Posted on 09/02/2012 10:49:10 PM PDT by Arec Barrwin
If Only D'Souza Were Right
Mises Daily: Monday, September 03, 2012 by Gary North
by Gary North
2016: Obama's America
I went to see 2016: Obama's America. Dinesh D'Souza wrote, stars in, directed, narrates, and did the original research for it. If we look at this from the point of view of its success as a documentary, I think it is effective. It is making money in theaters. This is amazing for a documentary. It is a campaign-year documentary, and it is a good one.
It is also dead wrong. That is because it misses the fundamental political fact of the last dozen years: the Obama administration is the operational successor of the Bush administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, on Wall Street, Barack Obama is George W. Bush in blackface. Obama is the star of a 21-century minstrel show.
This fact has been deliberately ignored for almost four years by both the neoconservative Right and the grin-and-bear-it Left. Neither side will admit what I regard as the fundamental fact of this documentary. It is a long whitewash of the policies of George W. Bush. The On-Budget Deficit
If you understand this early, you can see it in what is by far the best section of the movie. It appears at the end. It is an interview with the ever-eloquent David Walker, who resigned in 2008 from his job as comptroller general — senior accountant — of the United States.
This date is crucial: the last year of the Bush administration.
I need to make three observations. First, the deficit is vastly worse than the movie portrays. The movie sticks with the nonissue: the on-budget debt of $15 trillion, which is chump change, while never mentioning the central problem: the $222 trillion present value of the unfunded liabilities of the off-budget deficit, meaning the deficits of politically sacrosanct Social Security and Medicare. This is the heart of the federal government's highly entertaining Punch and Judy show over the deficit, with Paul Ryan as Punch and Obama cross-dressing as Judy.
Second, Walker has spent years warning the public about the unsustainable increase of the on-budget federal debt. He was eloquent on camera. But, central to that presentation is the fact that he blamed George W. Bush as much as he blamed Obama. He says on camera that the turning point on the deficit began with Bush's presidency. He showed that we are headed for a fiscal disaster, and it may overtake us during the presidency of whoever is elected in 2016.
In terms of the on-budget deficit, Obama's administration is an extension of Bush's. Dinesh D'Souza
Miss this, and you miss the whitewash. This documentary is an implicit whitewash. It relies on an assumption, namely, that we are not dealing in 2012 with a single political administration, which began in January 2001. Sadly, we are.
The key to understanding this is Timothy Geithner, who was the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (privately owned) in 2008, and is the secretary of the Treasury now. He does not appear in the documentary.
Third, neither Walker nor D'Souza mentions on-screen what should be the obvious constitutional fact — namely, that it is the Congress that legally initiates all spending bills, and it is the House of Representatives that holds the hammer constitutionally. There was not one word in the movie about the Congress of the United States as being constitutionally in authority over the budget of the United States government. How in the world could anyone make a documentary that focuses at the very end on the central problem that the country faces, and then try to pin the tail on Obama as the donkey?
We are living in a bipartisan, congressionally mandated, slow-motion train wreck. The Congress of the United States could stop Obama today as easily as it could have stopped Bush. Congress is not interested in stopping the deficit; it is interested in avoiding all responsibility for the annual $1.2 trillion on-budget disaster that is the federal budgetary process.
The fiscal killer of killers in Bush's administration was never mentioned: the prescription-drug law that Bush signed in 2003. The vote was close in Congress. If he had vetoed it, it would never have passed. Instead, he turned the signing into a pageant. He brought in thousands of seniors to witness it. He announced: "You are here to witness the greatest advance in health care coverage for America's seniors since the founding of Medicare."
This sell-out to Teddy Kennedy (who refused to attend), added at least $8.7 trillion to the unfunded liability of Medicare. Yet it is never mentioned in the documentary. Instead, the documentary focuses on Obamacare, whose burden is mainly on the private sector and actually relieves some of the Medicare payments. In any case, that law was really Pelosicare. She was the ramrod. The documentary has one brief segment on her. It skips the point: bad as that law is, she was far more responsible for it than he was.
The Economy
A related thing that bothers me intensely is the fact that the documentary tries to pin the bad economy on Obama. The bad economy should be pinned on Alan Greenspan, with considerable help from his successor.
To suggest that the president of the United States has the power to make the economy worse to imply that he also has the power to make the economy terrible. He has limited power either way, unless he drags us into a war. Bush dragged us into two wars.
Ron Paul always was right for 36 years in not pointing to the president as the main economic problem, but rather the Federal Reserve System. So, any documentary that does not go after the Federal Reserve when it talks about economic problems but blames the president instead, and also ignores Congress, is doing the general public an enormous disservice. It keeps the Federal Reserve in the background in the thinking of the viewers, when the Federal Reserve ought to be in the foreground, with the presidency in the background. This is basic economics. D'Souza does not know what he is talking about with respect to economics.
That's a point worth making to young hard core liberals. The guy who promised them all kinds of things did none of them. Gitmo is still open, the war in Afghanistan is still ongoing, and the Patriot Act is alive and well. Some of the idealistic young voters will realize that the President is just more of what President Bush was.
