DANIEL GREENFIELD: OBAMA’S DEATH AND TAXES ECONOMY
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-death-and-taxes-economy/
It’s an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about global warming: every time Obama gives a speech, a thousand businesses go out of business.
On July 24th, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from green energy and illegal immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn’t on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.
An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto “Vero Possumus” (which can be translated very loosely as “God Help Us All”), is an entirely familiar breed.
It’s an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year’s leftovers.
There are the warnings about all the old bridges threatening to fall down and kill the trolls living under them. Despite a second term in office, a stimulus plan, a plan to stimulate the stimulus plan and years of assorted pork, there are apparently now more Damocles bridges in the land than there ever were before.
In 2009, Obama promised to fix all the crumbling roads and bridges with a $787 billion stimulus plan full of “shovel-ready jobs.” Two years later he joked to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whose company is the 15th biggest government contractor, that the shovel-ready jobs were not shovel-ready. It would have been nice to know that before we spent the $787 billion.
And then there are the promises that we can fix all our problems with a green energy revolution that drives up electricity rates for everyone in order to buy windmills and solar panels from China. The green energy revolution has done a lot for Red China’s middle class while further eviscerating the standard of living for American middle class families who are just trying to keep the lights on.
And no Obama speech on the economy would be complete without urging us to invest more in education in order to get our hands on tomorrow’s jobs. “If you think education is expensive,” Obama said, borrowing his line from a bumper sticker, “wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century.”
But we don’t have to choose. As Detroit shows us, we can have both. Detroit has 5,000 teachers to 88,000 students. Its biggest challenge has been trying to win back another 5,000 students who escaped to charter schools to justify not laying off all the extra teachers. Its billion-dollar school budget is all the more shocking in a city that is deep in debt and suffers from a 47 percent illiteracy rate.
The education system fosters incredibly expensive ignorance. And that ignorance can not only be found in public schools in Detroit’s ghettos, but in the Ivy League alma maters of Obama and his financial advisers.
Obama’s 6 trillion dollar debt is a testament to the high price of ignorance; as are his economic speeches calling for more green energy, more education and more taxes to solve all of our ills. In his latest speech, he vowed that making “preschool available to every four year-old in America” would make America competitive in the “ocean of tomorrows” and “a sky of tomorrows.”
About the only thing in Obama’s entire 5,000-word speech that was at all interesting was in its opening as he pivoted from discussing the loss of middle class jobs to inveighing against the income inequality of the 1 percent. It was a convenient dodge that his average supporter was incapable of noticing, but it’s at the heart of what’s wrong with Obama’s economic logic.
Obama’s speech stayed in familiar class warfare territory. Its implication was that if the wealthy were made to pay their fair share, the lost manufacturing jobs would somehow come back. The economic logic of that is absurd. Even if we assume that the wealthy are the villains of the piece, taxing them at Hollandaise rates seems as likely to bring back the jobs as constructing cardboard factories in a cargo cult ceremony to summon the spirits of the lost jobs would.
But Obama, like most of his Socialist brethren, isn’t really interested in repairing the broken relationships of the economy. The logic running through his speech is that forcing the rich, or at least those of their class who haven’t written their timely checks to Organizing for America, to pay more will allow the government to create more jobs.
Obama’s perpetual motion tax machine is offering the same empty social welfare promises that more social services, more preschools, more free Internet, more green energy, more Obamacare, will turn the economy around, while shamelessly claiming that it has already done as much.
There are still the occasional nods to all the nation’s broken bridges that are just about to fall down, but mostly it’s the same empty Socialism that proposes to tax a country to death because it’s right and just to do so.
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French correspondent around the time that the United States Constitution took effect. Some two centuries later, government has combined death and taxes into one by taxing the economy to death.
Taxing economies to death is one thing that we have in common with the French. President Hollande began his disastrous term in office with a proposed 75% tax rate. France’s move to tax its economy to death hit a snag when its budget minister, a member of the Socialist Party in good standing, who was supposed to lead the crusade to make the rich pay their fair 75 percent share, admitted to hiding some $790,000 in a secret Swiss bank account.
Obama has squandered money like Louis XVI and then pledged to lead a revolution to find where the rest of the money is. Surrounded by some of the most corrupt billionaires in the country, whose think-tanks help write the policy proposals that the teleprompter feeds into his brain, he inveighs against the 1 percent. And he tops it all off by claiming his disasters as successes.
Obama taxes Americans. He taxes their incomes, their lifebloods and their patience. He has put his entire faith in taxes, in grubbing up enough money to serve as collateral for his latest scheme. And the road that his paradise of amnesty for illegal aliens, green energy for electric poverty and more government employees to administer the whole mess leads to is Detroit.
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