George Rebane
The President is on the stump again in a desperate effort to divert attention from his administration’s scandals and jobless recovery. He is pivoting on platitudes which the sheeple noddingly accept as planning. I have often advised readers on the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective. The President is into his fifth year giving evidence that he does not understand that difference, but there is also an alternative explanation.
His “plan” consists of specifics like ‘creating more jobs’, ‘raising middle class wages’, and ‘fixing education’. Typical of socialist thought, his objectives all along have been to reduce inequality rather than promote growth. And what such objectives result in are policies that seek to distribute ever more broadly wealth that has not been created by the private sector. No administration has hurt the middle class as much as Obama’s whose policies have burdened businesses to such an extent that middle class wages have actually dropped during this so-called recovery. (Recall, I still maintain that we are in Depression2.)
Every new regulation and tax added by government increases economic friction. For example, the closest Obama has come to specifying something from a plan is his prescription to fix education by reducing its cost. How does he plan to do that? We don’t really know, but the first thing he wants Congress to do is to pass a new law requiring colleges and universities to start submitting regular reports to government on their spending, student attendance, and graduation statistics. Brilliant! Now these hoary bureaucracies will have to add another layer of faceless employees to satisfy this new government diktat.
The President continues to pillory his opposition with the Grand Lie that the other side has offered nothing better than what his minions have inflicted on us. This ignores the specific proposals on tax reductions, regulatory rollbacks (including Obamacare), and tort reform that have been advanced continuously for years by the more conservative economists and institutions. When these are brought up in Congress, the progressives immediately pronounce them DOA and then deny that any such proposals have been made.
In the meantime 100+ more cities in the country are getting ready to follow Detroit and pull the Chapter 9 trigger. The unfunded liabilities problem, created by atrocious union pension plans that was pooh-poohed for years (even on these pages), has now become a reality. The response to it all has been a combination of crickets and denial, while at the same time arguing that the jurisdictions have no recourse but to pay the contracted amounts – one way or another. Progressive public policies passing in review.
The problem, as long argued on RR, is an electorate of ever more ignorant sheeple. Obama is not laughed off the podium because the adoring faces surrounding him really believe in the fertilizer he spreads to grow their unfounded faith in the brand of hope and change he has been successfully peddling since 2008. Our post-American president is on plan with his fundamental transformation, the major element of which is an economically weak United States which creates the pre-requisites for an international standdown and internal class warfare.
So this is how the federal tension is going to spend itself for the rest of summer until the debt limit brouhaha starts again later this year. The bottom line is that spreading wealth rather than creating it ignores the fundamental truth that the public sector cannot distribute what the private sector does not create.
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