Posted on 03/06/2009 8:18:35 AM PST by Reagan Man
Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.
Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?
But with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama's proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.
With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.
All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't "believe in bigger government" and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.
The president's suggestions that all the necessary tax increases can be squeezed out of the richest 2 percent are deceptive and likely to stir class resentment. And his apparent cave-ins to liberal interest groups may change the country for the worse.
Such concerns may help explain why the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 17 percent from the morning of Inauguration Day (8,280) to its close on March 4 (6,876). The markets have also been deeply shaken by Obama's alarming failure to come up with a clear plan for fixing the crippled financial system -- which has loomed since his election four months ago as by far his most urgent challenge -- or for working with foreign leaders to arrest the meltdown of the world economy.
The house is burning down. It's no time to be watering the grass.
This is not to deny that the liberal wish list in Obama's staggering $3.6 trillion budget would be wonderful if we had limitless resources. But in the real world, it could put vast areas of the economy under permanent government mismanagement, kill millions of jobs, drive investors and employers overseas, and bankrupt the nation.
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats in Congress are racing to gratify their interest groups in a slew of ways likely to do much more harm than good: pushing a union-backed "card-check" bill that would bypass secret-ballot elections on unionization and facilitate intimidation of reluctant workers; slipping into the stimulus package a formula to reimburse states that increase welfare dependency among single mothers and reduce their incentives to work; defunding a program that now pays for the parents of some 1,700 poor kids to choose private schools over crumbling D.C. public schools; fencing out would-be immigrants with much-needed skills.
Not to mention the $7.7 billion in an omnibus spending bill to pay for 9,000 earmarks of the kind that Obama campaigned against: $1.7 million for research on pig odors in Iowa; $1.7 million for a honeybee factory in Texas; $819,000 for research on catfish genetics in Alabama; $2 million to promote astronomy in Hawaii; $650,000 to manage beavers in North Carolina and Mississippi; and many more.
Meanwhile, the stimulus package is stuffed with spending such as "the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee public schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools, and, quite logically, no plans for new construction," in the words of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Obama can take credit for keeping campaign promises (which he might have been wiser to defer) on health care, energy, and more, and for ending some of George W. Bush's budget gimmickry. But he has been deceptive in basing his deficit projections on phantom expenditure cuts and wildly optimistic revenue estimates, and in proclaiming "a new era of responsibility" to be paid for by raising taxes only on "the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans."
The numbers don't add up -- and still won't if and when, as seems almost certain, Obama ratchets up his so-far-fairly-modest new taxes on the top 2 percent. "A tax policy that confiscated 100 percent of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue," according to a February 27 editorial in The Wall Street Journal. "That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable 'dime' of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion."
As for the budget's $2 trillion in projected net "savings," Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, admitted in testimony on Tuesday under questioning by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that $1.6 trillion comes from phantom cuts of the money that would be needed to sustain the troop surge in Iraq for another decade -- money that nobody ever intended to spend.
Other supposed savings -- especially from Medicare -- seem unlikely to materialize absent benefit cuts, which Obama has not proposed. And the cost of any health care legislation -- to be drafted largely by a Congress that is allergic to the kind of cost-cutting necessary to make universal care sustainable -- is likely to be two or three times the $634 billion over 10 years that Obama has budgeted.
Meanwhile, "politics trumps economics" in Obama's housing program, says Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. It targets tax credits narrowly on first-time homebuyers with weak credit ratings while creating few incentives for the more affluent and credit-worthy people who have the collective buying power to revive the housing market. Obama also supports a "cram-down" proposal -- authorizing bankruptcy judges to unilaterally cut distressed homeowners' payments -- that would be hopelessly unadministrable at best and might drive up mortgage rates.
Small wonder that liberal commentators who complained about Obama's initial stabs at bipartisanship are ecstatic about his budget. And small wonder that some centrists who have had high hopes for Obama -- including New York Times columnist David Brooks, my colleague Clive Crook, David Gergen, and Christopher Buckley -- are sounding alarms.
In a March 3 column headed "A Moderate Manifesto," Brooks wrote: "Those of us who consider ourselves moderates -- moderate conservative, in my case -- are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice.... The only thing more scary than Obama's experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.... [We] thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We're going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force."
Exactly right, except perhaps the "intellectually vapid" part. But turning centrist values into an influential political force will take some doing. Although almost 30 percent of Americans call themselves political independents, the political and intellectual classes are so ideologically polarized that resurgent Democratic liberals and wounded Republican conservatives get most of the media attention.
With the Republican Party in ruins and dominated by such hard-right conservatives as Rush Limbaugh, no center-right figure on the scene today has the stature to lead a loyal opposition against a popular president who puts a moderate face and an eloquent voice on an ambitiously liberal ideology.
