Jan. 20, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:56
3563 The Horrible Truth About Barack Obama's Presidency
On January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama took office on a platform of "hope" and "change" for the United States of America. As Obama has completed his final day as President of the United States, Stefan Molyneux reviews his accomplishments, failures and legacy in the annals of American history.Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/barack-obamas-presidencyFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We are bidding adieu to Barack Hussein Obama, and he is heading off to Palm Springs, I think it is.
How appropriate, the left coast.
And I wanted to sum up some information about him that seems to have escaped a lot of Attention, obviously, from the mainstream media, but from a lot of other outlets as well.
This is my closure, my going back and looking at all the salt that was sown into America's soil and wounds by Barack Obama.
Now, the first thing to remember, of course, this is number one.
Despite being granted the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the tasty $1.4 million US that came with it, Barack Obama was in fact at war longer than any other president in United States history.
Did you know he spent his whole two terms constantly at war?
His weapon of choice?
Drone strikes!
These, of course, were used by Barack Obama to bomb at least seven countries since becoming president.
Yes, nothing says I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize like dropping 100,000 bombs over the course of your presidency.
Hey, world, do you feel like becoming Dresden?
I've got you covered.
Now, this allows him to hide, of course, the ill effects of the war on terror.
Everyone talks, oh, they're so precision, they're pinpointed and so on, but drones pretty regularly kill additional people.
They cause massive blowback.
They stoke virulent anti-American hatred.
It's not really anti-American.
It's anti-blowing me up in virtually every country they are used in.
A lot of former officials say that the drone strike program does actually more harm than good.
What kind of president is he as far as wartime goes?
Hard to tell.
The fog of war seems to envelop the White House itself.
How many troops does America have in each country?
No one knows.
You see, Obama's Pentagon refuses to say.
So roll the dice and times a billion.
I mean, we do know there are now at least 10 times more troops in Iraq than in the latter half of 2014.
And since 2014, Obama has dropped...
A little more than 25,000 bombs in Iraq and Syria and Libya and elsewhere.
Now, if you're not dropping bombs on people, perhaps you can help arm the repressive governments, Obama says.
Yes, I can!
He also sold by far the most weaponry of any president and arms to Middle Eastern countries, many of whom, of course, are waging their own wars, some against their own people.
It's time for the big view.
You know, the war on terror has been going on for a little over 15 years or so.
It has resulted in at least two ground invasions and bombing.
Bombing seven additional, mostly...
Muslim countries, after all of this, trillions and trillions of dollars and millions of deaths, there are now more terrorists who are killing more people than there were in 2001.
Oh look, anti-terrorism is a government program that produces more terrorists.
Gosh, it's a good thing we've got an anti-poverty program that doesn't produce any more power.
No, that's not correct.
I mean, just in 2014, the US government said that 32,727 people were killed by terrorists around the world.
That's actually up 80% from the year before, right?
So, 2013 to 2014, up 80%.
Since 2002, the year after the war on terror began, the number of people killed by terrorists around the world has gone up 4,500%.
So, maybe Borat was right, I don't know.
Look at the terrorist organizations, right?
In 2001, Al-Qaeda, mostly confined within the boundaries of Afghanistan, Now Al-Qaeda and Islamic State and so on, they've got regional affiliates in more than 15 countries, including continents such as North Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
So...
Why?
Why is terrorism doing so well, despite the war on terror?
Well, arguably because of the war on terror.
In March of 2015, this is a report by a wide group of humanitarian organizations, and this includes the Nobel Peace Laureate International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
The estimate to just in Iraq alone, as a direct consequence of the U.S. war on terrorism, one million people were killed in Iraq.
That's actually about 5% of the country's population.
Now, you can check out my presentation, Iraq, A Decade of Hell, for more on the effects of this war on the local population.
But if you sort of normalize the deaths in Iraq by American populations, this would be a little over 16.2 million Americans killed.
Proportional, 1 million.
16.2 million Americans killed.
Killed.
That's about 5,400 9-11s.
So, let's say that you had that death count of 9-11 every day.
How long would it take for you to get to 16.2 million Americans?
Well, it would be a 9-11 every day for almost 15 years.
A 9-11 every day for almost 15 years.
Now, remember how angry you were.
At 9-11, what happened if you were around, well, 15 years every single day?
And this increasing radicalization, that's one of the clearly stated goals of the Islamic State.
They want to eliminate this gap between moderate Muslims and the West.
They want to create or tip everyone over into a civilizational conflict.
There's two sides.
And the U.S. plays into this goal that they have over and over again.
And over again.
So, that seems to me one of the most significant consequences of what happened.
Now, let's just look at a couple of the big picture items that I think are important.
We'll be touching on race relations and the economy and employment and so on.
But if we look at spending, when he's running for President, Obama said about President Bush's deficit spending, it's irresponsible and unpatriotic.
And presidential campaign event, July 3rd, 2008, Obama said, the problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children.
Driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome.
So we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back.
$30,000 for every man, woman, and child.
That's irresponsible.
It's unpatriotic.
Wow.
Buy a nine trillion dollar debt.
Really unpatriotic.
And Obama, of course, has added more debt to the US debt than all of the presidents combined before him.
And it's kind of weird in a way because Obama...
Kind of got to spend an additional trillion dollars a year because this sort of stimulus package that was passed, Congress refused to pass budgets after that, so they got to re-spend the stimulus package every single year.
And despite dumping this truly Venezuelan-style airplane crate worth of money on the economy, the economy under Obama never really topped 3% growth and often was much.
