts with the recognition that Obama has made some astonishingly ill-conceived decisions as president, and that Romney would never have done these things.

During a party’s nominating process for president – of which I was a part on the Republican side in this cycle – candidates do everything they can to differentiate themselves from each other. As the candidates focus on these differences and the media plays up the resulting conflicts, you could almost get the impression that some of us would have preferred Obama to some of our fellow Republicans.

Please!

Not only do I prefer Romney over Obama, it’s not even close. This is not to say that every proposed policy of Romney’s is exactly what I would propose. But in stepping back and looking at the big picture, you have to recognize that the next president’s task will be to fix enormous problems. You would want the new president, above all else, to be someone who would never have been so foolish as to make the decisions that a) created the problems; or b) made them worse.

Here are nine examples:

Mitt Romney would never have thrown $862 billion down a rat hole, claiming it to be “economic stimulus” that would keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent. Then, three years later when unemployment was still struggling to get back down below 8 percent, he would never be so brazen as to claim such a move had actually been successful.

Mitt Romney would never have signed ObamaCare into law. I know some think otherwise because the plan he implemented as governor of Massachusetts had some similar elements. But
ObamaCare was sold to the public with blatantly dishonest numbers and hidden taxes, and rammed through Congress via a series of political giveaways that would embarrass the most shameless of con artists. Whatever your disagreements with the structure of MassCare, Romney would never have done any of that. And if an ObamaCare repeal reaches Romney’s desk, he will sign it.

Mitt Romney would never have exploded the deficit to more than $1 trillion a year, then allowed his Treasury Secretary tell the chairman of the House Budget Committee, regarding plans to fix the problem, “We don’t have a definitive solution, but we know we don’t like yours.”

Mitt Romney would not be running around claiming that businesses need to pay more in taxes. He would not try to tell CEOs what to do with their cash reserves (although he could do so much more competently than Obama, since unlike the president he actually knows a lot about business), because he knows that is not the president’s job. He understands that businesses are the ones who create jobs, and the last thing we need when the economy is struggling to create jobs is to increase the tax burden on businesses.

Mitt Romney would not attack people for being successful. He would not encourage the middle class to resent successful people, but instead would encourage them to learn from those who have been successful, and to seek opportunities from them.

Mitt Romney would never have promised the Russians he would give them what they want on missile defense as soon as he didn’t have to worry about those pesky voters anymore.

Mitt Romney would never have stonewalled efforts to make crucial energy supplies available to Americans, as Obama has done on everything from the Keystone XL pipeline to the opening of domestic oil supplies in offshore locations and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Mitt Romney would never have let Congress get away with not passing a budget at all for three years, while running up the nation’s credit card at unprecedented levels through a series of continuing resolutions that escape the light of public scrutiny.

Mitt Romney would never have blamed someone else for the continued impact of problems he was elected to fix – as Obama does endlessly.

This list could go on, but these nine are the some of the biggest things – and the big things matter most of all. Everyone involved with a primary campaign hopes their party will nominate the absolute perfect candidate, and when your guy doesn’t make it (or for some of us like me, when you don’t make it), you can fall into thinking that all is lost. There are actually people running around saying there is no difference between Romney and Obama.

People. Get a grip. The differences are huge. And it starts with understanding how many truly horrendous decisions Barack Obama has made since he took office, and recognizing that Mitt Romney is a man with solid experience and good judgment – and that he would never have made any of them.

That alone offers a compelling argument for sending President Obama an invitation – to the inauguration of Mitt Romney on January 20, 2013. I trust he will attend.

An Army of Davids

April 23, 2012
By Herman Cain

It's tough being the underdog in any fight. But if a group of underdogs get together and work together, they can win. That's the American people up against big government. We the People are fighting the political class.

The federal government has become too big, too bureaucratic, and too controlling of our everyday lives, and they want to control us even more every day, with every session of Congress. As a result, We the People are losing more and more of our liberties every day.

This administration is trying to tell us which cars to drive, which light bulbs to buy, what foods to eat, where not to take a vacation, how much health care we can have, what to believe, who to believe, how to live, how to spend our money, when to die, where to build a new plant for a business, and what fairness ought to be – using our money!

Are we asleep, or just plain dumb and stupid?

Fairness is the liberty to make decisions about our lives and our money. But this administration is doing everything it can to take away our liberties with government mandates and income redistribution gimmicks like the Buffet Rule.

To make matters worse, we continue to see our tax dollars wasted on losing businesses and extravagant spending by government agencies while the national debt continues out of control.

In the Holy Bible, David was selected to fight the giant Philistine Goliath, because his brothers and the rest of the soldiers did not want to take on the task. It's called a lack of courage. David was surely courageous, and because he thought “outside the box,” he found a way to defeat Goliath with a single stone and a sling shot.

He won! He killed Goliath.

The political class in Washington, D.C. has become the big government Goliath. We the People must be an Army of Davids to take our liberties back from Goliath.

We have more than one stone and a sling shot. We have the right and responsibility to vote, the power of the Internet and the power of the people. But we have to use that power wisely and collectively to stop the erosion of our liberties.

Here are two things you can do:
• Join and support a citizens' organization dedicated to causes in which you believe. My www.cainconnections.com website comes to mind where we are focusing on solutions to our nation’s biggest problems. But there are many other groups that can help keep you informed and involved. With the right information, we can hold the people we elect accountable. We must do so continually even after they are in office.
• Remain inspired that we can make some bold and significant changes in D.C.
Many members of the political class want you to believe bold changes cannot be made, because many of them like the status quo, which will eventually cause this country to collapse.

