CPAC 2010 and Job Creation The Kucinich Way

It's an exciting time for conservatives. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is right around the corner and we will be travelling through all of the global warming caused snow to attend.

This will be a first for me. I've never been to D.C. before and this will be the biggest political event I've ever attended. While there we will be posting info about what we're up to and how the conference is going so check back throughout the week for fresh details regarding the event.

It's interesting listening to the excuses for why the results of Obama's policies haven't been all that impressive. The usual rhetoric of "it would have been worse if we hadn't acted" continues to get sold to us as if we're a bunch of ignorant kids. I wonder where all the critics of the debt racked up by Bush from the left are now. I'll probably find far more debt critics at CPAC then I'm finding in the mainstream media.

I watched an interesting interview the other day with Dennis Kucinich. He was talking about job creation. Just in time since the country is beginning to accept that this congress and president have absolutely no idea how to create jobs or stimulate much more than welfare and their own interest. The idea is to have people who are 60 retire early if they choose and start collecting social security at 60.

His logic is that if 1 million people retire early then there will be 1 million openings. Now there are many problems with this plan which you can see him describe here. First of all it's somewhat sad to see that Kucinich and others like him are so ignorant on how to create jobs that this is the best he can come up with.

He calls this creating jobs. Here's how I'd define creating a new job: A new job is opened and filled by an unemployed person without the sacrifice of another's job in return. Do you see the difference? It means 1 new job is available without another person leaving their job.

Besides, with all the massive new debt being racked up by Obama and Congress how do we pay for this? Social Security is already heading for bankruptcy so how will this help that issue? If you add 1 million people to Social Security when we already are facing huge debts and deficits the bankruptcy of Social Security will just approach faster and hit harder than we already are anticipating.

Ronald Reagan was prophetic regarding Social Security when he said this early in his presidency:

July 24, 1981

"If I may, let me explain the situation and what we were trying to do with Social Security. I have reneged on no pledge. I said during the campaign that we would do nothing to hurt those presently dependent on Social Security checks, that we would not pull the rug out from under those people so dependent.

As it is now the program will run out of money for paying benefits to the present recipients sometime late in 1982. Beyond that, however, there is a long-range actuarial imbalance which means that down the road in the next century, but within the lifetime of younger workers today, the program will be several trillion dollars out of balance."

We are beginning to see exactly what he was warning about. He went on to say:

"It is government's deficit spending, a debt now approaching a trillion dollars, that is responsible for the slowdown in our economy."

Yet the critics fail to see why we admire Ronald Reagan the way we do. The sad part of all this is that given what we currently face in this country a trillion dollar deficit represents the good old days.

What Reagan stood for in the past is what we now stand for in the present. That is why my next post to this blog will be live from CPAC. Have a happy valentine's day everybody.