So, Obama's leaving office, got a pretty sluggish economy, more and more Americans dependent on the government, a national debt that is unbelievable.
And so, if you judge him by his own 2008 standards, he was by far the most fiscally irresponsible president ever.
The employment issues we'll get to in a little bit, but just to sort of point out, the employment to population ratio has been continuously below the 60% threshold, right?
So 60% of those available to work are actually working.
The last time it was so low was actually back in 1985.
Hint, I used a gel.
That's how long ago it was.
Now, of course, you will hear that Barack Obama has grown the economy and jobs have gone up.
There are 7 million or more new jobs.
Well, I guess that's a number which, if you take in isolation, doesn't look too bad.
But the basic reality is that...
Okay, 7 million more jobs, but the population of the United States has grown by more than 20 million, and that is more.
Almost three times more.
So that's not particularly great.
So yeah, you've got trillions and trillions of dollars of debt.
You've got basically a giant welfare spigot of a trillion dollars a year.
You've got the Fed keeping the interest rates incredibly low, zero for the most part, and a massive pile of IOUs made out to foreign governments.
So it's not...
A real presidency in my...
I mean, he was the president, of course, right?
But no fiscal discipline, no fiscal responsibility, massive subsidies from the Fed, and free money from this endlessly renewed bailout program.
So, militarily speaking, wasn't it amazing?
If you watch the old Star Trek, you know that there was teleportation devices.
You know, people would kind of shimmer and then vanish.
Well, you saw the same kind of thing.
There were all these protests against the war, against intervention in the Middle East, which, of course, is a terrible thing and should not be done.
But it was amazing.
And the call went across the land that a Democrat was in the White House and they all shimmer and vanish.
The anti-war protest has just vanished.
It's almost like they care more about political power than they do about war and the disassembling of entire cultures overseas.
No, that can't be it.
Some other reason, let me know in the comments below.
Obama did carry out military interventionism in Libya without first seeking congressional approval.
That's pretty significant.
I mean, even George Bush, one of the most catastrophic decisions ever made by a human being on this planet, was the invasion of Iraq, at least in modern times.
But at least he sought congressional approval.
Not exactly a formal declaration of war, but authorization of force or whatever.
But Obama just carried out this military interventionism in Libya.
did not seek congressional approval.
Toppling Libya was one of the key components that created the migrant crisis that might bring down Europe, and so it seems somewhat significant.
I guess he sent his Lady Macbeth-enabled secretary of state to deal with that.
We came, we saw he died, and I wonder if she's sleeping at all.
Barack Obama also approved giving 20 F-16 fighter jets to Egypt, which is a Sharia dictatorship.
Invade everyone, arm everyone, invite everyone.
And people forget, while he was a senator, he actually did vote for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
It sounds like some sort of enema-slash-suppository for bunged-up bowels.
The Tarpa Bank bailout bail, yeah, he voted for that.
He also, fairly significant, waged a massive war against medical marijuana.
Um...
Maybe because he took money from pharmaceutical companies.
I don't know.
It's a little easier to grow it than it is to buy it.
So, who knows?
He nominated Timothy Geithner, a repeat tax cheater, to head up the government agency that enforces the tax laws.
It's like he's trying to write the darkest comedy known to mankind.
Barack Obama also signed this stimulus bill that ended up spending money on bonuses for AIG executives and later was shocked and outraged, literally shaking.
He got even...
Pretended to be outraged about it.
Oh, I remember all these lefties complaining about the Patriot Act.
Oh, unconstitutional, wrong, third-worldy.
Yeah, agreed.
October 2011, Obama signed a renewal of the Unconstitutional Patriot Act.
So it's really great that he's a constitutional expert because I guess he knows what to dodge.
He increased the national debt more in one term than Bush did in two.
So that's efficient.
In December 2011, Obama was criticized by the ACLU director for signing a bill giving the US government the power to detain US citizens indefinitely without filing any charges or taking part in any pesky trials with any requirements for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Barack Obama also defended warrantless wiretapping.
Isn't it great how our freedoms are being protected by the war on terror?
Oh!
Also never prosecuted any Wall Street executives.
I guess he took some fines.
Because you see, when you prosecute Wall Street executives as the government, you have to pay money to prosecute.
If you convict them, you've got to pay to put them in prison.
But if you fine them, that's a big shakedown.
Sorry.
Legitimate and just fine for wrongdoing.
Barack Obama also had multiple U.S. citizens killed without due judicial process.
In 2011, he ordered...
Boeing to shut down a new plant with a thousand employees because it was non-unionized.
And of course, the Democrats get a lot of their money from unions, both in the public and private sector.
During the Chrysler bankruptcy, people say, ah, Barack Obama saved the car companies.
No, he saved the union.
That's kind of a different thing.
The car company is a little more capitalistic union, a lot more Democrat-friendly and socialistic.
During the Chrysler bankruptcy, he stole money from retired teachers and police officers.
He violated the Fifth Amendment and a little bit more than 150 years of well-established bankruptcy law by illegally treating creditors who were secured worse than unsecured creditors.
Now, some of the creditors who were secured were retired teachers and police officers from...
Indiana.
Oh, 2010, Barack Obama also supported the release of the Lockerbie bomber, airplane bomber, convicted of murdering 270 people.
He supported the release of this guy from prison.
So, I guess he couldn't commute the sentence quite at that time.
Of course, you know about Operation Fast and Furious.
This is when the Obama administration ordered...
