Just found this by Jaxom Linked-In, over at the HUffing Post.
"Beyond Screwed."
My fellow Americans, I stand before you tonight with a proud record of accomplishment over the last four years, a record of accomplishment which both Democrats and Republicans can look upon with awe, even shock. When I began my campaign for the Presidency, I promised you, the American people, change you could believe in. And while it may have been difficult, even hard, to believe in the changes you’ve seen over the last four years, I think I can truthfully say that tonight, as you huddle with your loved ones in your tent cities and cardboard shelters all across this great land, you no longer find it hard to believe in the changes that I and my colleagues here in Washington have brought you. We have indeed, brought you change you have no choice but to believe in.
A mere four years ago, many of you were living the American dream. Many of you were employed. You had a house, and an adjustable rate mortgage, or even two. If you were young, you had dreams of attending college, and of one day obtaining jobs which, while they may not have had useful benefits or paid a living wage, would at least allow you to continue to service the insurmountable mountain of debt you’d incurred in student loans and on credit cards. Those of you who were lucky enough to be employed, paid money out of every paycheck into the Social Security trust fund, to ensure that when you reached retirement age, you could retire with a modicum of dignity, and avoid the hardship of extreme poverty in old age.
My fellow Americans, I stand before you tonight able to say, without fear of contradiction, that all of that, has changed. (Applause) And, my fellow Americans, I can also say, again without fear of contradiction, that as you huddle around your little campfires, fighting the freezing cold, trying to ward off frost-bite because you can’t afford medical treatment now that you are unemployed, homeless, and hungry, that you cannot help but believe in the changes which I have brought you. (Applause)
I can’t take all the credit. If it weren’t for the input, collaboration, and bi-partisan cooperation of Republicans in both houses of Congress, these changes might never have come about. It took a couple of years, and a genuine shellacking on election night in 2010, for me to understand how far I had to go, to really reach out to my Republican friends on the Hill. But I learned my lesson, and between us, we managed to overcome Democrat obstruction in the House and Senate, and pass bi-partisan legislation which has brought this country back to the edge of chaos, and put it firmly on the path to economic deconstruction. Therefore, to my Republican friends tonight, I say, thank you. Without your persistence, dedication, hard work, and diligent adherence to the importance of cutting taxes in the face of massive deficits, the fundamental economic changes we have wrought could not have come about.
Now, I know that many of you, particularly on the professional left, have been very vocal about being "screwed" in regards to particular policies and pieces of legislation that I have pushed for, gotten, and signed into law. But it is time to put this divisive rhetoric behind us, and move beyond "screwed."
Because there is more work to do. My fellow Americans, we cannot simply stand still, holding on to what little you have left in the face of the oncoming juggernaut of global competition. Unemployment rates in other areas of the world are far higher than our own. Other nations around the world have higher rates of academic failure, higher infant mortality rates, and infrastructure failure rates that put ours to shame. We are losing the global race in these, and many other areas. That’s unacceptable. We, as a nation, will not settle for second best. (Applause)
That’s why, tonight, I am announcing an increase in disincentives to domestic and community investment, substantial revisions in our tax code to make it easier for corporations to avoid any penalties on their profits such as actually having to pay any taxes whatsoever, and a plan that will simultaneously stimulate the trade deficit in our housing industry, increase our ability to borrow money abroad, and reduce the ever-increasing oversupply of vacant housing, which has become such a blight to communities across our nation.
These vacant houses continue to depress the foreclosure industry. Nationwide, there is an ever-expanding backlog of houses in which former owners continue to squat, tying up our courthouses with untold numbers of claims of fraudulent and missing documentation, illegal loans, missing titles, and other claims too numerous to go over here. This abuse of the legal system must stop. Therefore, one of the first pieces of legislation I want to sign is tort reform legislation which will remove such obstacles and streamline the foreclosure process, thus ensuring a continued supply of cheap, vacant housing, which can be torn from their foundations and shipped overseas.
Next, once we have ensured that we have, and will continue to have, an excess supply of vacant housing, we need to find a way to export those vacant houses to other countries and areas of the world where cheap, affordable housing is in even greater demand than here at home. By selling off our excess housing and shipping it abroad, we can create thousands of low-paying, temporary jobs in the deconstruction industry here at home, increase our exports, and improve the value of those few remaining homes whose mortgages are not underwater and whose owners have sufficient income to stay on the debt-service treadmill. To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, one of my most trusted advisors, We can no longer afford to ignore the crisis of excess unaffordable housing.
