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David Harsanyi says Obama’s love of government coercion demonstrates his lack of faith in the American people.
With midterm elections approaching, President Barack Obama has gone on the charm offensive, claiming Republicans are demonstrating a “lack of faith in the American people.”
Faith is often defined as having confidence or trust in a person or thing. In this case, though, faith means adding another $35 billion in unemployment benefits to the infinite intergenerational tab — sometimes referred to as the budget — and mailing out as many checks as possible before Election Day.
Yet, the jab is revealing in other ways. To begin with, what mysterious brand of public policy has Obama employed that exemplifies this sacred trust between public officials and the common citizen?
Was it the administration’s faith in the wisdom of the American parent that persuaded it to shut down the voucher program in Washington, D.C., and continue the left’s decades- long campaign denying school choice for kids and parents? Or was that just faith in public-sector unions?
Was faith in American industry behind the Democrats’ support of a stimulus bill that was almost entirely predicated on preserving swollen government spending at the expense of private-sector growth?
Is this hallowed faith in the citizenry also what compels the administration to dictate what kind of car we will be driving in the future, what kind of energy we will be filling these “cars” with and what amounts of that energy will be acceptable? …
When it suited the administration, the mandate to buy health insurance was not a tax. To defend against a lawsuit against the plan, they claim the mandate is a tax. Peter Wehner notes the contradiction.
… DOJ argues that the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And according to the Times, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.” Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.
Well, well, well, this does pose a problem for our president, doesn’t it?
In addition to being yet one more violation of his pledge not to tax families making less than $250,000, Obama, during the health-care debate, insisted that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was not a tax.
In an exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last September (h/t Ed Morrisey), Stephanopoulos pressed Obama on admitting that what he was advocating was a tax increase. “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama assured us. …
Mort Zuckerman pays homage to the remarkable job creation engine that is the American economy. He goes on to show how the Obama administration is destroying it.
… in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created 73 million new private sector jobs—while simultaneously losing some 44 million jobs in the process of adjusting its economy to international competition. That was a net gain of some 29 million jobs. A stunning 55 percent of the total workforce at the end of these two decades was in a new job, some two-thirds of them in industries that paid more than the average wage. By contrast, continental Europe, with a larger economy and workforce, created an estimated 4 million jobs in the same period, most of which were in the public sector (and the cost of which they are beginning to regret). …
… But one unfortunate pattern that has emerged in the last 18 months is to lay all the blame for our difficulties only on the business community and the financial world. This quite ignores the role of Congress in many areas, but most glaringly in forcing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back loans to people who could not afford them. And not to mention the role of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2004 sanctioned higher levels of leverage for financial firms, from 12 times equity to over 30 times equity.
This predilection to blame business is manifest in the unnecessary and provocative anti-business sentiment revealed by President Obama in a recent speech that was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. “In the absence of sound oversight,” he said, “responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.” This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonization of business is exactly the wrong approach. It ignores the disappointment of a stimulus program that was ill-designed to produce the jobs the president promised—that famous 8 percent unemployment ceiling.
But it’s not just the rhetoric that undermines the confidence the business community needs to find if it is to invest. Consider the new generation of regulatory rules, increased bureaucracy, and higher taxes created by the Obama administration. For example, the new financial regulation bill includes nearly 500 “rule-makings,” studies, and reports, compared with just 14 in total for the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom. The disillusionment has spread to the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which represents small businesses that normally account for roughly 60 percent of job creation.
The chief economist of the NFIB, William Dunkelberg, put it clearly: Small business owners “do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed.” He also said, “The U.S. economy faces hurricane force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult.”
Our economic Katrina, in short.
Jennifer Rubin reports on more of the Obama administration’s job destroying.
… ‘A report to be released [today] by the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General for the Toxic Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) will contend that President Obama’s push for General Motors and Chrysler to close thousands of dealerships across the country as part of their government bailouts “may have substantially contributed to the shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls, all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impacts.”
The SIGTARP report will further contend, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it is questionable whether the closings were “either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the nation’s economic recovery.”’ …
Scary graph from The Atlantic Blogs showing the increased number of long-term unemployed.
The median duration of unemployment is higher today than any time in the last 50 years. That’s an understatement. It is more than twice as high today than any time in the last 50 years. …
Caroline Baum says she’s embarrassed for Christina Romer and the bilge she must present about “jobs created or saved.”
… Sure the government can spend money and generate GDP growth in the short run: Government spending is a component of GDP!