Gun store owners to sell thousands of guns illegally to criminals.
June 2009, Obama fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin.
This is right after Walpin accused Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who was in fact an Obama supporter, for misuse of AmeriCorps funding to pay for his political activities.
A school board, if I remember rightly.
Escalating upwards, Obama lied about putting healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN. Remember, when Obamacare was in the works, we're going to put all the negotiations on C-SPAN so you can see for yourself.
It was on C-SPAN just in another dimension, but I'm sure that's included with your cable package anyway.
He lied about letting people keep their health insurance.
He lied about the cost of Obamacare.
Also said, oh no, Obamacare, it's not a tax at all.
But then, of course, his administration argued in front of the Supreme Court that Obamacare was, in fact...
Attacks!
That's a shocker.
And of course, Obamacare basically came about because he wants lots of illegal immigrants to come into the country so that they'll end up voting if they can get through the permission slip he gave them to vote in the last election.
So he wants lots of illegal immigrants to come in and dangle legalization in front of them in return for votes.
And because there are so many legal immigrants coming in, even from the third world and so on, pretty low skill, pretty low language skills, pretty low income, and therefore they need a subsidy for their health care so that they can stick around and continue to vote.
Democrat on a regular basis.
Remember, Democrats lost the argument for socialism in the 1960s, and everything since then has been hanging on and scrabbling on and trying to deny the ever-mounting evidence that socialism is a giant clusterfract that takes down civilization.
You remember all this green energy stuff, right?
He gave tax dollars to campaign contributors and lobbyists claiming the money was for green energy.
And of course, they went bankrupt on a regular basis.
And sometimes Obama's administration even knew that these green energy companies were going through significant financial troubles.
But, you know...
Payback.
It's a wonderful thing if it's not your money and you get to keep the power.
Obama administration officials actually held literally hundreds of meetings with lobbyists, not at the White House.
You see, there's disclosure requirements for White House visitors, but at coffee houses fairly close to the White House.
Now, to be fair, sometimes it would have been cold and they would have had to, you know, bundle up, maybe wear a toque of some kind, which can give you, if I remember rightly, it's been a while, So, there obviously is a negative involved, but they did choose to meet outside of the White House to avoid the disclosure requirements.
Obama did give administration jobs to more than half of his 47 biggest fundraisers.
Maybe a coincidence.
I don't know.
He's got some communist ties.
Let's not even get into his treatment of Lech Walesa, the Polish solidarity leader who led the fight against communism.
Barack Obama wouldn't even let this guy in the White House, but surrounded himself with a fair number of communists.
Actually, his administration spent $1.6 million restoring graffiti that glorified communist murderers such as Che Guevara and Vidal Castro.
So you wouldn't want that to fall into disrepair.
Fresh, fresh graffiti is key to the peace of a society.
Oh, he also attempted to outlaw family farms.
That seemed relevant.
Maybe it's because he wanted to raise the demand for illegal immigrants so they can come in and dangle the aforementioned citizenship and have them vote for the left.
You get all of that.
Ooh!
A commandly racially conscious president and administration, it seemed.
He claimed that written tests are a form of racial discrimination.
Racial discrimination.
This is, you know, for people who wanted to become, you know, firemen or policemen or whatever.
In 2012, the Obama administration accused PepsiCo of race discrimination because PepsiCo was using criminal background checks to screen applicants.
And since a disproportionate number of blacks have criminal records, that meant hiring fewer blacks.
So it's race discrimination to not want to hire criminals.
I passed that one without comment.
In 2009, the Obama administration eliminated the pensions of 20,000 retired Delphi employees.
December 2010, ooh, that's back in the day, right?
Transparency International reported, That corruption in the Obama administration was increasing faster than anywhere in the world, except three places, Cuba, Dominica, and Burkina Faso, which I actually thought was someone from Star Wars, but apparently it's a place.
Last but not least, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and did I mention the $1.4 million?
He sent U.S. troops to Uganda, the Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Union.
Maybe they were using tests and that was racist.
It's hard to say.
The levels of hypocrisy, even by political standards, were at times fairly biblical.
On January 10, 2013, Obama signed a bill that automatically provides and funds armed guards for himself and his wife for the rest of their lives.
Armed guards around them, funded for the rest of their lives.
Ah, but in 2004, when he was an Illinois state senator, he voted against allowing people to use guns in their own homes To protect themselves and their families from robbers, rapists, murderers, and so on.
So no guns for you if you buy them yourselves and use them responsibly and are trained.
Guns for me paid for by the taxpayer.
So...
The economy, I mean, he's a constitutional law professor.
He was a community activist.
In my view, he never had a real job in his life.
I have very little respect for people who've never had a voluntary market-facing career, you know?
And this includes, to me, people who work a lot in finance and stuff like that.
Like, if you've not made something tangible and sold it to people who can say no in the free market with your nuts on the...
Third rail of investors and income, and if you're not signing promissory notes to pay back things if you can't make it work and so on.
If you've never really had any voluntary skin in the free market game, I don't really believe that you have much to do with economic knowledge.
You may have some abstract knowledge, but nothing really meaty and tangible.
So you put this affirmative action candidate in charge of an economy when he's got no economic background and training other than being mentored by a communist, which is not very scientific despite its claims to the contrary.
Obama ended up being the only president in U.S. history without even one single year of 3% growth.
And remember, this is when he had this fire cannon of money that he could fire at the economy and did every single year.