We cannot allow that to happen. It would be a tragedy for us all, and especially for our grandchildren.

"Let it be borne in mind that the tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goals. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach for." - Dr. Benjamin E. Mays

Join the Army of Davids, so we can win!

The ‘Buffett Rule’: Small (and dumb) thinking about big problems

I have to give President Obama this: He is not very good at governing, but he has a rare talent for making it appear that he’s at least talking about solutions to problems, when in fact he is talking about total nonsense that doesn’t solve anything.

Granted, it helps that the media who are supposed to be holding your feet to the fire are credulous sycophants who swallow up every word you say. But still, Obama’s performing quite a magic trick by getting people to take him seriously when he talks about the so-called “Buffett Rule” as a way of dealing with the deficit.

This, in case you haven’t heard, is the idea that anyone who makes $1 million a year or more should pay a minimum of 30 percent of it in federal taxes, regardless of the form the income takes. Why does the form matter? Because not all income is taxed in the same way. If most of what you earn is investment income, you only pay the 15 percent capital gains tax.

This prompted billionaire investor (and big time Democrat) Warren Buffett to write an op-ed decrying how unfair it is that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. Now it turns out his secretary is paid $200,000 – so Warren might be a swell guy to work for – but leaving that aside, let’s say this policy was enacted and every $1 million earner had to pay a minimum of 30 percent in federal taxes.

Obama’s big idea yields pretty small results. The blog Political Math has calculated that enacting the Buffett Rule would yield maybe $4 billion a year in new revenue to the Treasury. The deficit is $1.2 trillion. So with the Buffett Rule – assuming a static analysis of the change in the tax code and its impacts – the deficit would be cut to $1.196 trillion.

Some plan.

But it’s even worse than that. The Buffett Rule is just the latest example of Obama wanting to punish success, and twisting the tax code in yet one more way to enforce this punishment. The tax code is a mess of deductions and loopholes for things politicians like, and punitive measures against things politicians don’t like.

If the Buffett Rule were to be enacted, everyone who earns more than $1 million a year – and does so largely from investment income – would be getting double-taxed (even worse than they are now), because investment income results from after-tax earnings that you put at risk. If you earn $100,000 and pay a 36 percent tax on it (leaving aside state and local taxes), you’ve got $64,000 left. If you invest it and make a $10,000 profit, the government wants you to pay 15 percent on that too (and if it was up to Obama, it would be way more than 15 percent). But if the investment doesn’t pan out and you lose your after-tax earnings, does the government send you a check to help cover your losses?

Of course not.

So under the Buffett Rule, you could pay 36 percent on your income when you first earn it, then another 30 percent on what you earn from the after-tax income you put at risk.

That’s stupid!

The whole idea of my 9-9-9 plan is that all income (as well as all business revenue and retail sales activity) is taxed only once and never twice. It eliminates all the loopholes, deductions and penalties. Everything is simple and straightforward.

Oh, and under 9-9-9, Warren Buffett’s secretary would never pay a higher rate than he does. It’s just that I don’t have a problem with him or anyone else making $1 million. They’ll pay their fair share, which is the same share percentagewise as everyone else, and then they can invest their wealth in the growth of American prosperity.

Only a clueless president would complain about this, and propose to enact a tax that discourages investment while making such a tiny dent in the deficit, you’d need a microscope to even see it. But that’s the president we have – small thinking and a tiny impact on very big problems, of which he just might be the biggest.

Why do you really object to voter ID laws, Democrats?

by Herman Cain
March 13, 2012

The federal government doesn’t think you should have to prove you’re who you say you are. Well, actually that depends. If you’re getting on an airplane, you not only have to show your ID, you have to let them look through your bag and let them take a picture of you with their special X-ray vision.

But when you show up to vote, that’s another story. Texas is the latest state to find itself in the crosshairs of the feds because it passed a law requiring citizens to show picture ID before they show up to vote.

The movement to require photo ID when voting has gained steam in recent years as we’ve heard more stories of voter fraud. To demonstrate how easy it is to commit voter fraud, conservative activist James O’Keefe showed up at various polling places on the night of the New Hampshire primary, identifying himself each time as a person who had recently died but was still on the voter rolls. The poll workers did not ask him for an ID, and even told him it wasn’t necessary when he offered to go back to his car and get one.

So why would anyone be against this requirement? You have to show ID to pick up a package from FedEx, but you don’t have to prove you’re who you say you are to vote?

Every state that has passed voter ID has been met with a challenge from the Obama Administration, which argues that these laws disproportionately disenfranchise minorities because they are more likely than the population as a whole to lack photo ID.

Now let’s be honest here. We’ve all heard the stories of dead people in Chicago helping to catapult John F. Kennedy to the White House in 1960. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Republicans tend to favor voter ID laws and Democrats tend to oppose them. Republicans suspect that voter fraud tends to have a pro-Democratic bias, probably for good reason.

But there is another side to this story that’s worth remembering. I am a black man from the south, and I came of age to vote in the 1960s. Attempts to disenfranchise black voters were real in those days, and they made it necessary to pass laws like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. I happen to think that most Democrats who object to voter ID laws are insincere, and are concerned about little else besides their own electoral advantage.

But Republicans who favor these laws should go the extra mile to make sure voter ID laws do not have the effect of making it harder for anyone to vote.