What it giveth it taketh away from the private sector via taxation or borrowing. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn’t spend, an investment it doesn’t make, a job it doesn’t create. This is what is unseen, as Frederic Bastiat explained in an 1850 essay.
“If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.
Ignoring the flaws in the stimulus for the moment, Congress raised the hurdle for hiring entry-level workers when it refused to delay the third step in a three-stage minimum wage increase last year. And the Department of Labor cracked down on unpaid internships, outlining six criteria that businesses had to satisfy in order to hire someone willing and able to work for nothing to get the experience.
For example, the employer must derive “no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.”
You can’t make this stuff up. …
It would be nice to think a GOP win in November would turn around government spending. Kevin Williamson calls BS on that thought. What’s the answer Never again let our guard down. Hold their feet to the fire and never relax. Or else, we will end up like the old T party of Trent, and Tom, and Ted. That would be Lott, Delay, and Stevens. All poster boys for GOP spending excess.
… If you want to see just how befuddled Republicans are when it comes to this issue, look no further than Senator John Cornyn’s performance on Meet the Press opposite David Gregory this weekend. Gregory asks the same question I ask every time I interview a Republican bigwig: “What does distinguish the Republican party of today from the Republican party under President Bush’s rule, with regards to spending.” Cornyn’s answer was, basically, “Uhhhhh — hey, look, something shiny!” But let’s hear from the senator in his own words: “Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances. They’ve had single-party government and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping job creators on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs. That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs.” This is politician for, “The dog ate my homework.” Yes, there is some uncertainty about the political environment, and that surely is affecting investing and hiring decisions. You know what else is affecting those decisions? A couple of trillion dollars’ worth of devalued capital in the form of collapsed real-estate values and a crippled banking system that Congress has decided to prop up rather than allow it to be sorted out by the ruthless Darwinian forces of the market.
But what about those unemployment benefits? The Republicans say they want to extend them but pay for doing so by cutting other spending. Unfortunately, the “other spending” they plan to cut is stimulus funds that have been theoretically appropriated but not spent — i.e., they’re “saving” money by not spending money we might not have been spending, anyway. It’s like a broke guy saying: “Yeah, I was planning on buying a new Ferrari, but then I changed my mind. What should I do with the $250,000 I saved myself?” …
Victor Davis Hanson says being anti-Obama is not enough.
Republicans will shortly need to stand for something more than just being against much of the Obama agenda. Only a superior and detailed alternative can win more lasting support than just a midterm correction.
Obama, after all — with nationalized health care, amnesty, cap-and-trade, financial overhaul, government absorption of private enterprise, takeover of the student-loan industry, and gorge-the-beast deficits that will ensure a generation of higher taxes — at least seems to have some sort of plan to change America.
The absurdity of $1.5 trillion annual deficits is easy to run on; but where in the budget should we freeze or cut spending? To restore fiscal sanity, we need details rather than vague promises to reduce red ink to a particular percentage of GDP. Is there to be an across-the-board spending freeze or targeted cuts? How much, if at all, does defense get cut? If it does, where and how? …
Paul Ryan says he’s not interested in running for the presidency. Makes him normal. And qualified. He likes Mitch Daniels for the job. Weekly Standard has the story.
… “I want to be a normal person,” Ryan continued. “Other people can run for that thing. Other people can’t do this,” he said, pointing to one of his three young children sipping a kiddie cocktail.
Many politicians say they won’t run for higher office because of their family, but Ryan really seems to mean it. “I lost my dad when I was a little kid,” he said. “So I’m very sensitive to that issue. I’d be on the campaign trail in a month, and I’d be crying myself to sleep because I hadn’t seen my kids for eight or ten days. Right now, I can handle it when I don’t see them for three or four days.”
“As nice as New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina are, it’s not home,” Ryan said. “I just couldn’t do it. It’s a two year deal. It takes two years minimum to run for that job, to do it right, and there’s no way I could do it.”
Ryan was willing to talk up the presidential prospects of another Republican: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. “He would be a great president,” said Ryan. “He looks like your accountant, but that’s not so bad maybe.” In Ryan’s estimation, Daniels is the only potential GOP presidential candidate at the moment who really gets the ideas outlined in his Road Map and is willing to fight for them. …
Amazing! Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than print.
… Amazon is reporting that it is now selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 paper-and-ink books. Kindle books outsold regular books for a while after
Christmas last year, and everyone assumed, doubtlessly correctly, that many people had gotten Kindles for Christmas and were loading them up. But now, half a year later, it seems to be a permanent shift. The recent cut in the price of a Kindle has tripled sales. …