So in perspective, 1790, oh yeah, I'm going back that far, 1790 to 2000, US real GDP growth averaged 3.79%, and he couldn't even manage one at 3%.
Now the number of Americans below the poverty line?
Under Obama's presidency, up 3.5%.
Real median income, down 2.3%.
Americans on food stamps.
You've got to just take a deep breath and put on your crash helmet of mathematical reality.
Under Obama, Americans on food stamps went from $33 million to $49 million.
Up 39%.
Ah, well, a little over 7 million new jobs.
Population growth of 20 million, but 15 million new people on food stamps.
Now, just not all of these are the very most current data, so some of these numbers may be even worse.
I got the latest I could find.
So yeah, Americans on food stamps.
15 million new Americans on food stamps.
We'll buy peace with debt if it's the last thing we do.
Well, if things hadn't changed, it would have been.
U.S. home ownership down 5.6%.
And, I mean, the prospects for millennials, it's pretty grim.
You know, my younger brothers and sisters, I feel for you.
It is a gruesome and ghastly marketplace.
Just one example, New York City Democrat controller reports New York employees born between 1985 and 1996, they're pulling home about 20% less than their peers just one generation earlier.
And, um...
This hollowing out of the economy.
America has been eating its seed crop for 60 or more years.
I mean, since the warfare welfare state really kicked in, the welfare state in the 60s and the warfare welfare state, I guess, starting from Korea particularly onwards, but the perpetual war state has kicked in more recently.
America has been eating its seed crop.
You know, all the kids living at home, they're relying on the fact that their parents could buy a house.
And if they didn't have parents who bought a house, they didn't have a basement to live in and so on.
Like, people make fun of basement-dwelling neckbeards and so on.
Anyway, but the reality is that they're just feeding off the leftover scraps from a more vibrant economy or a remotely vibrant economy in the past.
And do you remember how Barack Obama was saying, oh my goodness, it's $30,000 debt per citizen?
Well, from 2008 to 2016, U.S. national debt rocketed up 95.3%, now standing at $61,340 per Per citizen.
And I don't believe Americans can legally be broken up and sold for parts, so that is completely unpayable, just so everyone knows.
And this stimulus that he dumped on the economy?
Estimates to say it added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs at a cost of the aptly numbered $666 billion or $278,000 per job saved.
Unemployment is a big issue, and you'll hear lots of different information about this.
The sources for all of this will be below.
But people say, well, the unemployment numbers have come down, but you've got to look at how it's counted.
Go to shadowstats.com for more on this.
As of November 2016, over 95 million Americans were not even in the labor force.
So that means that they are available to work.
They could work.
They're in the ages where they could work.
Not in school.
I think they're all Kevin Smith movie, Mallrats.
They're not here to work.
They're not there to work.
They're not there to shop.
They're just there, right?
There's people in the economy.
It's brutal.
People who have debt, people who have disability.
Disability has vastly increased, partly because of an aging population and also partly because it's a way, if you want to get out of the workforce, to get an income that can outstrip unemployment and welfare in terms of stability and so on.
And it's been just brutal.
The people who, you know, failure to launch, oh, the failure to launch, the young people, no, there's no place to land for a lot of young people.
No jobs, or the jobs are crappy and part-time, plus you got hoovered into school through propaganda.
You'll make a fortune if you go to school.
Well, of course, the government loves you getting hoovered into school because then it doesn't have to count you as unemployed.
The government loves hoovering you into school because that way it can indoctrinate you on pro-status, pro-leftus, pro...
Socialist, pro-Marxist propaganda, and you pay for it.
See, it's expensive to propagandize other people, but if you take on the debt to be propagandized yourself, ooh, that's a win-win for the nasty among us.
So, yeah, 95 million people not in the labor force.
What are they doing?
Please, if you're one of these people, just do me a favor.
Please, please.
Satisfy my curiosity.
Tell me below, what do you do with your day?
Well, my days, I feel like I'm...
My bed is like a can.
I go...
At the end of the day, right?
But what do you do with your days?
I mean, binge-watching, video games, other things on the internet I've only heard about?
Let me know.
I'm really, really curious.
Because that number has increased.
By over 18% since January 2009, right?
The number of Americans not in the workforce.
It's actually particularly bad for women as well.
You know, the feels-friendly president, not so great for the estrogen set.
Even the official unemployment rate for women, 4.9%.
But under President George W. Bush, at a similar point, it was 4.5%.
And the number of women who are just bugging out, they're going gall tests, they're leaving the workforce, is at an all-time high.
Labor force participation was recently 56.6% for women.
That's a 27-year low.
And this is important.
So there were 7 million new jobs.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
If you destroy one high-paying job or, you know, 50K or whatever, right?
One reasonable middle-class income, a provider income for people who want to have families.
Let's say you destroy one job for 50K, but you create two jobs for 19,000.
Oh, look, you've added a job.
You are up one job.
But that's not how you should measure things.
That's not how you should measure things.
So this is going back to 2015.
So 29 quarters after the pre-crisis peak, total non-farm labor hours utilized by the U.S. economy were no higher than Q4 2007.
Let me sort of break down to you what that means.
Non-farm labor hours, right?
So what that means is if you take a job, Pays 50k, you work 40 hours a week, and you break it into two jobs that pay 19k each, but are only 20 hours a week.
It looks like you've got an extra job, right?
You've subtracted one, you've added two, you're up one job.
But if you look at the amount of hours that have been worked, it's still only 40 hours a week that are being worked, right?
And of course, there's a loss of income and so on.
