Washington's Illiteracy Crisis

According to recent federal studies, the illiteracy rate in the US is around one in seven. As with everything that Obama is trying to “fix”, this is truly a crisis. However, this crisis is directly affecting our politicians as it seeps into the halls of our government with dramatic, breakneck speed. I fear if the crisis continues to go unchecked, Americans everywhere will suffer the consequences. Today, I declare we have a literacy crisis in Washington and it is those on the left that has been hardest hit.

It’s government’s literacy crisis that led to Joe Biden’s comments that the Obama administration misread the economy. During Obama’s stimulus speeches in January, he kept reminding us that our current recession was analogous to the recession that caused the Great Depression. I’m afraid to ask what his new assessment of the economy has been updated to, mostly because I think that the movie Waterworld will be referenced.

This may have been the first visible sign of illiteracy in the Obama administration. I’ve since realized that there are more. Today, the NY Times announced that Obama may have misread how hard it would be to close Guantanamo Bay. I also remember reading an article in January from the NY Times outlining Obama’s Guantanamo Bay strategy. The plan was that since Bush was out of office, Obama should be able to talk countries into taking the prisoners. Apparently, Obama misread how difficult it is to accomplish foreign policy. He’s since modeled all foreign policy after his Guantanimo strategy.

It looks as though his administration has also misread how apocalyptic the average weather had been. His Science Czar Holdren (more to come) has predicted a billion global warming deaths by 2020 (hat tip to Right Klick), but looking at my local weather I see a different story. Temperatures tonight will only get as high as 50 degrees, more than 10 degrees below average. Looks like I'll be lighting my furnace tonight and turning on the heat in my house so I don't freeze. Maybe the CO2 will bring the temperatures back to normal(still more to come on this)

It is shortsighted to think that illiteracy is only occurring in the White House. It appears that Congress cannot read their bills. Quote House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer:

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes’’

Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman can’t read the economy. In May, Krugman promised that:
“…when it comes to inflation, the only thing we have to fear is inflation fear itself.”

Krugman argued that expansionary monetary and fiscal policy does not create inflation during a recession. Hat tip to Robert Verdi at The 46, it looks like we have had our second month of increasing inflation. June had a huge jump from .02% to 1.8% in CPI. Last time I checked, we are still in a recession. Obama’s planning on fighting this trend with more expansionary fiscal policy.