More importantly, when they try to rationalize why President Obama kept Gitmo, the war, and the Patriot Act, they'll hopefully start to have a more mature view of politics.
Note: No point in wasting one's breath on established older liberals, they'll just spin up some irrational excuse.
Try the slimy ex-Whig political tyrant who destroyed the Republic, Abe Lincoln!
“Miss this, and you miss the whitewash. This documentary is an implicit whitewash. It relies on an assumption, namely, that we are not dealing in 2012 with a single political administration, which began in January 2001.”
I just saw the movie and did not think that this section was in any way not factual and well documented. In leaving out the unfunded future liabilities, I will give the benefit of the doubt to D’Souza simply because it is so easy to get lost in the weeds. He kept is simple with facts that nobody can dispute and not having to get bogged down in explaining the concept of net present value, etc. The simple facts are powerful enough to make the point about BHO.
And with respect to Bush 43, it is one thing to say he approved of TARP and thus started the country down the present road, but it is another thin entirely to speculate that Bush would have continued with the same trilions in deficits that BHO did. Bush was honestly trying to rescue the financial system, even as he did not sufficiently defend the free market were as I accept D’Souza’s assertion that BHO wants to shackle the US with wealth-leveling debt.
In other words, under Bush we get bigger government. Under BHO, we get big and then Bigger government. They are similar but the magnitude and goals are different.
In any case, the left loves to scold us about “sustainability” while their deficit spending is certainly not sustainable. There are only so many jelly beans in the jar and we have exhausted our ability to write paper script for far more jelly beans than we can possibly ever produce. If the next Republican administration doesn’t understand that, we are just as doomed and the only issue is when.
Many of us here on FR are still very angry at Bush for his squandering of the opportunity we laid before him in his 2nd term (re-election and a GOP Congress) and his lack of policing of Wall St.
But my understanding of D’Souza’s film is that the budget deficit is a side issue and the main issue focuses on the true political agenda of the current occupant of the White House.
Obama continued the war policies of Bush because his managers wanted to ‘ease’ him into commanding the ship while preparing America for a fundamental change to a weakened socialist entity that would eventually pay tribute and justice to other nations for the purported neo-colonial abuse that was rendered to these countries.
The Brits tried to Christianize them and the Soviets tried to Communize them. Neither effort had a positive end so the weight of history says your proposal needs to remain on the shelf.
Two possible alternatives beyond the pure cut/run: retain a Special Forces presence to act as they did in 2001 (good read - The Horse Soldiers) or go totally stand-off with drones.
Spot on. The parallels between Hoover + FDR and Bush + Obama are uncanny.
When you are stupid in one of the areas of primary importance to what you are writing about (no matter how brilliant you might be in the other areas) then all you are capable of producing is dreck.
The editors at the Von Mises Institute should have skimmed this dross off the top and published something else.
Because, contrary to the rantings of this ridiculous buffoon it matters what sides you are supporting in conflicts and the advisability of actions is not the same when you go switching what you are propping up.
Here is a clue for North, and for people who are too damned stupid to think he had some point worthy of addressing.
Israel is the eight hundred pound nuclear gorilla of the middle east.
They admitted openly to a two hundred warhead nuclear arsenal when the Oslo Accords were negotiated in 1998. Some military analysts believe they began adding twenty five to thirty five warheads per year ... and now it has been fourteen years.
Israel is not going to be snuffed out of existence without exhausting that arsenal. Do the math. North, evidently lacks the capacity.
Gary North shows what happens to a brain on drugs. As I recall, it was Al-Qaeda that attacked us and Saddam who encouraged them and was preparing to arm them with WMDs.
My gut tells me Bush conceded on Medicare spending to maintain support for the war.
Bush started term 2 with an ambitious plan to rework SS, as he recognized the HUGE unfunded liability. Bush lost a lot of political capital on that initiative.
Third, Bush tried to reign in Freddie/Fanny and the housing bubble. The progs in the Democrat party/media crucified Bush and reassured that all was just fine.
We can now look back and confirm all was not fine
The Federal Reserve is not standing for election. The President is. The author of the article misses the entire point.
Instead of having a ‘tyranny of the majority’ that the Founders sought to protect us from, we are living under the absolute tyranny of the MINORITY which we enabled. It is called the US Government.
The day that the US established a full time sitting congress was the day the Constitution died.
You are so right on!!!
I think that is correct but he time of the Bush administration is when the line between flirting with disaster and inevitability of disaster was crossed.
Reagan was the only president wince Cal Coolidge who knew how things actually work- who understood economics. All of the others since Coolidge have believed that the Experts have to manipulate the markets to keep them free. Until the kenyan. He doesn’t even want the gloss of a free market mirage.
The difference between Hoover and Roosevelt was that Hoover’s measures, which later were FDR’s measures, were denied by the USSC. Hoover lost office because he was president during the Crash itself. FDR was able to appoint sufficient new Justices to the Court that the measures finally stood.
Too bad he completely MISSES the reason for the movie.
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