The simple way to do that is to match the stringent nature of your photo ID requirement with a concerted outreach to let people know what is necessary to get the required ID. My home state of Georgia instituted a voter ID requirement in 2008. In response to concerns that many voters would be disenfranchised by not having the required ID, Republican Secretary of State Karen Handel initiated a widespread, grassroots voter education program to make sure people knew what they needed, and how to get it.
That seems like the right mix. Photo ID requirements should make it hard to cheat, but they should not make it harder to vote – and that goes for anyone who wants to vote.

If there are some Republicans out there who wouldn’t mind if voter ID requirements drive down the voting turnout from Democratic constituencies, I say this: Instead of discouraging these people from voting, why don’t you make the case to them for why they should vote Republican? It can be done.

Photo ID requirements are basic common sense to prevent voter fraud. When people object to this, it’s hard to believe they really care about voting rights as opposed to cheating rights. And the states who pass these laws should undertake aggressive outreach, as Georgia did, to make sure all voters have the ID they need. It’s simply the right thing to do in a society where we value the right to vote, and vote honestly.

Mainstream Media Protects Obama

by Herman Cain
March 12, 2012

You probably heard last week what a radio host said about a law student, but you didn’t hear the news that really matters. That’s because the dinosaur media in this country doesn’t report the news that really matters.

In fact, if you’re like most Americans, you’ve never even heard of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It sounds like some obscure committee buried deep in the bowels of government, but it is actually a creation of ObamaCare that has the power to deny you vital treatment that could be essential to your health.

When people laughed at Sarah Palin for speculating about “death panels” in ObamaCare, they either didn’t know – or ignored – the reality of the IPAB. Maybe that’s why the media ignored a 17-5 vote last week by a crucial House subcommittee to eliminate the IPAB – a vote that gained support from two Democrats on the committee. Why did they vote to get rid of the IPAB? Because it is an unelected, unaccountable group of so-called “experts” that ObamaCare would empower to decide which kinds of health care deserves to be covered.

This is the dirty little secret behind the Obama claim that ObamaCare controls costs. The claim is absurd on its face because any time you make a service free by forcing a third party to pay for it, you drive demand through the roof and costs will go up. That is so basic you can’t even call it Economics 101. It’s the first day in class.

If ObamaCare had existed six years ago when I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and my insurance company had to follow ObamaCare rules, the IPAB might have looked at my 30 percent chance of survival and denied my surgery and chemo treatment. I am now six years totally cancer free because I could choose my surgery and chemo treatment, not the government.

Plain and simple, the IPAB is the government agency that will direct health care rationing once ObamaCare causes demand to run laps around supply, which is inevitable.

ObamaCare’s defenders claim disingenuously that Congress has oversight powers to override IPAB rulings, just as they have had oversight powers over Fannie and Freddie, and the Federal Reserve. How’s that working out for us?

There is no requirement for an affirmative vote in Congress to approve the IPAB’s decisions, and that means 15 unelected people will have an awful lot of power to decide how people will be treated – or not treated.

So why didn’t the media report on the House vote this week? A Google news search turns up nothing from the AP, the major newspapers, networks or cable news channels. You only find a handful of press releases and references on conservative news sites.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the mainstream media doesn’t cover actual policy substance, which is why you got your fill of Sandra Fluke but nothing about IPAB. Another big reason is that the mainstream media protects Obama. They do so on matters large and small. Obama’s claim that his father served in World War II may well have been a slip of the tongue intended to reference his grandfather. His father was born in 1936 and he would have had to enlist at the age of five. Impossible!

But I could live with their failure on small matters like this, if they would report things that actually matter. They don’t. They completely ignored the fact that Obama double counted $500 billion in “savings” in the scoring of ObamaCare. There have been precious few headlines reporting on the failure of Democrats in Congress to pass a budget since 2009 – a failure that Obama spokesman Jay Carney said recently the White House has no problem with. The mounting failures of the “green energy” companies Obama has subsidized have been headline news in alternative conservative media, as you would expect, but they receive scant coverage in the MSM.

It’s tough to defeat an incumbent president when the news media protect him by ignoring his failures – not to mention his “accomplishments” that are bad for the country, like ObamaCare and the establishment of the IPAB. So it should come as no surprise that the House subcommittee vote to eliminate the IPAB got such little attention, even though the vote was bipartisan.

If we want the public to understand Obama’s real record, then we’ll have to report it ourselves, because the MSM will not do it. That’s why nearly 50 percent of the public continues to think President Obama is doing a good job.

They are clueless and the MSM media wants to keep it that way.

Gas Price Solution: $2.50 is bold and achievable

March 5, 2012
By Herman Cain

When George W. Bush left office, gasoline was less than $2 a gallon. When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, it was $1.13 a gallon.

Today, it’s inching toward $4 a gallon. Remember when Democrats used to blame Bush for what they said were “high” gas prices because he and his Texas oil buddies were all in cahoots or something?

No politician is to “blame” for the price of a global commodity. Contrary to what a lot of people think – and what the media leads you to believe – the president of the United States does not “micro-manage” the price of goods.

But on a larger scale, government policy can affect both supply and demand, and when government energy policy becomes exceedingly ridiculous – as it is now – it’s no surprise that we start paying excessive prices at the pump.

Federal policy today is about as unfriendly to energy independence as it has ever been. We put severe restrictions on domestic oil drilling (both on- and off-shore), on the operation of refineries and even on the distribution of existing gasoline supplies. We rely heavily on unfriendly nations like Venezuela, and on Middle Eastern nations who may not be enemies per se but are certainly not our close allies.

Even a proposed pipeline allowing us to buy oil directly from friendly Canada has been met with presidential opposition.