And so when you take a 50k job, break it into two 19k jobs, Then it looks like you're up on job, but no more work is being done.
So non-farm labor hours didn't go up at all.
From 2007 to 2915, that's 29.
29 quarters after this.
Not a movement.
See, labor hours are more telling.
Job slots you can count.
Full-time and part-time are considered the same, right?
So if you have one full-time job at 40 hours and one part-time job at 20 hours, then there's two jobs.
Or you can count both of those as one job.
If you look at the hours that are actually being worked, then you get that a part-time job is half the full-time job.
And so that's important.
In 2015, the number of non-farm labor hours utilized in one quarter was only 1% higher than in the spring 2000.
For 15 years, it crept up 1% the number of hours being worked.
What this means is that the U.S. has gone through two business cycles and has essentially added zero new employment inputs to the U.S. economy.
Sure, you fragmented some jobs, but that's like saying, oh, look, I broke my window in half.
Like, I broke my windowpane in half.
Now I have two windowpanes.
No, you have one broken windowpane.
And this is important.
This is new.
So you look at 29 quarters since the 1981 peak of the economy.
The non-farm labor hours had increased 17%, like from the early 80s.
In the 1990 business cycle peaked 29 quarters after, the non-farm labor hours had increased by 12%.
So, right, so the hours worked increased 17% after the 1981 peak and crash by 12% in the 90s.
And since 2000, it's flat as a pancake.
It's flat as a pancake.
I mean, we're talking...
Gymnast cleavage.
It is totally non-existent.
And that is really something to ponder and to think about.
So all of these numbers that you're hearing about, oh, we created all these jobs and unemployment is down.
Well, people are leaving the workforce and you've created crappy jobs.
And that is really, really important.
Because even this labor hour question doesn't even take into account job quality.
Now, usually part-time jobs have a lower quality in terms of income and just conceptual difficulty and so on.
But even if you look at just the hours worked, it doesn't give you the full picture because what's happened is manufacturing jobs have been hollowed out.
50,000 manufacturing jobs a month have been carved out and hollowed out of the US economy over the past couple of decades.
And so you have big manufacturing jobs, which was the climb to the middle class.
It's how you used to get to the middle class without having to go to college, right?
You can get a trade or whatever.
You could just join and journeyman or get apprenticed in some factory or whatever.
So you used to be able to get to the middle class without having to go to college.
Now, a combination of a whole bunch of stuff, which we'll get to in a few minutes, but automation, absolutely.
Automation is not insignificant, but that doesn't mean that there aren't manufacturing jobs.
Automation has been going on Since the 18th century, before that even if you can't sort of livestock, automation has been going on since the 18th century, escalating in the 19th century, but people still had jobs, right?
It's not automation alone.
It's a lot to do with how expensive and ridiculous and complicated and red tapey and environmentally sensitive and, you know, OSHA sensitive all of the jobs have become and this is why jobs are being shipped overseas.
So if you look at service jobs, which is where a lot of the new jobs are happening, they, what, about 26 hours a week and about $14 an hour on average.
So you're topping out at about $19,000 a year.
And that's only 40% of the breadwinner category of jobs that are about $50,000 a year.
Now, the number of...
They're called breadwinner jobs.
In other words, you can sort of raise a family, get to the middle class, if you manage your money and if you don't live, you know, in some gold-plated downtown Manhattan mansion.
The number of breadwinner jobs, and these are the full-time positions in places like energy and mining, manufacturing, construction, you know, the white-collar professions, business management services, information technology, finance, insurance, real estate, transportation, distribution, and so on.
Those jobs...
Have dropped by 1.7 million since December 2007.
And they're still lower in terms of total numbers than they were at the turn of the century.
So those jobs are going down.
And a lot of this has to do with the Fed bubble.
And I've talked about this with Peter Schiff before.
I'm sure I will again.
But the Fed bubble, you know, keep interest rates down, dump all this money in the economy.
Well, that feeds the rich, all the people who've got stocks and bonds and other financial instruments.
So the top 10% make out like bandits.
And we've seen that happening under the Obama administration and starting even before that.
Now, right below the top 10%, there's another 10%, maybe 15% of people who kind of feed those people and take care of those people and manage their money and so on.
Then there's this great hollowed out donut in the middle.
And then there's the poor who, you know, wait tables at the country clubs where the rich are and so on.
This is why you see this bubble.
It's like it pushes a bubble.
Think of a bubble growing.
It pushes the poor down, pushes the rich up, and in the middle is a vacuum.
Nothing there.
And so this happens, and this is why you see a growth in rich people, a hollowing out of middle-class jobs, and an escalation of, quote, opportunities for poor people to make the princely sums of $19,000 a year working in unpleasant conditions and usually without benefits.
So this is the reality.
I mean, in one six-month period in 2014, 97% of the net job creation was part-time work.
Part-time work.
In 2015, there were 10% fewer manufacturing jobs in 2007 and 30% fewer manufacturing jobs from 2000.
Again, it's not all just automation.
Listen, automation is happening all over the world, but there are countries that are gaining.
In manufacturing jobs.
So, no.
If there was automation...
Automation is everywhere.
There's lots of automation in China and India and other places.
So, if it was just automation, then manufacturing jobs around the world would be going down.
But no, it's not the way it is.
If you look at high productivity, high pay goods production sector jobs, like energy mining, construction manufacturing...
In June 2015, there were 19.6 million of those jobs.
That was actually 5 million fewer than January 2000.
You've got a big population growth, huge population growth, but fewer high-quality jobs.
