To justify even bigger government, our president and his surrogates have told Americans lines such “deficits don’t matter,” “tax cuts have been tried and don’t work” and “free markets have never worked.” But Canada, our long-overlooked, and now richer, neighbor, is telling a different story.As of July 1, Canada surpassed the U.S. in net household worth. That’s a sign of a nation that’s been growing for a sustained period, boosting household wealth .

According to a study by Environics Analytics Wealthscapes published by The Globe & Mail, average Canadian household net worth in 2011 was $363,202, surpassing by $40,000 the $319,970 U.S. average.

Commentators from The Atlantic to Bloomberg News have rush to lay this success to Canada’s socialism. That’s nonsense. Canada was stagnant for years until it — like, say, Chile in Latin America, moved away from socialism toward free markets.

The U.S., on the other hand, is moving closer to socialism. And not surprising, it finds itself in roughly the same downwardly mobile position as, say, Argentina.

For one thing, Canada has embraced fiscal discipline. Its federal debt is around 35% of GDP compared to the U.S. at 100%. The deficit is 2% of GDP, not 10% as here. At June’s G-20 meeting in Mexico, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told heads of state that economic growth and fiscal discipline “go hand in hand.”

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President Obama cannot run on his record and makes no effort to do so. The economic recovery that was coming and coming and coming, is allegedly still coming, but isn’t here. That is the same recovery that he could not produce overnight, and now cannot produce because of the shambles in Europe, which falls on America because Europe is “our greatest trading partner.” This is more diaphanous rubbish than most such apologia: Foreign trade takes less than 15 percent of American production; Europe, even when taken as a whole, is only the fifth trading partner (after Canada, China, Mexico, and Japan); Europe generally is not in worse condition than the U.S. (Germany especially is functioning much better); and concerns about the 17-nation euro have largely driven the investment of $900 billion by Europeans in the United States since 2008, almost twice the previous traditional rate.

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After his attacks on Mitt Romney’s involvement in the job-creating private equity firm Bain Capital failed to resonate with an underemployed America, President Obama has retooled his message somewhat.

Now, after the Washington Post published a story about Bain’s alleged role in outsourcing factory jobs overseas, he’s blasting Republican nominee Mitt Romney as an “outsourcer in chief” and “outsourcing pioneer.”

He did so even as, the Washington Free Beacon reports, Team Obama spent nearly $4,700 on services from a Canadian telemarketing company called Pacific East between March and June. The Obama campaign also paid a call center in Manila, Philippines, $78,314.10 for telemarketing services between the start of the campaign and March.

Few people remember an August 2010 report at InformationWeek.com about the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee, launching a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

They were to provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

The hypocrisy only starts here. While blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and the 20,000 jobs it would bring immediately, with hundreds of thousands later in an economic ripple effect, this is the President who applauded a U.S. Export-Import Bank’s loan to Brazil’s state-run Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion with the promise of more to follow.

At the time, Obama was railing against tax incentives for U.S. oil companies and still is.

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The study published by Professor Mark Regnerus this week certainly has some flaws, and many of the comments made about it have some merit. However, as a matter of intellectual honesty, it needs to be recognized that virtually all the studies of same-sex parenting that have been conducted thus far fall far short of any standard of scientific testing.

Of the 50-plus such studies done in the past 15 years, the vast majority come to the same conclusion: Children of gay parents perform at least as well as children from heterosexual families; there is no difference in child outcomes based on family structure.

For several reasons, this literature is unlike anything else within social science. First, it partly arose from, and was strongly influenced by, legal cases in which lesbian mothers were denied custody of their children on the basis of their sexual orientation. Second, for the most part it has been written by individuals with strong personal worldviews who sympathize with those studied. Third, the focus of the literature is often on “soft” measures of child and family performance that are not easily verifiable by third-party replication, and that differ substantially from measures used in other family studies. One of the odd characteristics of this literature is the lack of consistency of measures across time. Subsequent studies seldom test for measures that were used in previous studies. Fourth, the data and procedures used in the studies are never made available online in order for other scholars to replicate findings. And finally, almost all the literature on gay parenting is based on weak designs, biased samples, and low-powered tests.

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In the May/June Cato Policy Report, analyst Chris Edwards notes: “In some ways the United States is in even worse fiscal shape today than Canada was two decades ago” when it was suffering through “a deep recession and teetered on the brink of a debt crisis caused by rising government spending.”

Canada stopped its slide. Will America?

As economist Walter Williams pointed out here Wednesday, the rocketing federal debt is 106% of our economy, the highest it’s been since World War II and three times what it was during the 1970s. To say our economy is sluggish is almost to exaggerate.

Making a bleak outlook even harsher is the largest-in-history, economy-crippling tax hike coming in January when the Bush tax cuts expire.

In short, the U.S. cannot continue down its current path and hope to remain the world’s main economic power and global beacon of prosperity. It must reverse course.

