Peter Schiff Exposes Obama’s Misstate of the Union (Audio)
Peter Schiff gets a bit riled up in his latest podcast while responding to Obama’s State of the Union Address. Of course, Peter has good cause to get upset as he picks apart the outright lies in Obama’s speech, including Obama’s claim that he has reduced America’s debt and that the middle class lifestyle is better off thanks to big government.
Follow along with this partial transcript:
“There really wasn’t much substance in that address at all. It looked like he was speaking to some grade school kids, if you look at the vocabulary and the way the speech was delivered. It seems like it was written for people without a lot of education. You’d think that was really ironic, because education is such a cornerstone. The president wants to make sure that everyone goes to college. Now he wants to make community college free. Yet when they write [his] speech, I think they do it with a vocabulary of maybe a seventh grader. I think that’s what it’s aimed at. That’s really all a college education buys you in America now. You graduate college and you can read and write at a seventh grade level.
“That’s part of the problem they don’t understand… Having more kids in college. Pretty soon, the government is going to succeed in making a college degree even less worthless than a high school diploma. If Obama had his way, you would need a PhD to be a fry cook… If we had all of our fry cooks with PhDs in philosophy, is that really a worthwhile situation? That’s part of what he talked about.
“He took credit for the recovery in the economy, even though there is no recovery. Even though it’s just a bubble created by the Fed. Of course, when he takes credit for the recovery, he doesn’t point out the disappointing facts. Like that incomes are lower now, real wages are lower now than they were when the recovery began; that the average net-worth of the average American – particularly the people that voted for Obama – is much lower today than when the recovery began.
“We’ve had more people who have lost full-time jobs than when the recovery began. We now have all these people that have part-time jobs that don’t even want them. They want full-time jobs. So we’ve had this huge transition in the labor force from full-time to part-time. People have lost their higher paying jobs and they got crappy low-paying jobs… Why doesn’t he accept responsibility for that?
“If he says, ‘This is my recovery. This is the Obama recovery,’ then he owns that. He owns this labor market. He owns all these low-paying, part-time jobs. Those are Obama’s jobs. The fact that we’ve had this collapse in labor force participation, that’s on him. But no, he only wants to talk about the jobs that have been created without getting into the nature of those jobs; the character of those jobs and who’s got them. And the fact that so many people don’t even want the jobs. These are retired people that would rather go fishing or play golf, but they can’t afford that anymore, so they work part-time at Wal-Mart. Thank Obama for that.
“He doesn’t want to point out the facts. He’s going to gloss over all that as he’s trying to claim credit for a recovery that doesn’t exist. But he can pretend. You know, the stock market has gone up. Sure. But most of the Obama voters don’t even own stocks. If there was a Republican president in office now and he was Candidate Obama, he would be lambasting the president for this recovery. All he would talk about is how it’s a recovery of the rich, the 1%, that the vast majority of Americans have been left out. Yeah, they have been left out, but because he’s the one that’s in office, he has to pretend all of that doesn’t exist…
“To me, this whole thing was just a way of positioning. He’s trying to make the Republicans the bad guys. What he’s saying is that I want to provide all these freebies to the middle class, and we’re going to pay for it by higher taxes on the rich. He wants to raise the capital gains tax up to 28%. He wants to do away with stepped-up basis. When you die, if you had a stock and you bought it for $2 and you die and it’s at $100, your heirs don’t have to pay the capital gains tax. He’s acting like this is some super loophole. No it’s not. Because they have to pay the estate tax, which is 40%, which is even higher. So you don’t have to pay the capital gains tax at 24%, but you do have to pay the 40% estate tax… What Obama wants is for people to pay both. Obama would like it if you paid the capital gains tax, and then you paid the estate tax on what was left over. Which is horrible. To describe this as a loophole is completely insincere.
“He’s trying to frame this by casting the Republicans as the bad guys. He’s saying, ‘Look at all the great stuff you can have if only the Republicans would raise taxes on the super rich.’ He always talks about the super rich. But the vast majority of people who will be hit by these higher taxes are not super rich at all. They’re just not middle class, but they’re still going to be impacted by these higher taxes. He wants to basically create the idea in the minds of the voters that the Republicans are preventing you from getting all this free stuff, because of their rich friends. It’s really just like a bribe. The president is bribing the voters. “In exchange for your votes, we’ll get you all this stuff and we’ll steal it from these super rich guys who don’t deserve it anyway, because all they’re doing is getting them all kinds of tax breaks. Special treatment. Loopholes.’ Getting to keep the money you earn, somehow that’s a loophole. But getting money for free that you didn’t earn, well that’s just ‘fair.’
“That’s how econ works, right? The president was talking about his middle-class economics, about building the middle class, as if the government built the middle class in America. That’s the point that Obama doesn’t understand. Capitalism built the middle class. It was the free market. It wasn’t the other way around – We didn’t have a middle class first. It was because we were free that we created a middle class, and we did it without any government benefits or government programs. It’s the government that is destroying the middle class lifestyle. Before the government got involved, if you were a guy – even without a high school diploma – chances are you could afford to buy a house, get married, support your wife, have four or five, six kids, support them, put them through school, and retire. And not have any debt. That was American middle class life.
“What’s it like to be middle class in America now? You got a bunch of debt. You’ve got student loans. You get married, your wife has to work, because she’s got student loans. Even the two of you, you can barely make ends meet… Maybe you have one kid, maybe two. But you can’t even start until your life is getting close to forty and her biological clock is ticking, because in the meantime all you’re doing is paying your bills and interest on your debt. You’ve got no hope of ever retiring, because you can’t save any money. The whole middle class lifestyle that we enjoyed in the 1950s is gone. Why is gone? Who killed it? It was government.
“Now President Obama is promising that government is going to be the solution; that we need the government to help the middle class. That’s the last thing the middle class needs, because there’s not that much left of it anymore, thanks to what the government has already done.
“Some of his comments were really rich. When he starts talking about how concerned he is about future Americans, young people, and Americans yet to be born. Yet he’s saddling them with all this debt. How concerned can he be when he’s leaving them with all this debt? He constantly talks about how we’re one country, we’re one people, yet he’s constantly trying to divide us with class warfare.
“He had the nerve to talk about how he reduced the budget deficit… Well, first he ran it way up. Then he cut it based on that elevated level. You’re talking about a guy who has already added more than $6 trillion to the national debt, then he talks about how he’s reduced the budget deficit. What, is he kidding? In fact, there’s a good chance that by the time Obama leaves office – two years from now – that he would have added more debt to the country than every single president who preceded him, doubling the national debt. There has never been a president who has doubled the national debt while they were president, yet Obama might succeed. Yet he’s claiming that he’s succeeded in reducing our debts. He hasn’t reduced anything. He’s leveraged us up, he’s buried us in debt.
“The only reason we’re not collapsing is because the Fed has been bailing us out with 0% interest rates and three rounds of QE, [and there’s] about to be a fourth round!”