And in sort of the lower-middle-class stuff, they call it the Hess complex, health, education, and social services.
You know, 42,000, 48,000 jobs sometimes a month being grown.
But these jobs are 35K a year.
I mean, after taxes in particular, It's not even close to a middle class lifestyle.
And so this isn't just Barack Obama, but it definitely escalated under Obama.
Four out of five U.S. adults, they struggle with joblessness, with near poverty or reliance on welfare for parts of their lives.
That's 80% of the American adults.
This is what happens in third world countries, people.
This is what happens in third world countries.
The middle class gets eviscerated and you get this escalation, this crushing down of the poor, this helium-like growth of the rich.
This is a medieval economy.
So if you look at this, loss of manufacturing jobs, loss of a steady pathway to the middle class.
You can look up the old economy Steve memes on the internet.
They're funny and tragic and horrifying.
I mean, of course, it's no surprise.
Real household income, median real household income, has declined by 7% over the last 15 years.
This can't be a shock.
What turns this around?
We'll see.
Starting very soon, I believe.
Now, race relations.
Okay.
It's time for us to be brutally frank with each other.
A lot of people were guilted into voting for Barack Obama because, you know, slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, and all this kind of stuff.
And they thought, okay, good, we can finally put this whole racism thing deep in the rear view.
And, of course, it has...
Gotten worse.
Race relations has always been a government program in America, and government programs always make things worse.
Always make things worse.
Restricting government programs is the only government program that makes things better.
I mean, big picture stuff, right?
The U.S. has spent $15 trillion on the war on poverty since 1964.
Ah, look at that.
$15 trillion on the war on poverty.
Mostly to grow single mothers in the drug and thug culture, but $15 trillion.
$15 trillion.
Now, in 1964, about one in six people lived in poverty.
Ha ha.
Now, about 50 million Americans live in poverty.
About one in six.
It's basically the same proportion as under LBJ. Oh, Jesus, you were right.
The poor will always be with us.
Well, certainly.
If you hand over their management to the government that grows some, like, voting crops and bureaucrat power crops and so on.
And Obama, his promises were the mirror image, normally, of what happened.
The inverse image of what happened.
I mean, people's perceptions on race relations were actually better under Reagan and Bush 41.
They got worse under Clinton, and then got steadily better over Bush 43's presidency, and then cratered under Barack Obama.
Huh.
Got worse under Clinton, worse under Obama.
I don't know.
There's no pattern.
There's no pattern!
Can't be imagined.
I return to the great Dr.
Thomas Sowell, who wrote about this.
And I'm just jamming this in here because it's important.
He wrote, the poverty rate among black families fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs.
It dropped another 17 percentage points during the decade of the 1960s and one percentage point during the 1970s.
But this continuation of the previous trend was neither unprecedented nor something to be arbitrarily attributed to the programs like the War on Poverty.
And this is the part that if you know your history and you know your numbers, this is the part that is so heartbreaking when you look at the state of the black community in America.
These days, poverty rate among black families fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960.
How far could that have gone?
How much further could that have gone?
We'll never know.
Hopefully we'll have a chance to rerun the experiment with freedom!
Race relations, now with voluntarism, for the betterment of everyone.
So, what has happened under Barack Obama?
So, in April 2009, 66% of polled Americans said that race relations were generally good.
And, you know, we're not talking about Eskimos and Asians.
We know we're talking about blacks and whites, right?
So April 2009, fresh new exposure to Obama.
66% of polled Americans said that race relations were generally good.
At the same time, 22% said they were generally bad, right?
So 66% good, generally good.
22% generally bad.
I guess the rest didn't know.
Now, fast forward seven years under Obama.
What's happened?
Well, the generally good, are race relations generally good?
Well, that's gone from 66% down to 32%, less than half.
Generally bad has gone from a low of 22% up to a high of 63%.
Isn't that astonishing?
Almost tripled.
Race relations in the United States under Obama.
That was one of his big goals, his big promises, and that's frankly why a lot of people voted for him.
And he made race relations almost unbelievably worse than they were before.
Well, this is what happens when you continually race bait, when you continually go after people for imagined racial slights, and when you talk about Trayvon Martin as your own son, and you talk about Philando Castile, and you legitimize all of these horrible black power movements,
and foment hatred of cops, and cause the Ferguson effect, or trigger or help escalate the Ferguson effect, which gets more black killed, which makes more people upset and unhappy and angry at cops, and it's It's a government program, and it's going to do exactly the same as every other government program, which is to make everything it claims to make better worse.
So none of this should be massively surprising.
I actually just did a video where I talked about and reviewed a video I did back in 2008 of what I thought was going to happen under the Obama presidency.
And it's the trap that identity politics and race politics and gender baiting and race baiting, it's a trap that it always ends up falling into.
Of course, the black vote is hugely important to the Democratic Party, but fewer than half of the black voters actually agree that With the big government, generally socialist, democratic party's approach to solving problems.
So that's a...
That's a problem, right?
The Democrats need the black vote, but fewer than half of the blacks actually agree with this sort of big government approach.
So what do you do?
Well, you have to avoid debating any real issues and focus on racial politics, on race baiting, and so on.
And particularly when, of course, a lot of left-wing policies have done their unholy bloody work of making life far worse for the black community, it's kind of tough.
To get the votes of the black community if you're actually going to talk about policies, if you're actually going to talk about the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, the fact that the government runs the inner cities, they control the streets, they control the police, they control the housing, they control the education.
