Conservative Patriot

Pipe Down Jeff Immelt

It’s staggering to me that Jeff Immelt is lecturing us business owners about how we need to “do more” and “take the lead in getting hiring restarted”. That’s pretty easy to say when your company, GE, is effectively an entity of government, with a federally guaranteed crutch you can lean on if you make poor business decisions like, say, hiring employees you have no need for, as he is lecturing us to do.

Those of us in the real business world without a taxpayer-funded safety net only hire people when they’re necessary for function of business, not because the President of the United States or Jeff Immelt says we should do so because we need to reduce national unemployment. This administration’s inability to stimulate job growth does not equate to an onus on me as a business owner to make his unemployment numbers look better.

GM (another government entity - surprise, surprise) can, and did, for example, hire workers to build a glut of Silverado pickup trucks that were utterly not wanted or needed by the American consumer, simply because it “looked good” that GM was hiring and creating jobs and bolstered their balance sheet. By shipping these trucks to dealerships that already had over 6 months inventory of Silverados, they effectively pulled their 2012 earnings into this model year. Talk about accounting tricks… GM knows that if those trucks don’t sell, it doesn’t matter - the taxpayer will bail them out at the point of the IRS’ gun yet again. That’s all well and good for GM, but when adults who actually have some business acumen are running a company that truly operates in a free market, they don’t build products that the market won’t bear; or if they do, they won’t be in business very long.

The reality is that this administration has a vested interest in GM pumping up it’s revenue numbers this year. This is nothing more than an effort to inflate GM’s stock price ahead of a stock sale planned by the U.S. Treasury Department. The Treasury holds more than 500 million shares of General Motors and is “conveniently” waiting until August to sell some of them. In order to avoid a loss of taxpayer investment that the administration said would not happen, Treasury needs to sell its remaining shares at $53 merely to break even on its rescue of GM. But GM shares are way underwater and doing nothing $33. Do the math.

The bottom line is that I’m tired - and it would appear that the American people are as well (especially the business people) of listening to preaching from sanctimonious gasbags like our President and Jeff Immelt insisting that we all need to “do more” and hold up examples of these risk-free actions that were taken with taxpayer safety nets as exhibit A of how this all “just works”, and we simply need to make businesses hire people and the unemployment issue will be solved. This administration is clearly out of ideas as to how to jump-start the economy and they’re now grabbing at any straw that is put in front of them. It’s not surprising, given that this President and 90+% of his staff have never run a business of any sort in their lives, but that doesn’t mean that the American people are going to sit and listen to this claptrap from Obama and his ilk come 2012.

For that reason alone, I was so happy to hear that David Plouffe is actually advising the President that, “So, you know, people won’t vote based on the unemployment rate.”

I’ll take that bet, sir.

Circle of life - Federal Government-style

So it would appear that the arms that the Feds were selling to druglords in Mexico as part of “Operation Gunrunner”, are now being used by those very cartels to shoot down Mexican police helicopters that the US sold to the Mexican government. Our rifles shooting down our helos. Ironic, ain’t it?