And the worst thing of all, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu admitted last week, is that the Obama Administration doesn’t care that all these policies drive up gas prices. They want gas prices high! Chu said in 2008 that he wishes we were more like Europe, where they pay much higher prices than we do in order to force conservation. Straining the family budget is not conservation, it’s dumb.

When you have policies like this, it doesn’t leave much that anyone can do to make a positive difference. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) wants to ask the Saudis to increase production to help us out. That’s what you’re reduced to when you refuse to maximize our own energy resources – begging sheikhs, emirs and princes for favors.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) wants the Commodities Trading Commission to do an investigation. Are you kidding me? The rest of the Democrats just keep blaming the oil companies and Bush, as if it wouldn’t be nice to have gas prices back where they were when Bush left office.

There are, however, things we can do. I was campaigning with Newt Gingrich last week when he unveiled a plan that can bring gas prices back down to $2.50 a gallon. Newt’s plan is bold, even though it mainly consists of common-sense measures that recognize the principles of supply and demand.

Newt’s plan would:
• Remove bureaucratic and legal obstacles to responsible oil and natural gas development in the United States, off shore and on land.
• End the ban on oil shale development in the American West, where shale gives us the potential to produce three times the amount of oil as Saudi Arabia.
• Give coastal states federal royalty revenue-sharing, so they will have an incentive to allow off-shore development.
• Reduce frivolous lawsuits that hold up energy production by enacting loser-pays laws. That way, if someone files a frivolous environmental lawsuit and loses, the plaintiff will have to pay all legal costs for the other side. That will make a lot of people think twice before abusing the legal system.
• Use new oil and gas royalties to finance cleaner energy research and projects. For some reason, Democrats act as if we have to choose between oil and alternative sources of energy. That’s ridiculous. The answer to our energy needs is all of the above.
• Get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency, which does nothing but drive up energy prices and kill jobs, and establish a new Environmental Solutions Agency. The new agency would use positive incentives, and would work cooperatively with local government and industry to achieve better environmental outcomes. The idea is to meet both our energy needs and important environmental standards, rather than constantly going to war against energy on behalf of the environment, which is what the EPA does.

This can be done. Newt’s $2.50 plan is as bold as my 9-9-9 tax code replacement plan. But first we need leaders who think energy independence matters, and is worth achieving. We don’t have leaders like that now, which you should remember the next time you pay way more than $2.50 a gallon for a tank of gas.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Stimulus is killing us

The so-called stimulus package passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by President Obama in 2009 was not the first such attempt by Washington to stimulate economic growth by spending money the government did not have. It was merely the most obscene, and the clearest evidence yet that such “stimuli” is akin to the kind people often put into their bodies.

Figuring that a $100 billion stimulus package like the kind that saw the Bush Administration send taxpayers $1,000 checks in 2008 was for small-timers, Obama convinced an all-too-willing Congress to go even bigger and balloon the deficit by $862 billion to supposedly spur economic growth.

The economy was in big trouble, so we needed to think big! Translation, spend big! If we didn’t, the president warned, unemployment would exceed 8 percent.

As we all know, the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent after the impotent stimulus. Even now it has not been below 8 percent since it first exceeded that level, and it is currently hovering around 8.5 percent. 
In 2011, unable to pretend the economy was getting better, Obama asked the new Congress that now included a Republican House to give him another $400 billion stimulus. This time, he was told Congress had cut up his stimulus credit card.

Why doesn’t economic stimulus work? When it comes in the form of federal spending, it doesn’t work because it’s based on a completely wrong notion of what spurs prosperity. In that respect, it's much like a drug.

Consider the effects that a stimulant like caffeine has on your body, or even a stronger stimulant like amphetamines. These stimulants merely provide a very temporary boost to your energy – keeping you awake when you should probably be sleeping, or keeping you operating at a high level when you need rest. They make the body act in an unnatural way, and that doesn’t come without consequences.

Some artificial stimulants, such as cocaine, can really give you a short-term kick, but can also accelerate your heart rate so intensely that they can kill you. None of these stimulants have any nutritional value. They just give you energy that your body wouldn’t produce if left to its own devices, then they wear off and you either crash or take more. It’s a vicious cycle and its long-term effects are usually very bad.

When the government tries to stimulate the economy with deficit spending, it is essentially doing the same thing. Healthy sustained economic growth comes from value-added production that serves markets that want the goods and are able to pay for them. When not enough of that is happening, economic growth slows or sometimes goes backwards for a short period of time. No one likes it when that happens, but it is often a necessary correction to something that has skewed the market. 

What the government then tries to do is replace the value-added, market-serving production that generates real economic growth with the gratuitous spreading-around of borrowed money.

That doesn’t work. 

The economy is way past the point where the federal government can “stimulate” it back to health. That’s why Obama’s $862 billion boondoggle did not work. Real economic growth will not return unless we unleash the productive sector of the economy (which is the business sector), get out of the way of energy production, cut taxes on businesses and individuals, and stop treating everyone who makes money like a criminal.
The only thing stimulus is getting us is annual deficits of $1 trillion or more, and a federal debt that’s now bigger than the size of our entire economy.

The economy on stimulus is like your brain on drugs. It’s killing us.

Obama’s Report Card: We’ve Got a Few Problems Here

February 20, 2012
by Herman Cain

Based on President Obama's latest State of the Union address and speeches, he would probably grade his performance in the first three years of his presidency as an A or no less than a B. Let's examine the facts and see what the facts say about promised results versus actual results.

