Anna Tarkov sends this over viaTwitter, and I know it’s hot in Vegas, butis it brain-boilingly hot?
Obama has killed jobs, he has
killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to
invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing,
Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.Meanwhile,
he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with
taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union
members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer
money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as “tax
cuts” even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he
made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off
government stimulus (with taxpayer money).
This is like some twisted version of Wingnut Bingo: Lazy shiftless recipients of handouts? Privileged union members? People “who don’t pay taxes” getting something the Hard Workin’ American Mayunn didn’t get? BINGO! If only there were some completely irrelevant anecdotes he could offer up as data to prove it’s all Obama’s fault, why …
You won’t find proof of the
damage Obama is doing on Wall Street, but rather on Main Street. My
friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business.
Small business creates 75 percent of new jobs (and a majority of all
jobs). I called one friend who was a wealthy restaurant owner. He says
business is off by 60 percent. He’s drowning in debt. He won’t last
much longer. His wealth is gone.I called another friend in the
business of home improvement. He says business is off 90 percent from
two years ago. My contractor just filed personal bankruptcy. She won’t
be building any more homes. The hair salon where I’ve had my hair cut
for years closed earlier this year. Bankrupt. But here’s the clincher
— ESPN Zone just closed all their restaurants across the country. If
they can’t make it selling cheap food and overpriced beer with 100 big
screens blaring every sporting event on the planet to a sports-crazed
society, we are all in deep, deep trouble.
Did you ever eat at an ESPNZone? I ate there once after it opened because some friends and I were curious. You know the ball pit at Chuck-E-Cheese? It was like eating inside one of those, while the demon munchkin cheerleaders responsible for the Pac-Man music sang in your ears. The one in Chicago sucked. The food was over-salted and overpriced, the place was always jammed with tourists and their ill-behaved, sticky children, and if I wanted to eat dinner with ESPN blaring at my head I’d stay home and make myself a frigging steak and open a bottle of cabernet with the $45 it would cost to get a burger and a couple of beers at that shithole.
I love me a sports bar with a million screens, but this wasn’t a sports bar. It was the kind of greedy move that makes greed famous: Hey, let’s have a theme restaurant, make it suck slightly in that “Wichita Airport Bar” kind of way restaurants suck nowadays, build it on a scale that makes Donald Trump look like a slacker, how has that ever gone bad? Its closing isn’t a sign that the world is ending (still less that Obama ended it), it’s a sign people have figured out they can get crappy food and loud noise at their local for 20 bucks and the bartender will throw them some free shots.
And by the by, I thought everybody who lost a job or closed a business was just a lazy idiot who didn’t deserve unemployment benefits because HANDOUTS! And shiftlessness, and why couldn’t they just make it work?
I’ve polled all my friends who own
small businesses — many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields.
They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes,
income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers
compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only
way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very
low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees
provided by temp agencies.
Sigh. It could also be they’re avoiding employees because it costs a fuckton to insure them for BIG business, not to mention what it costs for those out there who have one or two employees versus 3,000.
But hey, health care is socialism, and socialism kills jobs too. If only we had no taxes. If we had no taxes, everybody would have tons of money, and they could all spend it at ESPNZone.
So who is going to pay Obama’s
taxes? Not his voters. They want government to pay them. Who is going
to create Obama’s jobs? Not his voters — they’ve never created a job
in their lives.
And we’re back to shiftless layabouts again.
A.