I mean, good lord!
It's like a reservation system out there.
So more government when you're already full of government is really tough to sell, but you can get people to hate another group pretty easily if you keep pitting them against each other.
So that's the only option that they have.
It's all been disproven by facts, by reason, by evidence.
There were so many people back in the day arguing strenuously, morally, aggressively against the welfare state.
No, no, no.
It's going to solve the problem of poverty.
Just a few poor people left.
A lot of rich people will take it.
Done.
Done.
But now the evidence is in.
It's made everything worse.
You've got entire generations of people growing up.
Nobody in the family works.
Nobody in the family works.
Think of all the human capital.
Vanished from that entire environment.
Think of a kid growing up.
You never see anyone working.
Everybody talks about how great the system is.
And you're bored.
And you end up not finding any value in maxing out your human capital.
You play video games.
You play sports.
You just...
Doesn't matter.
What's the point?
And then you've got this whole monolithic wall.
Oh, the system is out to get you.
White people are out to get you.
You can't get ahead anywhere.
Everyone's so racist.
And then you get this self-fulfilling prophecy.
Oh, I can't get anywhere, so I don't get anywhere.
So then people look at your community and say, okay, I've got some problems.
You know, aha!
We knew you had problems with our community.
Right?
And this is what the left always does.
Identity politics.
I mean, back in the day under Franklin Delano and Roosevelt, you pitted the workers against the management.
Typical Marxist stuff.
You get the poor and the middle class, pit them against the rich.
Now you can add more groups to this unholy brew.
Blacks, gays, Hispanics, women.
Ah!
Get them all goaded up.
You're being oppressed.
Vote for us.
We'll make it better.
Only the government can save you.
And it's really, really horrible.
I mean, yes, blacks get arrested more.
Blacks commit more crimes.
And if you compare what's called the Crime Victimization Survey, where they phone people up and say, were you the victim of a crime?
Who was the perpetrator?
The Crime Victimization Survey matches the arrest statistics in general of the police.
So the police aren't arresting blacks, they're arresting criminals.
Which is why there's so few East Asians in prison, right?
There's no bias against black civilians in police shootings.
There's a new study.
A team was headed up by an African-American Harvard economist.
There's no bias, he found.
Cops are far more likely to be killed by a black perpetrator than black men ought to be killed by cops.
About 40% of all cop killings are committed by black males.
Black officers are far more likely to fire their guns at black citizens than our white officers.
So you have these big problems in the community.
If you just create this answer called racism for everything, everybody knows that that ship has run its course, that whole gunpowder line is done.
It can't continue.
You can't throw more money at this community.
You can't cry more racism than you have already.
Something else has to be done!
And look, If you're a Democrat, how do you feel about Barack Obama?
I mean, the guy kind of, almost single-handedly destroyed the Democrat brand for a generation or more.
Right now, Republicans control 69 out of 99 of the state legislators.
It's an all-time high.
After the 2014 midterms, Republicans had the most state-elected lawmakers in office since 1920.
The Republican Party is by far the dominant political force in the country.
Trump is going to have unprecedented levels of Republican power when he takes office.
So don't mess it up, Donnie.
Don't even think about it.
And there's a terrible thing that happens in society when you stop being able to offer goodies to the young, particularly to young men.
When I was a kid, you know, you followed the rules.
And in return for following the rules, you got to have a nice job.
You got to buy a house.
You got to have a car.
You got to have a family.
You got to be a father and a husband.
And that's what you do.
You obey the rules.
When society runs out of stuff to dangle in front of the young, the young very quickly run out of allegiance to society's rules.
Let's face it, a lot of social rules are bribery for compliance, and that's not the end of the world.
Some people are motivated by an intrinsic pursuit of virtue, and other people want the goodies that come from obeying social rules.
Society is running out of goodies to offer the young, and therefore the young are running out of allegiance to society.
And we don't have a lot of time to turn this around.
And there are ways to turn it around, which I've talked about for many years on this show.
And look, I remember this.
Very clearly, in the 90s, I wasn't around in the marketplace really for the first recession in the 80s.
I was pretty young still.
I had a job, but it was not something affected by the recession.
I actually remember saying to my mom, I remember saying, you know, I hear all this talk about this recession, but I don't really notice anything.
And she turned to me and she said, it's because I still have a job.
It's a reasonable point.
But the 90s, I had graduated from my undergrad at that point.
And in the 90s, I was brutal.
Oh my god.
I couldn't get a job as a waiter.
I ended up weeding people's gardens.
I ended up, someone's grandmother was coming to stay, some stranger.
And I took her around and showed her the sights.
And I cleaned people's cars.
I mean, I was just anything, anything.
I was like hustling to get a buck.
I was looking for spare change on the sidewalk.
And then I sort of struggled through that, got a better education, started a company, and rode the dot-com boom as a software entrepreneur.
We all know how that turned out.
Now, I sold the company right before it crashed.
Just lucky, I guess.
But seeing that happen, and seeing my friends, of course, hearing about people as well, and can't get jobs, it's all being outsourced, and just this mad chaos, just this mad chaos.
You know, there's this old, I think it's in an airplane movie, and I could probably get this wrong, but...
Let me know if you remember.
It was some movie.
I think it's in an airport.
And there are all of these people with all their luggage.
And there's this stuff on the loudspeaker.
You know, the flight to Houston is now departing from great 32C. And everyone's like, they go charging off that way.
And then, you know, there's another announcement.
The flight to Houston is now departing.