Fortunately, a dozen or so centrist Democrats in the Senate are voicing concerns about the more profligate spending proposals. Together with the Senate's three centrist Republicans, they could hold back the liberal tide and appeal to the more moderate angels of Obama's nature.
I still hold out hope that Obama is not irrevocably "casting his lot with collectivists and statists," as asserted by Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide and a leading conservative intellectual now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Commentary magazine's blog Contentions.
And I hope that the president ponders well Margaret Thatcher's wise warning against some collectivist conceits, in a 1980 speech quoted by Wehner: "The illusion that government can be a universal provider, and yet society still stay free and prosperous.... The illusion that every loss can be covered by a subsidy. The illusion that we can break the link between reward and effort, and still get the effort."
“After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy?”
Mitt Romeny.
To use a geek term, you’ve been fsck’d
“Liberal leanings? When do you think these “centrist” sheeple will discover they elected a flat-out Marxist as Leader of the Free World?” ~ nutmeg
Here’s a new 12-Step Program for them:
Apparatchiks Anonymous
1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent little egoic dreams of control could restore us to true liberalism.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Creator and Guarantor of our Liberty.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.
5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty remove all these defects of ideology.
7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the Times.
8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all by realizing that these constructs are irrelevant.
9. Made direct amends to such people by switching parties.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other Leftists, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
In conclusion...[...]http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/12/announcing-new-12-step-program-for.html
VERY KEY POINT:
They’re not afraid of his liberal leanings, nor of the leftist orientation of the budget itself.
They’re worried that the budget REVEALS his liberalness.
Sic Semper Leftist - this is always their way, to implement their agenda by stealth and deception.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum.
Whenever evil wins, it is only by default:
by the moral failure of those who evade the fact
that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
AYN RAND
“The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.... [We] thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.”
I knew there was a reason I never liked David Brooks.
It’s because he’s a moron.
He’s really just in favor of the status quo: he’s frightened by bambi’s push to the left, just as he’s frightened by an imagined counter-pull to the right. “Pull to the right” means “MORE economic freedom for the individual and greater wealth production resulting in increased economic progress for the country”...Brooks fears that.
He knows very little. The interventionist “status quo” was unsustainable. Government intervention, by its nature, must fail to achieve its objectives, even from the standpoint of its proponents. To counter the negative, unintended consquences of regulation, proponents are forced, by the logic of the situation, to advocate yet MORE regulation. The correct course of action, needless to say, would be to abolish the original regulation.
This is the significance, I believe, of our present crisis: it represents the inevitable and logical working out of a set of premises and assumptions about the relationship between “government” and “the individual” that would have occurred eventually even under “moderate” conservative leadership. “Moderately conservative” means “moderately committed to freedom.” There are no intellectually compelling arguments for such a position, which is the reason Brooks complains about not having a voice — others like him were swayed long ago either by the arguments from the consistent left or the consistent right.
The middle is unsustainable, being governed mainly by fear of any change at all, even change for the better.
Liberal? How about Marxist dictator?
He just finding that out? He must have head his head stuck down in the sand.”
Too little——too late
"and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free. "
Another one. Only too late again. They only learn when it's too late. We warned this would happen.
Thanks for the ping!
“THe a**holes who thought Obama was a centrist - including most of the GOP - deserve to live in a marxist hell. They are fortunate that conservatives may save them from that fate. At least we are trying to do so.”
well, we’ve been calling him a socialist and they didn’t believe us. They’d say: “well, you did the same thing with Clinton and accused him of every murder in Arkansas and nothing came out of it. He turned out to be not so bad.” So there’s a bit of “Boy who cried wolf” here.
Does anyone take Stuart Taylor seriously?
Words fail me. Anyone who didn’t see this coming is an idiot.
Actually, it worked. After he tried ramming socialized medicine down our throats, we won back congress for the first time in 40 years. Clinton was shrewd enough - and distracted enough - to hide some of his marxist tendencies after that.
I believe FDR deliberately took advantage of the American people's misery to introduce his Marxist/socialist programs, and BarryO is now doing the same thing to further implement FDR's power grab except on a far grander scale than FDR ever dreamed possible. If he succeeds, and with another compliant Democrat Congress comparable to those in FDR's day backing him I don't doubt that he will, the US will become a Marxist/socialist nation similar to Euro nations like Sweden. That is, like Sweden except for much less freedom for everyone but the wealthy liberal elite, Hollywood trash, and the fawning media who worship the ground BarryO stands on.
Yep,and there are a lot more than just three. In fact, I believe there are many more Rinos in Congress than there are real conservatives.
So sit down and shut up.
Yeah-I was afraid, too.
That’s why I voted against him in Nov.and prayed to God he wouldn’t win.
These “centrist” morons are now locking the barn after the horses are gone.
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