It's Happening---We Told You So

Sometimes it is so much fun to say "I told you so!" Like when you are on an auto trip and your husband gets lost and you tell him to go one way and he wants to go the other way and after an hour of driving in circles, you end up where YOU said to go in the first place! There is much glee derived from the phrase!!

Sometimes, however, "I told you so" comes with sadness, regret, tragedy and even ruin. And then there are those times where "I told you so" lies somewhere in the middle.

During the run-up to the election, candidate Obama's ties to William Ayers and Reverend Wright, were poo poo'ed as being inconsequential and yet in the prism of now President Obama's sweeping plans for our government, free enterprise, charities, immigration, taxes and even basic Constitutional freedoms, we can see the fingerprints of these individuals all over them. Sadly, Obama is doing exactly as he promised and we told you so!

When candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber that his plan was to "Spread the Wealth Around", Joe was excoriated for having the unmitigated gall to question "THE ONE". We were told, that this was the way to a healthy economy during an "unprecedented" downturn. The threat of spreading the wealth and setting a boundary of $250,000 for the line dividing the rich from the rest of the unwashed masses was taken very seriously by many small businessmen and the contraction of the economy was well on the way before candidate Obama ever set foot in the Oval Office. Well before the election, small businesses started pulling back on expansion plans, unnecessary spending, and started laying off people. Smart small businesses hunkered down and went into survival mode and vowed to stay small to avoid being penalized for their success....we told you so!

Conservatives railed against wealth redistribution and warned that demonizing the earners who create the jobs, buy the goods and give to charities would take away any incentive for them to be productive. Now in a mere two months we have thrown trillions of dollars down the rat hole of unsupervised bailouts in the name of Stimulus only to see the recipients give us the middle finger salute on so many fronts that our legislators have initiated legislation to tax away the bonuses of bankers and other companies that take bailout funds. Well, yesterday in the St. Louis Business Journal, this story was featured.

Don Davis, president of Centrue Bank in St. Louis, has resigned because his income will be severely restricted by new federal limitations on bank executives. In January, Centrue accepted $32.7 million under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly called TARP. Later the federal government imposed restrictions on the bonuses of top executives at banks and other financial institutions that took TARP money. "My salary and bonus isn't going to work — TARP isn't going to allow it," Davis said in an interview Monday. Davis, for example, is paid $350,000 in base salary, but also receives 10 percent of the profits of the St. Louis branch of Centrue. In 2008, that amounted to about $750,000 for Davis. "TARP doesn't like me getting that," Davis said. Don Davis, president of Centrue Bank in St. Louis, has resigned because his income will be severely restricted by new federal limitations on bank executives.

So now we are seeing that this prophecy is coming true. Businessmen are taking their ball and bat and going home--game over. If government can determine who will be punitively taxed, what is standing between you, the ordinary guy, and them???? The answer is..."nothing". And it does NOT give me pleasure to say "I told you so."