The Rumple in the Jungle: A gift from President Mobutu to the people of Zaire and an honor for the black man.
Posted on 09/14/2010 8:03:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
‘Washington: We Have a Problem” proclaims Vanity Fair magazine. In an eerie echo of the verdicts passed during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, namely that the presidency was “too big for one man,” Vanity Fair now declares “The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around.”
The Vanity Fair piece is a long apologia for President Obama’s perceived ineffectiveness, and reflects — no surprise here — the Obama interpretation of events. “The G.O.P.,” writes Todd Purdum, “has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep refusal to give the president votes for any of his major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus bill to health-care reform.” This is President Obama’s constant plaint — though it rings hollow coming from someone who took office with comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress.
But in the course of documenting the difficulty of governing, Vanity Fair does make a conservative point. Government is too big. Purdum quotes from just one day’s Federal Register:
The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you’ll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items.
The president himself doesn’t at all concede that government is attempting to do too much (and failing at most of it). On the contrary, his vanity (and it is a common one for left-wingers) is that he believes his particular ideas on business investment, medical procedures, housing, and thousands of other matters are the solutions to our woes, but “politics” keeps getting in the way.
We’ve seen President Obama’s delusions of expertise on display before. Without any trial period, demonstration project, or peer-reviewed study, the federal government dictated that medical records be digitalized and extracted $19 billion from taxpayers to fund the transition. The new systems, the president insisted, would prevent errors, reduce costs, and improve patient care. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, “a 2009 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that hospitals with more-advanced electronic systems fared no better than other hospitals on measures of administrative costs. . . . Meanwhile, many doctors and nurses say they’re frustrated with the technology. While some say electronic records have improved the way they practice medicine, many others say the systems are time-consuming distractions that take away from patient care.”
Digitalized medical records would certainly have evolved with time — just as paper books and newspapers are rapidly losing ground to their electronic competitors. But without government intrusion, the programs would have developed organically, adjusting to user feedback and actual experience — and costing the taxpayers nothing.
At his September 10 press conference, the president announced another “common sense” idea: We must stop “giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” A familiar trope from the 2008 campaign, this “idea” is really another tax increase.
The president’s refrain notwithstanding, there is no section of the U.S. tax code that rewards U.S. companies for outsourcing American jobs. American firms pay taxes on their worldwide income. Our effective corporate tax rate, the highest in the OECD according to a Cato Institute study, puts our companies at a competitive disadvantage abroad. The tax code accordingly does permit U.S. multinationals to “defer” taxes on income earned abroad that is reinvested abroad. They pay taxes on that income only when they repatriate the earnings to the United States.
But eliminating the “deferral” would simply increase corporate rates still further, undercutting the profitability of American companies with overseas operations. As Cato’s Daniel Griswold explains, “There is no evidence that expanding employment at U.S.- owned affiliates comes at the expense of overall employment by parent companies back home in the United States. In fact, the evidence and experience of U.S. multinational companies points in the opposite direction: foreign and domestic operations tend to complement each other and expand together. . . . More activity and sales abroad often require the hiring of more managers, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and production workers at the parent company.”
Reducing the rate of corporate taxation would make U.S. companies more competitive overseas while also attracting more foreign investment here.
But reducing taxes, like reducing regulation, or permitting the market to shape digital medical records, offends President Obama’s preference for top-down decision-making. He isn’t deciding, Carter-like, who should use the White House tennis courts, but he is attempting to do pretty much everything else, with similar results.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.
Declusion? Is that the result of developing a good strategery?
They could not even buy themselves an election with this $800 million Porkulus because the system is utterly incapable of distributing it effectively. You’d think that would serve as a lesson to them.
Mona Charon and National Review used the word “delusions” correctly. I suspect that SeekAndFind would like to refudiate the typo. Side note: you never see the words “Obama” and “competence” in the same story other than to point out that the two have no overlap.
“Todd S. Purdum
The Hitman — Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum Unleashes Vicious Attack On Palin
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/people/todd-s-purdum#ixzz0zW6Y0xS2";
“The G.O.P.,” writes Todd Purdum, “has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep refusal to give the president votes for any of his major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus bill to health-care reform.”
Hey Todd, here’s some information you can use. Politicians are self-serving survivalists. They do whatever they think is best for themselves, first and above all. Even if it means screwing their party, their constituents, or even their country. This is true for most D’s and R’s.
So if the GOP was in lockstep in opposition to Obama, there is only one conclusion. The threat to them from Obama is real, and significant, enough to unify them.
Obama created his own mess.
When Forman fought Ali...he said that the people there were souting ‘ALI...ALI!!!’ and sprinkling ‘hoobie dust’ around.
Maybe “O” thinks ‘hoobie dust’ takes the place of competence!!!
—bflr—
The Rumple in the Jungle: A gift from President Mobutu to the people of Zaire and an honor for the black man.
And events have shown the Republicans were right in doing so. These initiative passed anyway and the results have been disasterous.
Foreman said that the ‘hoobie dust’ is the reason he lost.
We need to get some and sprinkle it on “O”!!
In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan: “Government isn’t the solution to our problems......government IS the problem.”
and his traveling freakshow of an administration.
it will take a decade to undo what they have done in 20 months.
by then there will be enough retard voters to elect another communist turd so we can do it all again.
This is a typical MSM formulation that we all should be seeing through by now.
Conservative president is facing resistance to his policies - all the stories are about how America doesn't want those policies.
Liberal president is facing resistance to his policies - all the talking heads bemoan the fact that the "system is broken".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.