STIMULUS BILL ($862 billion): The Congressional Budget Office reported in November 2011 that 700,000 jobs may have been sustained as a result of this massive spending measure. The administration projected 3.5 million jobs would be created. (That’s more than $1.2 million per job, assuming it’s true.) The administration then concocted a definition for "saved" jobs to boost the results. Only liberals bought the phony definition and the result was still way short of projection.

The president also said the spending would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. It has not been below 8 percent since he made the prediction, which is a post-World War II record of 35 straight months above 8 percent. The administration (specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics) has now changed who gets counted in the work force and who gets counted as unemployed to make the rate appear to be lower than it actually is.

Hush! The real number is over 15 percent, but don't tell anybody.

OBAMACARE: We were supposed to be able to keep our current insurance if we liked it. Insurance premiums were supposed to come down and more people would be covered. None of that happened. Even worse, a majority of the public did not even want ObamaCare.

NATIONAL SECURITY: The world is not safer. Defense spending is on a downward trajectory. Our military is being stretched. Terrorist attempts continue. Our southern border is not secure. The START treaty was a mistake because the president gave away too much, and now he wants to voluntarily reduce our nuclear arsenal. I don't feel secure.

ENERGY INDEPENDENCE: An extended moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, refusal to approve the Keystone Pipeline, mandatory reporting of "greenhouse gases" and a regulatory onslaught on the coal industry are not the path to energy independence. Energy dependence, which is what these policies produce, is a threat to our national security.

INVESTMENT IN SO-CALLED “GREEN JOBS”: More than a half a billion dollars of taxpayer money has been wasted on companies like Solyndra and Fister Automotive, which have filed for bankruptcy. Government should not be in the business of trying to pick winners and losers, and this administration has only picked losers. So-called “green jobs” will not save this economy.

FANNIE and FREDDIE: These giant mortgage holding companies were the catalyst for the financial meltdown of 2008 and 2009. They are still at the heart of the housing crisis and are still being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers. The administration has just allowed business as usual to continue at these entities at our expense, and received no new oversight in the big-banks-biased Dodd-Frank financial deform legislation. Speaking of which . . .

DODD-FRANK: This bill was supposed to help prevent another financial meltdown, which we are very close to again because this legislation did not solve the problem. This bill has also had the consequence of forcing a lot of perfectly healthy smaller community banks out of business due to increased regulatory requirements. In a rush to pass the bill, many of these requirements were not properly vetted by the entire banking community.

I have listened to many small banks’ horror stories about how they were unfairly shut down by the regulators due to the impact of Dodd-Frank. Where’s that report?

NATIONAL DEBT: Insane! During the Obama Administration, the national debt has increased more than 50 percent in three years to more than $16 trillion. For that spending, the federal government is bigger, the economy is still stalled, the real unemployment rate is not decreasing, gasoline prices are headed back to $4 a gallon and our national debt is now bigger than our Gross Domestic Product. None of these are good outcomes.

SPACE PROGRAM: The administration cancelled the development of our next generation of space vehicles. We will now have to "thumb a ride" with Russia or other countries. That's not leadership. That’s allowing an American strength to become a weakness.

CASH for CLUNKERS: That failed program needs no further explanation.

President Obama did give the OK to complete the mission to take out our enemy Osama bin Laden. Kudos! The administration also bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, but the taxpayers will not recoup nearly $25 billion of the $85 billion bailout.

Based on the facts above, this presidency has been a failure. But consistently, about 45 percent of the American people have the perception that President Obama is doing a good job. That's the power of carefully crafted rhetoric, selective statistics and a pro-Obama mainstream media.
Let’s not reward President Obama’s failed report card with a second term.

Time for Clarity: Russia and China are not our friends

By Herman Cain
February 12, 2012

There are many theories about why Russia and China last week vetoed a United Nations resolution endorsing an Arab League plan to transfer power from Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Some say Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to go against a fellow strongman because a lot of them have been losing power lately, and he doesn’t want to be next.

China has tended to follow Russia’s lead on this issue – also joining in a two-party veto in September of a UN resolution condemning Assad’s autocratic behavior and the violence it is engendering.

They won’t even condemn the violence?

But there is one thing that should be abundantly clear from this action and many others that have occurred in recent years: Russia and China are not friends of the United States. Recognizing clear facts like this is what I mean when I talk, as I did during my presidential campaign, about peace through strength with clarity.

There are reasons that Russia and China pursue interests that diverge from our own – not that we justify these reasons, but we certainly must understand them and account for them as we develop strategies to counter the challenges these nations pose.

Russia and China have different cultures, different political traditions and different geo-political realities of their own to face. Russia and China may also have a different definition of peace than we do, and they certainly want our strength. That’s clear. A foreign policy that would ignore all of this would be a mistake.

But a wise foreign policy recognizes simple facts, which start with the fact that certain countries are rivals of the United States. We don’t attempt to deny the obvious when it comes to hostile regimes like those in Iran and North Korea. Indeed, the leaders of these nations do a fine job all their own of expressing their hostility toward us.

But for various reasons – many of them foolishly of our own making – we are reluctant to be clear about the nature of regimes like China and Russia.

We owe China a lot of money, of course, because we have refused for generations to be fiscally responsible in federal budgeting. They are also a major trading partner, and while there is no hard and fast rule that you can’t be a trading partner with a hostile nation, the compromised nature of our economic relationship with China makes it harder for us to see or speak clearly about the fact that their interests are not the same as ours.