It can happen. After years of implementing socialist policies, Canada, as Sweden has done, quietly reversed course in the 1980s, cutting taxes and launching privatization efforts. The tax cuts have acted as a stimulus while privatization, writes Edwards, “reduced government debt and helped spur economic growth by creating a more dynamic industrial structure.”

Canada has pursued, as well, free trade to the benefit of its industries and consumers. It also avoided a housing crisis, such as the meltdown that still plagues the U.S. economy, because the mortgage industry there isn’t pressured by the government to make risky home loans.

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An Iowa State University study has found that the federal sugar program costs U.S. consumers roughly $3.5 billion a year and deprives the workforce of 20,000 jobs. This New Deal-era framework of barriers on sugar imports and of price supports for domestic sugar is a racket that benefits only a few, in particular the Fanjul family of Florida.

In a letter to House leaders, a group of lawmakers from both parties call U.S. sugar policy “the last of the command-and-control commodity programs that has yet to be reformed.” The 22 representatives insist that Congress should “have a robust debate about sugar policy during consideration of the 2012 farm bill.”

They write: “No other farm program is deliberately designed to transfer income from American consumers and workers to a small, but ’special,’ interest group of sugar processors and growers.”

The sugar program has led to more job decay than candy has caused cavities. To avoid high prices at home, food manufacturers that use sugar have moved jobs to Canada, where the price of sugar is less than half the U.S. price, and to Mexico, where they’re two-thirds the American rate.

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At least this confected casualness is preferable to the former, ostentatious fun of the summiteer: speeding limousines hurtling to a stop as if conveying bank robbers transferring to escape helicopters, as well-upholstered and accoutered men debouch from their cars and bustlingly wrestle bulging briefcases up the conference-building steps for the evident benefit of all mankind. For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world. Thus it was with Pope (Saint) Leo and Attila the Hun in 452; Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; Napoleon and Alexander on the raft at Tilsit in 1807; Metternich and the heads of the Great Powers at Vienna in 1814–15; Bismarck and the Powers at Berlin in 1878; Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George at Versailles in 1918–19; Hitler, Chamberlain, and the others at Munich in 1938; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945; and the post-war summit meetings from Potsdam through to the dramatic Reagan-Gorbachev meetings in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow. Hugely important decisions, many of them disastrous and some dishonorable, were made at those earlier meetings. The previous meetings at Camp David, between Churchill and Roosevelt in 1943, and between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in 1959, were necessary and at least discussed serious subjects.

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The dominant media’s habit of covering up for President Obama is infamous. There are the commander-in-chief gaffes (“president of Canada,” “I’ve now been in 57 states,” “I don’t know what the term is in Austrian,” etc.); his close association over many years with a bitterly anti-American and racist preacher; his exploitation of legislative trickery to force government health care on the nation; and the shameless stealing of credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden from the troops “out there fighting on my behalf.”

Yet when it comes to ignoring matters directly related to ethics and corruption, it is then that the president’s media lackeys truly threaten our system of representative government. When Obama this year explicitly broke his pledge that he would not reap the benefits of super-PACs, the White House press corps should have been aggravating him at every turn. But it didn’t.

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One wonders what India’s officials must have thought as Hillary Clinton arrived in Delhi with a warning that unless they buy less Iranian oil — now at 550,000 barrels a day, or 9% of its oil imports — they face punishing U.S. sanctions on their banks by June 28.

To be sure, Clinton is focused on a serious issue. Cutting off Iran’s oil money is critical to halting Iran’s illegal nuclear program that menaces global security. It has to be done.

But something’s off about the U.S. asking India to make sacrifices in shifting its oil suppliers without any corresponding U.S. effort to shift its own suppliers to give India more options.

The fact is, the U.S. is now buying record amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia, which is the most logical substitute supplier for India, leaving less for India to buy. This is notable because U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia soared 38% this year to an average of 1.4 million barrels a day, according to a March 16 Dow Jones Newswires report.

This is happening because the Obama administration is halting domestic energy production, both in refusing to drill offshore and in rejecting the U.S.-Canada Keystone XL pipeline, which Clinton’s own State Department has a major role in blocking.

This shows the administration’s stubborn focus on domestic politics to please campaign donors is undercutting U.S. diplomacy and global security.

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President Obama’s re-election campaign released an ad Tuesday saying Mitt Romney “shipped American jobs to places like Mexico and China” when he led the investment firm Bain Capital.

The $780,000 ad buy in the key swing states of Ohio, Iowa and Virginia was in response to an ad by the free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) noting the administration’s penchant for wasting taxpayer money in support of green energy companies, particularly those overseas or with foreign owners.

Among other things, AFP noted, the Obama administration approved a plan by electric car company Fisker to use part of its $529 million federal stimulus loan guarantee to build its manufacturing facility, and the 500 jobs it supports, in Finland.

Now comes Obama’s counterattack — an odd charge since he seeks to block the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that would create 20,000 jobs fast and hundreds of thousands of jobs in an economic ripple effect.

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