Commentary by Michael Reagan: Obamanomics - The gift that keeps on giving

Like everybody else, presidents have birthdays and have a right to celebrate them and invite others to join them in the festivities. But taking advantage of the occasion to bash the rich and then charge some of them a whopping $40,000 to be able to sit near him as he observes his birthday is nothing short of outrageous.

The only thing President Obama excels in is fundraising - after all, when a president puts the arm on you, you can hardly say no. And the president has been putting the arm on a lot of his rich friends lately and raising big bucks for his upcoming re-election campaign. It's a shame he can't create jobs as efficiently as he raises money for himself. If he did I might even vote for him. However, he doesn't, and so I won't.

He should quit blaming the rich for being successful and take a look in the mirror. Instead of quoting my father to justify himself and his shocking incompetence he should try to imitate my dad and try to govern as well as my dad did.

In just barely two years he has driven the economy into a ditch yet has the gall to blame our economic troubles on President Bush, who has been out of office for two years. Moreover, during the last four years of the Bush presidency, Congress, which controls the purse strings and thus the economy, was controlled by the Democrats. It wasn't George Bush who overspent; it was the Democrats on Capitol Hill who did their best to imitate the most drunken of the legendary drunken sailors.

"Spend and elect" has long been the policy for the Democratic Party and they have been on a spending spree since taking control of Capitol Hill with nary a word of caution coming from the Obama White House. The nation is already staggering over Washington's out-of-control spending spree and we have yet to begin to pay the monstrous bills for such costly programs as Obamacare.

It appears that Barack Obama and his toadies on Capitol Hill have no concern over the fact that their overspending is placing a burden on our children and grandchildren, who will be burdened with paying the bill this generation's overspending is putting on their shoulders. The time-honored American policy of each generation leaving their children a prosperous nation has been reversed by Obama and his Capitol Hill allies. Their heritage will be mountains of debt.

We are now experiencing a monetary crisis thanks to Obamanomics. The savings of the American people have been savaged by the president's economic policies and the value of the dollar has plummeted, sending the price of gold skyrocketing. Economists are warning that the nation is heading into a double-dip recession.

Incredibly, the president and his toadies in the media and on Capitol Hill are blaming that growing army of Americans in the tea party for the economic problems for which he and he alone are to blame. Decent American citizens who comprise the tea party are labeled terrorists for daring to oppose Obama's quasi-Marxist policies.

At the heart of Obamanomics is the discredited political movement that has its roots in the political and economic policies of Karl Marx. It is a policy that has wreaked havoc whenever its ugly head is raised.

Even with the debt-ceiling compromise in place, the stock market this week proved that investors are still nervous about the economy's long-term health.

It may be a happy birthday for the president. It is not, however, a happy occasion for the American people, who are paying for the gifts he's giving to himself.

• Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of "The New Reagan Revolution" (St. Martin's Press, 2011). Visit his website at www.reagan.com, or e-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.