In the case of Russia, the U.S. was justifiably excited after the fall of communism about the opportunity to develop a different kind of relationship with a free Russia – on everything from economic and trade relations to issues concerning nuclear proliferation. But as the one-promising Yeltsin government became mired in corruption, and it gave way to the increasingly autocratic leadership of Putin, the U.S. became unwilling to face facts. One of the worst examples was the Obama Administration’s decision to welch on the U.S. commitment to install missile defense systems in Eastern Europe – all because the Russians didn’t like it.

A nation with clarity in foreign policy matters would have understood that its first responsibility is to its own security and that of its allies. A nation that fears clarity would do what Obama did.
On the matter of Assad and Syria, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the Russians were unwilling to work with the U.S. on a solution, even after the U.S. unconditionally took the option of military intervention off the table as a concession to the Russians. A nation with clarity in foreign policy matters would not make such concessions in the fruitless pursuit of support from a nation that can perhaps be worked with in certain situations, but is fundamentally not our friend.

Nations who prop up unfriendly dictators in opposition to U.S. goals are not confused about their interests. They want things that are not good for America or for our allies, and that’s because they are not our allies.

It’s OK for us to say that, and it’s essential for us to know it, because if we don’t then we’re going to keep getting played for fools. That’s not strength. That’s a sign of weakness.

Obama has a curious definition of fairness

February 6, 2012
by Herman Cain

As President Obama continues his class warfare rhetoric, insisting that the rich should pay more in taxes, he continues to show that he has a different definition of fairness than most of us. In addition to his so-called “Buffet Rule” and saying that it is not fair that Buffet’s secretary pays more in taxes than her billionaire boss, Warren Buffet, he recently invoked the words of Jesus to try to intimidate or shame people out of opposing his desire to raise taxes on the rich.

By the way, who defines rich? Is there a Department of Definitions that has been secretly established in Washington, D. C. that we don’t know about? Maybe it is next door to the Department of Happy, since President Obama, his administration and the Democrats believe they can make people happy by continuing to tax, spend and give away other people’s money.

The lame example of Buffet’s secretary is comparing apples and oranges. Warren Buffet’s accountants have mastered the complex and unfair tax code to shelter as much of Buffet’s income from taxation as is legally possible. By contrast, Buffet’s secretary pays income and payroll taxes on her $100,000-a-year salary.

As a result, President Obama shows once again he is not interested in fixing the real problem, which is the tax code. He wants to add the words of Jesus Christ to his inventory of class warfare rhetoric. But making people envious of other people’s money or property was not a teaching of Jesus.

By the way, Obama completely misunderstands the passage he was quoting, which was Luke 12:48. In fact, the passage was part of a parable Jesus told about money managers who had been entrusted with different levels of their master’s wealth – and those who did well with the man’s wealth were rewarded, while those who did not were beaten.

The meaning of the parable was that when God gives people gifts, He expects them to be fruitful with them – not that people who “have been given” wealth (as if wealthy people just had their money given to them) are supposed to turn it over to the government. The real meaning of the passage could not be more different from what Obama wants it to mean.

So instead of rhetoric and bad Bible teaching, let’s look at some hard income tax facts from the latest available Internal Revenue Service data. For 2008, the top 10 percent of taxpayers paid 70 percent of all income taxes. The top 50 percent of taxpayers paid 97 percent of all income taxes, which means the bottom 50 percent paid 3 percent of all income taxes.

That’s not fair enough for Obama!

Some of us know that this is not about fairness at all. It’s about total redistribution of income to punish those who work hard and take risks, and to make those who do not more dependent on Big Brother government.

The class warfare rhetoric is also not about helping the needy. Churches and community-based organizations do a much better job of helping the needy than any government program. And where do those community organizations get most of their funding from? They get it from those greedy evil “rich” people, plus a lot of people who are not rich but have big giving hearts.

If President Obama was really interested in helping more people move into the top 50 percent of taxpayers, or maybe even become a millionaire or billionaire, he and Congress would replace the current tax code and stop adding more and more regulatory requirements on businesses. The burden of both taxes and senseless regulations also make starting a new business far more difficult than it used to be.

Instead, we are going to hear another debate about extending the payroll tax cut, which most people could not even notice in their paychecks when they got it, and more about once again extending unemployment benefits with money the government does not have.

Raising taxes on the rich, or anybody, is only going to make things worse for families, businesses, the unemployed and the underemployed. That’s a fact the president and the Democrats refuse to acknowledge.

All of the president’s fairness rhetoric is just that – rhetoric. It can’t help people find jobs, buy food or gasoline, nor can it give this economy the boost it needs.

That’s unfair to all of us.

Why I support Newt Gingrich for president

by Herman Cain
January 29, 2012

In a sea of negativity and distractions in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, I decided to throw my support behind former Speaker Newt Gingrich because I can now see much clearer distinctions between President Obama and Newt than I do between Governor Mitt Romney and the president.

These distinctions are between Obama’s hodgepodge of foggy small ideas, which he talked about in his State of the Union address, and Speaker Gingrich’s clear and bold solutions for solving the crises we face as a nation. And yes, my bold 9-9-9 tax reform plan is a serious consideration for Speaker Gingrich, which is why I accepted his invitation to co-chair his Economic Growth and Tax Reform Advisory Council.

The polls do not agree with my assessment of Speaker Gingrich, and it appears that the so-called political establishment does not agree. But remember, I’m Mr. Unconventional, and the ability of the Republican nominee to highlight distinctions clearly in the general election campaign will be critical to achieving the ultimate mission of defeating President Obama.