Leaving from 16B and everyone's like, I'm going to go off that way.
And this sort of just following around all these random directions.
I think that's what it's kind of become like for the economy these days.
So unpredictable.
The booms, the busts.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
And it's really demotivating.
And a lot of people who have followed the rules.
I get these messages all the time.
A lot of people have followed the rules.
I did the right thing.
I got good grades.
I got a good education.
I got a good degree.
I'm applying for jobs.
And there's nothing.
Nothing.
And they're in debt.
And they've got to take whatever they can get.
And then when they take whatever they can get, they don't have as much time to look for work.
And the more time that grows between you and your degree, there's this feeling it's falling apart.
It's crumbling apart.
You know, economically it's going from a MILF to an ancient Egyptian mummy.
Boy, there's an analogy for you.
And you stretch this and, boing, it breaks.
You know, how many years after your degree does your degree become less relevant?
And people say, well, you had this degree, but it was quite some time.
Gone.
The debt stays.
You can't get rid of the debt at all.
The debt stays, but the value diminishes and crumbles.
And the government wants you to go to school.
As I mentioned, they can indoctrinate you.
They can lend you money.
They can drive up demand.
They can keep you out of the workforce to make unemployment numbers look better.
And what do they care?
They don't care about what happens to you afterwards.
They don't care.
They don't care.
There are It needs to be something fundamentally different.
Obama represented to me, you know, peak leftism.
I mean, this highly non-American upbringing.
I mean, the guy was surrounded by a whole bunch of radicals, grew up in pretty foreign places and so on.
Not a strong steeping in the Western tradition.
I mean, I think this is true of the Bushes as well, because they have grown up in a very rarefied atmosphere, very far from the hurly-burly that produced the Western tradition of small government, separation of church and state, science, the free market, and freedom of speech, and gun ownership, and so on.
But this deviation, I think, that Obama represents domestically, certainly, It's something very significant and really needs to be understood and addressed.
This is why I've sort of ground into this closure issue that I've had with regards to Obama.
And trust me, this is not any kind of forgiveness for the unbelievable wrongs done by the Republicans in the past either.
But as a whole, America has drifted so far from its roots that it's now at the opposite end of the universe.
And you're either going to fall off the edge of the universe and just go full...
Third world crap.
I mean, this is bigger and bigger government, fewer and fewer middle class, fewer and fewer hyper-rich, but getting richer.
More and more people down here outside the gated communities, scrabbling Venezuelan-style for rats and seagulls to hunt in the gutter.
Or you're going to return to your roots.
You're going to say, well, we started.
And this is the West as a whole.
This is the West as a whole.
We started with small government.
We started with free...
We started with freedom of the press.
We started with integrity.
We started with responsibility.
We started with self-ownership.
We started without this festering need to blame everyone else for the dysfunctions within ourselves, within our families, within our communities.
Yes, there's stuff out there that makes things hard, but it is still a fantastic time to be alive.
There's still so many opportunities.
We have this conversation.
This capacity to communicate and to connect has not existed at any time throughout history.
We'll never come back to this kind of place or time again.
Everything after this is going to be conditioned by this, by this conversation, by this capacity to exchange information and arguments and facts and evidence and reason and passion to help light each other, to light the way for mankind.
But we have to recognize what we have violated is morality.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
Thou shalt not inflame the negative passions of others.
Thou shalt respect persons and property and contract.
The common law.
Don't steal.
Don't hurt.
And keep your word.
It's that simple.
That's the Holy Trinity we need to get back to.
If we drift further, we will be lost forever.
And we will return, though much better armed, to medieval practices that we spent so many bottomless gallons of blood escaping from.
We can get back there.
We need to take a deep breath, orient, center, return to the non-aggression principle.
Shrink the size and power of the state.
Rely on community.
Rely on voluntarism.
Rely on family.
Rely on friends.
Rely on yourself.
Nobody is fundamentally standing in your way.
Unless you're in Germany and you want to speak the truth about it.
Certain policies.
Let's just say in most of the West, nobody's standing in your way.
Economically, in general, nobody's standing in your way.
If you can't get a job, make a job.
Do something.
There is still bounteous opportunity compared to the past.
Look what I do.
Used to be a software entrepreneur.
Now I do this.
Would have been impossible in the past.
Make something with all of the amazing new technology that's out there.
Make something great.
Make something powerful.
Make something positive.
Make something inspiring.
And we can get back to what we have lost if we get back to the basics and recognize that those we perceive as our enemies who will fight us tooth and nail in general.
We will go, I will go at least, with the Platonic argument or the Socratic argument that evil is simply a form of ignorance.
That once you know, once you learn, once you understand, you have the chance to be good which you didn't have before.
Because we're only going to get one more shot.
I mean, it's the next decade.
That's it.
And it's really the next couple of years that matter the most.
This addiction to government, spending this addiction to state power, has run deep into the veins, into the spinal fluid of the West.
And curing us of this addiction is going to be painful.
The longer you've been on heroin, the harder it is to get off.
It can still be done, but we have almost no time left to achieve it.
Last thing I'm going to leave you with.
On May 9th, 1939, a decade after, of course, the 1929 stock crash, 10 years into the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary had this to say, and this is slightly before, of course, the beginning of World War II, at least in Europe.
He said this, and this is my final comment too.
He said, we have tried spending money.
We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work.
I want to see this country prosperous.
I want to see people get a job.
I want to see people get enough to eat.
We have never made good on our promises.
I say, after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.
Ah, you see?
Historically, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