Therefore, because many countries will not be able to afford purchasing these previously foreclosed homes, we will, in partnership with Wall Street, our major lending institutions, and the IMF, create a new fund to lend money to foreign borrowers, so that they may buy up our excess housing and ship it off to those places in the world where it is needed more than it is here. This new fund, a housing bank for the poor, if you will, will make available no money down, no doc adjustable rate mortgages for individual borrowers from around the world, from those living in military dictatorships in North Korea to the booming market in China, from the flooded plains of Bangladesh to the arid deserts of North Africa. Make no mistake. This will not be easy, or cheap. But it is the right thing to do.
In order to fund this new housing bank for the poor and disadvantaged borrowers of other nations, the United States will need to come up with somewhere around 20 to 30 Trillion dollars. Many of our financial institutions are sitting on vast cash reserves, estimated at 2-3 Trillion, even as we speak, but are not lending those monies out because of the lack of confidence in the international housing export market. However, my advisors, including but not limited to Treasury Secretary Geithner, and others in my administration, believe that we can stimulate additional lending from private sources, if we first prime the pump with public sources of funding, and guarantee the profitability of these foreign borrower mortgage products through the use of Federal Reserve Bank Credit Default Swaps and other guarantees. By instituting these temporary, short-term measures, we can re-start the international housing export market and create vast investment and profit opportunities in foreign-borrower-mortgage backed securities, and their derivatives, for decades to come.
Now, I know what my Republican friends are thinking. And I want to assure you that my plan will address your concerns. First, this will be deficit neutral. We can achieve deficit neutrality by doing two things; first, we will not borrow from foreign or domestic sources, in order to initiate this first phase of global lending. Instead, we will draw on the vast resources already available to us. Between the Social Security trust fund and the Federal Employee Retirement System trust fund, we have enough to be able to initiate this first phase. Once the pump has been primed and the international housing export and foreign-borrower-mortgage backed security industries have been re-started, I cannot foresee any circumstance which would present difficulties with being able to repay the public’s trusts. It is simply inconceivable that there could be any unforeseen negative consequences to this plan. Thus, the public’s trust in these public trusts is secure. Further, by starting this program by borrowing funds from the public's trusts, we can demonstrate our fiscal responsibility, and thereby restore confidence in the international lending community about our credit worthiness and the strength of the dollar, thus ensuring that we can continue to offset badly needed tax cuts with foreign lending for the foreseeable future. Secondly, in order to help secure the cooperation of the banking industry and Wall Street in general, we will suspend the capital gains tax on profits derived from lending and financial speculation for a period of two years, again, in order to help restore confidence the confidence of our lending institutions of their ability to make profits, no matter what.
But that’s not the end of the discussion. I know that this will be a bitter pill to swallow for those of the professional left, who believe that if we simply raise taxes high enough, all of our problems will magically be solved. These liberal critics may mean well, but their tax-and-spend Keynesian idealogy has no place in the real, pragmatic world. If we are going to accomplish meaningful legislation for the American people in a bi-partisan fashion, we’re going to have make concessions in order garner the votes of our Republican friends. You may not like it, but if we don’t meet at least some of their demands, we will not be able to accomplish anything. Politics is, after all, the art of compromise. Therefore, I will offer a couple of ideas to sweeten the pot, and make this more palatable to our friends across the aisle.
First, while this program is in place, which is only temporarily, we will agree to not merely extend the existing tax rates on the top 2% of income for an additional four years; we will also lower the top marginal rate to 28%, a rate not seen since before the Great Depression.
Second, we will in addition, institute a recapitulation tax moratorium on payroll taxes for the next four years, in order to secure the solvency of our entitlement programs. This recapitulation moratorium will extend and increase the temporary payroll tax holiday, covering 5% of all payroll taxes for the next four years, but will recapture the lost funding via an additional 10% payroll tax increase on all those earning less than $108,000 a year, commencing January 20th, 2016.
Here once again I expect we will hear criticism from the bloggers, pundits, talking heads, cable news show hosts, and other unrealistic members of the professional left, who are constantly moaning about how they have been ignored, marginalized, and generally screwed over by those of us who are trying to do the difficult, sometimes painful job of actually trying to govern in the toxic political atmosphere of Washington D.C. As Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again." It’s time for the lefties and bloggers, sitting around in their pajamas in their mother’s basement, to get over whining about "being screwed." It’s time to get beyond screwed, and move forward with real change for America.
Thank you all, and God Bless the United States of America.
Update: Well, thanks to those who stopped by. Whether you like it or not, I appreciate your time, and hoped it lightened your day at least a little bit. If not, then try to remember the advice of the unimpeccable Betty White: