Originally published at Sultan Knish.
It’s an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about Global Warming; every time Obama gives a speech; a thousand businesses go out of business. 
On July 24th, to celebrate Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar Day, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from Green Energy and Illegal Immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn’t on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.
An Obama speech is a familiar quality that even the scribblers whose limbs once tingled at the touch of the teleprompter have developed a callous contempt for its reflexively dishonest “Let me be clears” and the infinite “I’s” that roll off its assembly line speechmakers.
An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing from his political zoo on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto “Vero Possumus”, (which can be translated very loosely as “God Help Us All”), is an entirely familiar breed.
It’s an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year’s leftovers.
There are the warnings about all the old bridges threatening to fall down and kill the trolls living under them. Despite a second term in office, a stimulus plan, a plan to stimulate the stimulus plan and years of assorted pork, there are apparently now more Damocles bridges in the land than there ever were before.
In 2009, Obama promised to fix all the crumbling roads and bridges with a $787 billion stimulus plan full of “shovel-ready jobs”. Two years later he joked to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whose company is the 15th biggest government contractor, that the shovel-ready jobs were not shovel-ready. It would have been nice to know that before we spent the $787 billion, but maybe that’s why all the old bridges keep threatening to fall down.
And then there are the promises that we can fix all our problems with a Green Energy revolution that drives up electricity rates for everyone in order to buy windmills and solar panels from China. The Green Energy revolution has done a lot for Red China’s middle class while further eviscerating the standard of living for American middle class families who are just trying to keep the lights on.
Naturally, no Obama speech on the economy would be complete without urging us to invest more in education in order to get our hands on tomorrow’s jobs. “If you think education is expensive,” Obama said, borrowing his line from a bumper sticker, “wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century.”
But we don’t have to choose. As Detroit shows us, we can have both. Detroit has 5,000 teachers to 88,000 students. Its biggest challenge has been trying to win back another 5,000 students who escaped to charter schools to justify not laying off all the extra teachers. Its billion dollar school budget is all the more shocking in a city that is deep in debt and suffers from a 47 percent illiteracy rate.
The education system fosters incredibly expensive ignorance. And that ignorance can not only be found in public schools in Detroit’s ghettos, but in the Ivy League alma maters of Obama and his financial advisers.
Obama’s 6 trillion dollar debt is a testament to the high price of ignorance. As are all of his economic speeches calling for more Green Energy, more education and more taxes to solve all of our ills. In his latest speech, he vowed that making “preschool available to every four year-old in America” would make America competitive in the “ocean of tomorrows” and “a sky of tomorrows”.