My decision was not based on the political pundits’ attempted labeling of the candidates as conservative, most conservative,moderate, liberal Republican, not a true conservative, not a real conservative or any other of the concocted labels by which they try to pigeonhole candidates.

My decision to support Speaker Gingrich was also not influenced by all of the attacks and dirt dug up from Newt’s personal and political past, which all of the campaigns are guilty of doing – including Newt’s. As a reminder, Newt specifically tried to stay out of the negative attack mode but was forced into it after being bombarded with attacks in Iowa, and some early attacks in South Carolina, where he not only survived but won the primary.

The bombardment of attacks on Newt is being launched again in Florida. I believe he will survive as the clarity of his solutions rises above the rhetoric.

And now, some of the former Members of Congress who served with Newt when he was Speaker of the House are trashing Newt, even though many former members thought highly of his leadership as Speaker. Their trash and attempts to say Newt was not a “Reagan conservative” (here we go again with the labels) are certainly adding credence to the emerging perception that the so-called Republican establishment is pushing hard for Mitt Romney to be the nominee.

That’s because the establishment does not want bold changes in Washington, D.C.
The bottom line is that the voters will decide. That’s why the voters got my first endorsement as announced previously, because the people have to remain inspired or the establishment wins. Most of us just want the people to win, and win with a people’s president in November.

Here are nine of Speaker Gingrich’s positives:

• He successfully led the passage of nine out of ten provisions in the Contract with America when he was Speaker of the House.
• He was a key player in passing welfare reform in the 1990s, and got President Bill Clinton to sign the legislation.
• He left Congress and spent years studying and developing bold ideas and solutions to our problems, many of which he is using as a candidate. This hiatus as an elected official gave him time for his head to clear and identify how to fix a broken Washington, D.C.
• He will ruffle feathers in Washington in order to change Washington.
• He will be bold in boosting economic growth because he understands that less government is the key, not more government as Obama believes.
• He believes in removing regulatory barriers so this country can become energy-independent by maximizing all of our natural resources.
• He is an outstanding debater and his language connects with people.
• He fearlessly body-slammed the media in a recent debate, which showed strong conviction, character and leadership qualities.
• His motivation to be president is the same as our motivation for bold solutions in Washington, D.C. It’s not about us. It’s about the grandchildren.

Thomas Jefferson said, “When people have the right information, then they will make the right decisions.” It is way past time for the media and campaigns to focus on solutions so people can get the right information.

We must make the right decision in November 2012. 

What it Means to Endorse We the People

by Herman Cain
Monday January 23, 2012

I made my much publicized unconventional endorsement at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last week in Charleston, South Carolina. As predicted, the media did not like it, but the people loved it.

I endorsed “the People”. We the people!

The media did not like it because it did not fit their desire to have another quick hot scoop news story that would have about a hot minute-long news cycle. Just look at the endorsements of Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry. They were not stories very long and their impact on the endorsees was questionable.

A single presidential candidate is not going to save this country. “We the People” are going to save this country from its current path of collapse. Yes, collapse is a strong word, but if one honestly considers the facts, that’s the only conclusion one can make about the direction we are headed.

Facts: The national debt is out of control. The economy is not in a recovery. We have an energy crisis. Our space program no longer leads the world . The world is not safer. Our military has been weakened. Most people are not better off than they were three years ago when President Obama took office.

Big government liberals don’t consider the facts. They can’t even handle the facts because the facts do not validate their preconceived emotional motives and objectives. They don’t always know what those objectives are, such as the ill-purposed “Occupy Wall Street” protests. They just want to protest and distract attention in the media from the failures of this administration, and from the need for real solutions to problems.

Our nation is broke. Washington is broken.

It is clear that we are not going to change Washington from the inside. We will have to change it from the outside and from the bottom up. The people!

That means we will have to get specific commitments about specific solutions from candidates before they get elected. The heat must come from that candidate’s constituency, which is hereby endorsed and empowered to take the heat to them. Asking them to adopt the 9-9-9 tax reform plan would be a good start.

But regardless of who is elected, neither he nor the next Congress will take the steps that are necessary to turn this country around unless the people demand that he do so.

I was encouraged by some students at the College of Charleston during a rally with Stephen Colbert last week, when they shouted out “thanks for endorsing me”. Endorsing the people is a wake-up call to action.

Several reporters kept asking me during interviews what endorsing the people means. This shows just how insulated and out of touch with the people they are. The media class and the political class believe they are in charge.

Endorsing the people was a reminder that elected officials work for us, and that we are in charge if we assert our collective power. They forget that, so we have to remind them.

We the People are coming. We want our power back.

And Now, for My Unconventional Endorsement

Monday January 16, 2012
by Herman Cain

I have been hounded in media interviews to give them the scoop on which Republican presidential candidate I ‘m going to endorse. When I respond that it will be “unconventional,” they go nuts because they cannot conceive of what that means. That’s not the way they think.

So they try to guess what it means based on conventional political practice. You will be endorsing yourself getting back into the presidential race, they guess. Nope. You will be endorsing someone that’s not in the race, they suggest. Nope. You will be endorsing two of the remaining candidates instead of one. No again.

I was an unconventional Republican presidential primary candidate who ran an unconventional political campaign, and achieved unexpected results before I ended my quest for the position of president. Most of the people interviewing me did not get it. Namely, it wasn’t about the position as much as it is about the mission. I am still on a mission to help defeat President Obama, and to make the “9-9-9 Economic Growth and Jobs Plan” the law of the land.

