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Riding Income Redistribution Back To White
House In 2012
Investor's Business Daily
April 21, 2011
By Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins
How can Barack Obama be about the worst president
in history - and at the same time the "best politician"
in America, according to some experts?
Simple answer: Being president is about substance; being a
politician is about theatrics. Sometimes, the twain meet and
- as in the case of Ronald Reagan and others - produce a statesman.
But not in Obama's case. Just the opposite!
Being a good president involves competence, integrity and
making Americans better off, often by stopping government
from doing things that make people worse off. (Rep. Paul Ryan's
trailblazing blueprint for reducing the deficit and downsizing
government is a prime example.)
To Obama, politics is about bamboozling people into thinking
that he's making them better off when he's making them worse
off.
The trick is to expropriate money from people who work hard
and pay their taxes - and use the loot to scatter around enough
political lagniappe to piece together a majority of bought-and-paid
for votes strategically placed in the right locations to yield
an Electoral College victory.
Obama never lets a cynical political ploy go unexploited.
He blares away about raising taxes on the "rich."
He knows that high taxes ruin the economy and hurt everyone
who depends on a nongovernment job for a living.
But so what?
The sotto voce Obama plan: Get rid of pesky Republicans; get
re-elected; raise taxes through the roof starting in 2013;
knock smug middle-class Americans off their high-earning perch;
crash the economy; catch everyone in a new "safety net"
where all have the same modest government-controlled income
and live under federal supervision.
In his "now you see it, now you don't" speech at
George Washington University on April 13, the president of
the United States declared war on mainstream America and common
sense.
Obama insulted Rep. Ryan for trying to save and reform Medicare.
How dare Ryan defy King Barack and stand in the way of ObamaCare
and the government-run health care rationing that Americans
hate?
Among other cost-cutting priorities, repeal of ObamaCare should
be a condition for any increase in the federal debt limit.
Obama's latest phony "solution" to the Obama debt
crisis is to appoint a committee to run in circles and gum
up Congress sufficiently to delay a Budget Resolution that
cuts spending.
Obama is funding a new political imperium built upon a massive
voter turnout of government-oriented constituencies. These
include government employees (about 17% of total employees);
the roughly 60 million people who depend significantly on
government assistance; and a large portion of the three rapidly
growing "minority" groups who, according to census
data, will soon constitute an arithmetic majority in America.
In 2008, African-Americans favored Obama by 95%. Overall,
he got 67% of the Hispanic vote and 62% of Asians. In key
locations, his percentages were sufficiently enormous and
concentrated to tilt the electoral vote count. Obama got 67%
of the electoral vote with 53% of the popular vote.
Members of unions vote heavily (60%) for Obama in exchange
for favors. So do abortion supporters (73%) and members of
the GLBT community (70%).
Obama will get the "kiddie" vote on campuses, the
anti-American left, the hard-core environmentalists, the brass-collar
Democrats and a lot of nice people who cannot bring themselves
to vote against America's first black president.
Obama's potential for a "near lock" in the Electoral
College shows the political power of "income redistribution"
in combination with an ever-larger, all-pervasive government
that (including state and local) controls and spends nearly
40% of GDP in a discriminatory manner among an increasingly
diverse and balkanized population.
Members of Obama's potential coalition receive disproportionately
large amounts from government but pay little of the cost of
government.
A small minority of Americans (roughly one-third of eligible
voters) already pay nearly all the personal income tax - and
Obama will whip the "tax slaves" into paying more
and more until they collapse.
Originally, the disparity in treatment between "net payers"
and "net takers" was to help people who were actually
poor (instead of merely less well-off than someone else) -
but Obama and other levelers have made broad scale "redistribution"
the main mission of government.
Jeffrey Miron at Harvard points out that in 2007 - before
the recession - Washington was already spending about 50%
of the budget on programs designed to redistribute money from
the better-off to the less well-off.
The Heritage Foundation's Index of Dependency shows that dependency
on government has increased by about 15% since 2007.
In Obama's un-American America, a modest standard of living
will become both the minimum and the maximum.
Thanks, but no thanks.
- Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary
of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
-Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department
in the Reagan administration.
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