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Charles Krauthammer starts our look at the Kansas speech.
… In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!
Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.
This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?
He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.
What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?
Debra Saunders is next.
… Fair share? In the Kansas speech, Obama extolled Minnesota manufacturer Marvin Windows and Doors for laying off workers only once in 100 years. During tough times, Obama noted, Marvin’s unnamed owners shared the pain of reduced compensation with their workers.
So who is Obama’s jobs czar? Not the suckers at Marvin. General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt, whose compensation doubled last year as GE was seeking concessions from workers, is Obama’s go-to guy on jobs. The New York Times reported that General Electric didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes in 2010 – even though the multinational corporation earned $5.1 billion in U.S. profits.
Obama’s other model rich guy is investor Warren Buffett, who frequently complains that his taxes should be higher. Now Buffett doesn’t pay what he says he should pay, but he says he wants to do so, and that’s enough. Thus, Buffett is a member in good-standing in Obamaland’s fellow big-shot club.
Besides, Obama told the audience gathered in the Osawatomie High School, under his plan the rich would only have to “contribute a little more.” This administration is dedicated to never telling voters that they have to pay for his agenda. Only the top 1 percent – who already pay 38 percent of federal income taxes – have to pay for big government, and then just a skooch more.
Same rules? Please. The Obama way is to talk up fairness while your cronies hire a stable of lawyers and lobbyists to grease the path for favorable tax loopholes. This is where high tax rates come in handy – they create an incentive to cozy up to the administration to win tax incentives for pet training and technology.
That’s the problem with Obama’s prescription for the middle class: Sure, he wants to create more jobs, as long as all jobs go through Washington.
James Pethokoukis says the president would take us back to the stagnation of the “70′s.”
1. Obama clearly thinks the “last few decades” have been a disaster for the U.S. economy, that America’s 30-year economic experiment in enhanced economic freedom—lower tax rates, less regulation, freer trade—has been a failure. Indeed, Obama says that although the “theory fits well on a bumper sticker … it has never worked.” Reagan and Clinton blew it. (Tax cutting JFK, too, apparently.) Time for a different formula. Time to raise taxes and create more rules for business with a goal of “shared prosperity and shared responsibility.”
2. But what Obama is really saying is this: “Let’s go back to the 1970s.” It was a Golden Age of Equality, with the top 1 percent’s share of national income at its lowest level of the 20th century. And the nostalgia surely doesn’t stop there. It was also a time of strong unions, expensive oil, regulated industry, and high tax rates. This is exactly the Obamacrat agenda. Of course, the 1970s were also a time of economic chaos and stagflation that led voters in 1980 to reject Jimmy Carter by a crushing landslide. Yet Obama wants give that formula another shot.
3. Back during the success-punishing 1970s, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent. And guess what? Liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, and Peter Diamond—whose nomination by Obama to the Federal Reserve thankfully failed in the Senate—think the top tax rate should zoom back there again. More evidence that Clintonomics is dead in today’s Democratic Party. Then again, Obama, like many Democrats, never thought the Reagan tax cuts made much sense. As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope: “The high marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest … but they did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters.” So the only downside was excessive tax planning?
4. Here is the real record of cutting taxes and regulation: The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation—the scourge of the 1970s—was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. (These numbers are even more impressive when you recall that heading into the 1980s, experts were predicting a dystopian, Solyent Greenesque, Age of Limits future for America.) Obama would be lucky to fail like this.
Believe it or not, the ignorant one is still ranting against ATM’s. Peter Ferrara has the story.
… He explained the roots of the problem as,
“Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.”
This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy. Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and hence wages and standards of living. Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.
He identifies the solution in the speech as increased government spending as the foundation for rising prosperity. He says,
“Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world. That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.”
Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity. But today Obama tells America “It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”
Instead he tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as the model that works. But American economic growth is not suffering because of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country. It is suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every policy that would free the economy to produce and boom. Under such Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a reliable energy grid like a third world country. …
Daniel Henninger writes about the “Godfather” speech.
