Posted by
Philip Mella on Monday, August 03, 2009 2:55:18 PM
It's taken several months, but President Obama has landed where most conservatives knew he would: a tax hike on middle-income Americans. Addictions are unsightly to behold and Obama and his liberal cohorts in DC simply can't kick the spending habit. 'Revenue neutral' to them doesn't mean reducing taxes to compensate for increased spending, it means bilking even the middle class, which reflects a rare combination of electoral desperation and fiscal chutzpah.
The nearly limitless appetite for government expansion has effortlessly progressed passed the merely distasteful, it now provides a grim view into the soul of a president who is convinced that despite its requiem in Western Europe, socialism is a noble system perfectly suited to the American civic sensibility. Apparently the clarion sound of taps being played across the world for a system that blunts innovation and ensures universal mediocrity hasn't reached the White House, or perhaps, it's the case that our president is simply tone deaf.
It's becoming clear that Mr. Obama easily confuses leadership with lecturing, in large measure because he correctly understands that average Americans instinctively reject his statist views as hostile to their well being. Lacking the confidence of his anachronistic ideas, he feels compelled to instruct us about their virtues. However, it's clear the gloss has worn off his leftist agenda as Americans across the political spectrum are expressing a collective skepticism about his ideas, from his Leviathan health care proposal to his anti-growth 'cap and trade' to the daft way he's handling Iran and North Korea.
Saturating our airwaves with a virtual non-stop presence and professorial loquacity that makes Bill Clinton seem positively terse, Obama never misses a moment to remind us that his is a revolutionary vision for America, one where larger government, higher taxes and regulation is paradoxically good for our civic--and fiscal--health. What he seems to routinely overlook is the glaring reality that with the notable exception of the Department of Defense, government doesn't perform well, which is to say it's always over-priced and produces underwhelming results. Somehow, Mr. Obama's implied high praise for the bureaucratic class won the hearts--if not the minds--of millions who supported his ascendancy to the White House.
Indeed, since Medicare and Medicaid are poster children for government mismanagement, why would an otherwise sane nation blithely consign one-seventh of its economy to the feds so we can watch it spiral out of control and experience the same suboptimal health care Canadians and Brits moan about on a daily basis?
The implied predicate of Obama's agenda is a cynical distrust of freedom and a tacit belief that most Americans have a superficial understanding of market economics. Obama's goal is to supplant the rigors of a free market--which intuitively makes the best use of resources and continuously realigns incentives with disincentives--with a numbing array of new bureaucracies that will sink the government's talons into Wall Street--and, by implication, Main Street--to control consumer behavior and tax it into submission.
It's a thoroughly anti-American agenda and although the Republic will survive, it will protract our economic woes and reinforce for the naive millions the wholly ignorant notion that government is the answer to our ills.