An unconventional endorsement is part of a bigger message. It can also be two-dimensional, a specific candidate and a specific cause. We already know the specific cause. I’m still looking for the right candidate to “adopt” the 9-9-9 plan. If that does not happen, the cause will still be part of a bigger endorsement message, which is to make sure we defeat President Obama in 2012, and that we transfer power out of Washington and back to the people.

Besides, I’m not convinced that one-dimensional endorsements make that big a difference in the outcome of how people vote. They probably do to some extent, but in today’s political climate most of them are not game-changers.

I want to change how voters think about candidates, not in terms of their media-focused flyspecked negatives, but to think of them in terms of their positives and their relevant experiences. I also want to change how voters think about solutions to our national crises.

Namely, stop accepting the usual political rhetoric of “what’s wrong,” because most of us already know what’s wrong. We also know that there is more than enough blame to go around for how we got so screwed up as a country. I want voters to focus on how candidates are going to fix stuff

I want people to focus on real solutions and real leadership.

I know that’s unconventional political and media thinking, but the conventional thinking, the conventional approach, the conventional compromises, the conventional promises, the conventional rhetoric and the conventional endorsements are not going to save this great country.

We need a Solutions Revolution.

We can’t just think outside the box, as the saying goes. We must redesign the box and fill the box with what the people want, not what the political class and the media class want.

We want our power back.

That’s unconventional.

Join the 999 Revolution!

January 8, 2012
by Herman Cain

Our nation is plagued with crises. We have an economic crisis, a spending crisis, a big government crisis, an energy crisis, an immigration crisis, a foggy foreign policy crisis, an assault on the Constitution crisis and a moral crisis.

President Obama blames the Bush Administration, the Republicans in Congress, big business, rich people and even the American people by saying in essence that we have lost our optimism. That’s what happens, Mr. President, when we have a leadership crisis in the White House.

Sadly, polls consistently show that President Obama has about a 45 percent job approval rating. These 45 percent must be some of the most clueless people on Earth, or they have been living in a cave for the last three years. The other option is that they have drunk so much of the Obama Kool-Aid that they do not want to know the truth.

The truth is the people of these United States are fed up, just as the colonists were fed up with King George and his abusive treatment of the colonies. The colonists cited those specific abuses in the Declaration of Independence, and showed their defiance with the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Ten years later (1783) we had the start of the American Revolution. We won!

It’s time for another revolution. This time it will not be bombs and bullets. It will be brains and ballots. In 1773, it was taxation without representation and other abuses. This time it’s too much taxation, regulation and legislation. Period!

A recent Gallup poll determined that nearly two-thirds of the American people say big government will be the biggest threat to the country.

We need another revolution!

Let’s start with the biggest domestic crisis we have – an economy on life support.

The best solution on the table is my 9-9-9 economic growth and jobs plan. All of the other proposals are just rearranging the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic.

9-9-9 the Revolution is not a Republican, Democratic, conservative, liberal or libertarian movement. It is a “We the People” movement. It rises above the political rhetoric, candidate attacks and the president’s blame game.

This is a Solutions Revolution that you can find at www.cainconnections.com
The strategy is straightforward and simple. We will mobilize citizens by congressional districts to obtain commitments from candidates running for Congress before they get elected to co-sponsor or vote for the 9-9-9 legislation.

We will partner with like-minded organizations and use media, rallies, bus tours and speaking opportunities for yours truly and other strong voices to promote our mission of making 9-9-9 the new law of the land. We have all been abused by a broken tax code, a broken Washington and deceptive politicians for way too long.

Let’s transfer power back to the people. That’s the way this country was founded, and that’s what it will take to save this country. We must save it from the outside in order to bring about the right kind of changes inside Washington.

It will not be easy, just as it was not easy 235 years ago.

Remember, it’s not about us. It’s about our grandchildren.

I will not be guilty of doing nothing.

Join the Revolution!

New year, new grandchild . . . new commitment to 9-9-9

January 1, 2012
by Herman Cain

I am not making this up.

Our fourth grandchild arrived today! Mother, baby boy and dad are all doing fine.

This blessed arrival is another reminder that no matter how bad we may see things at times, the miracle of life is still God’s most precious gift to us, along with His Son Jesus Christ.

The birth of a new baby is also a reminder of why we do what we do. Some of us run for elective office, while some of us help those that make such a commitment. Some of us build businesses, and some of us work hard just to be good parents and grandparents.

The new year and new babies should remind us all of our collective responsibility to leave this nation in great shape so they can have great futures. Right now we are not doing such a good job with the lack of leadership in the White House and a dysfunctional Congress.

So even though I am no longer seeking the position of president of the United States, I continue to pursue the mission of returning power from Washington back to the people. It starts with replacing our dysfunctional and politically manipulated tax code. You guessed it: Let’s replace it with my 9-9-9 plan.

I continue to receive comments expressing disappointment that I had to end my candidacy, and people’s disgust with the negative and dirty side of politics. But then people also say to keep 9-9-9 alive so we can get it passed.

That’s why this week I will be announcing a national initiative to turn my 9-9-9 economic growth and jobs plan into a national movement by the people. We may not be able to dramatically change a broken Washington from the inside, so let’s change it from the outside.

The Tea Party Citizens movement has demonstrated that we can make this happen, and this new year and all the new babies have inspired me to take on this challenge. We owe it to our children and grandchildren.

The politicians and bureaucrats in Washington forget that they work for us. We will remind them.

A new year, a new grand baby and a renewed energy for 2012.

We will win a victory for the people.