… About two-thirds through Mr. Obama’s Kansas speech, I started to think of “The Godfather.” After slapping around the “wealthy” for about a half hour, Mr. Obama said, “This isn’t about class warfare.” Maybe that’s true. In “The Godfather,” when awful things are about to be done to people, Michael Corleone or Tom Hagen reassure those about to get hit, “It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.”
But I could be wrong about that. There is that defining moment when Michael Corleone says to Fredo, his brother, “You’re nothing to me now.” When even as party leader, a president of the United States gives a major speech in which people get singled out repeatedly as basically enemies of “the middle class,” one has to wonder if they are nothing to him.
You then have to wonder about the tenor of another Obama term in office. If in fact there are categories of Americans he simply doesn’t like, a second Obama term, like the last half of “Godfather II,” could be a clinical exercise in hammering the people he singled out in this speech. Metaphorically speaking.
The Kansas speech was built around one concrete policy idea: that the rich and millionaires (officially still defined as families with before-tax income above $250,000) should send him more money so he can “invest” it. This single policy, if we heard correctly, will end high unemployment, raise middle-class incomes, put children through college, make America fair and defeat countries that pollute.
But will it? …
Next to last on the speech today from Peter Wehner.
… The shame is that there is a genuinely interesting and important debate of ideas to be had over the size, reach, and role of the federal government in our lives. Honorable people have very different views on this matter; some, like Obama, are drawn to a European-like model of social democracy, one that wants to centralize more and more power with the federal government as a means to eliminate income inequality and ensure greater fairness. Others believe the federal government has dramatically exceeded its constitutional authority, that it is leading us down a path to fiscal ruin, and in the process it is undermining civic character.
The great divide between conservatives and liberals today is over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Those are serious intellectual differences to discuss, but Obama apparently wants no part of it. He would rather turn his opponents into brutish, cartoon characters. …
William Voegeli writing for the Ashbrook Center provides interesting back story to the president’s ode to Marvin Windows.
Near the conclusion of his big speech in Kansas this week, President Obama praised business leaders who understand “their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders.” The president singled out Marvin Windows and Doors, based in Warroad, Minnesota, for not laying off a single employee during the recession, and choosing instead to cut the pay and perks of both workers and management.
This section of the speech is apparently based on a recent New York Times article about the company, one which complicates some of Obama’s arguments, however, and highlights other things he declined to address:
1. Marvin Windows and Doors has the latitude to consider obligations beyond those to its shareholders because it doesn’t have shareholders. The 107-year-old company is privately held: the president is the founder’s granddaughter and her brother is the chief executive. The firm’s work force of 4,300 included 16 members of the Marvin family.
2. Marvin also doesn’t have, apparently, any obligations to unions; its workers don’t seem to belong to any. When housing starts – and orders for new windows and doors – plummeted, management cut salaries by 5 percent, put hourly workers on 32-hour weeks, stopped paying tuition reimbursement, stopped allowing employees to cash in unused vacation days, and encouraged them to take unpaid leaves. Through attrition, the workforce is 14 percent smaller than at its housing-boom peak. The only things the company hasn’t cut are jobs and health insurance benefits. There’s not a hint in the Times article of any of these changes being voted on or negotiated with anyone – all appear to have been the owners’ unilateral decisions. …
Good post from Roger Simon showing how the LA Times covers for the prez.
Trust the Los Angeles (“Khalidi Tapes”) Times to take every opportunity to protect the “unsullied” reputation of St. Barack Obama. Latest: today’s article on the Mormonism of Mitt Romney includes this gem:
“George W. Bush is a born-again Christian; President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades; Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school. But no previous president or serious candidate can rival Romney for the time and energy spent in running a religious organization and ministering to its members.”
“President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades”? Say what? Let’s leave aside the eye roller that with “regular” church-going Obama was still somehow able to miss the multiple racist and anti-American excrescences of his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (or so the then candidate assured us) and cut straight to the chase – the life of our president since he has been in the White House.
From Time Magazine (Dec. 23, 2009) – No Church-Going Christmas for the First Family:
“But there’s one common Christmas practice not on the First Family’s schedule: a visit to Christmas Eve church services.
Church, in fact, has been a surprisingly tough issue for the Obamas. …”