9/20/2012 - West Side Leader
     

To the editor:

Once again, it’s the economy stupid! Election year or not, try as it might, the Obama Administration simply cannot have it both ways with respect to this critical economic issue of our nation’s unemployment rate. While the White House campaign’s marionette masters haplessly insult the public by their frenetically hyping a positive spin on the direction in which we’re supposedly headed, across town the government’s own Department of Labor has just released its latest official unemployment report. In essence, it does not well comport with the much preferred spin coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as the jobs record is what it is: For every single job-seeking, newly-employed worker, four times that number have now currently headed in the exact opposite direction, dropping away and giving up altogether looking for work. Oops, sorry, but that’s the government’s own data.

What’s even sorrier is the ever-worsening condition of things now as compared to just four years ago. Hurtfully damaging as it is, the numbers speak egregiously for themselves, and in terms of the Obama Administration’s directional compass, the situation in which we now find ourselves certainly doesn’t bode well and is not promising at all. Things simply cannot be spun to blindly mislead the voting public any more than would perhaps espousing belief in the “Easter Bunny.”

In terms of the direction in which this country’s all-important unemployment rate is headed, the record reflects the simple truth ... this administration’s failed policies have been, and continue to be, nothing short of an unqualified disaster. They need to take ownership of what they’ve built. Misdirected, we’re obviously headed in the wrong direction by all this “hope and change.” And, speaking of which, where is all that “hope and change” anyway, that which was sold to us like the proverbial bridge four years ago? Wishful romantics may believe in the Easter Bunny, but reality’s the rational domain of grown adults. What America got instead is a grotesque proliferation in government-subsidized spending.

As a direct repercussion of the growing unemployment crisis, unlike four years ago, today, there’s been an alarming increase of all households in this country now receiving food stamps, welfare payments and/or who reside in Section 8, taxpayer-subsidized housing. Think about the level of reckless endangerment of that sort of societal dependency on such unsustainable entitlements and what that Easter Bunny mentality has wrought. With now nearly half of all of this country’s eligible-age taxpayers contributing nothing, zero, to help fund the government (thus, having absolutely no skin in the game), just who do you think is getting stuck with the ever-growing bill to pay for all this? Those of us now being repeatedly asked, by this same ruinously rabid, borrow, tax and spend administration, to “just to pay a little more” need to understand the fleecing that’s actually going on here ... code for the redistribution of wealth.

Beauty forever being in the eyes of the beholder, I’m sorry, but neither Obama nor his equally mendacious apologists still cannot put lipstick on a pig and call it pretty. As Nov. 6 approaches, think hard about where we are now — the direction the current compass has us heading — and then vote wisely, America!

Bill Fairweather, West Akron

• Leader office closed
• APS students grateful for experiences
• Cartoons: 5-23-13