Charles Krauthammer
washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030502951.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Friday, March 6, 2009; A15
Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely. Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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* MARCH 4, 2009, 11:10 P.M. ET
Presidential Bait-and-Switch
What Obama once promised, and what he's delivering.
* Article
By KARL ROVE
Barack Obama won the presidency in large measure because he presented himself as a demarcation point. The old politics, he said, was based on "spin," misleading arguments, and an absence of candor. He'd "turn the page" on that style of politics.
Last week's presentation of his budget shows that hope was a mirage.
For example, Mr. Obama didn't run promising larger deficits -- but now is offering record-setting ones. He'll add $4.9 trillion before his term ends and $7.4 trillion if given a second, doubling the national debt in five years and tripling it in 10. Mr. Obama's deficits will be much larger than he admits because he relies on rosy economic assumptions and gimmicks that mask spending and debt (like assuming popular new programs he supports won't be renewed).
Nor did Mr. Obama run promising more earmarks. Instead, he said he'd reform the earmark culture and "scour the federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts." Now he wants to wave through a $410 billion omnibus spending bill with about 8,500 earmarks. This is on top of the $787 billion stimulus bill signed into law two weeks ago.
His justification comes to us from the White House's budget director, Peter Orszag, who recently called the omnibus spending bill "last year's business." But it will fund the federal government for the next six months. Mr. Obama could veto the legislation or push congressional Democrats to ditch the earmarks. But he has given little indication that he will do either.
Nor is it credible to claim that the spending spree on Mr. Obama's watch is someone else's responsibility, as Mr. Orszag did by saying the president had "inherited" these deficits.
Mr. Obama ceded authority to congressional appropriators, who wrote the stimulus bill that is history's largest spending increase. Then Mr. Obama got behind the pork-laden omnibus-spending bill. And Mr. Obama has also proposed $4 trillion in outlays this fiscal year and $3.6 trillion next fiscal year.
Mr. Obama cannot dismiss critics by pointing to President George W. Bush's decision to run $2.9 trillion in deficits while fighting two wars and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. Mr. Obama will surpass Mr. Bush's eight-year total in his first 20 months and 11 days in office, adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt. If America "cannot and will not sustain" deficits like Mr. Bush's, as Mr. Obama said during the campaign, how can Mr. Obama sustain the geometrically larger ones he's flogging?
There is more. Mr. Obama pledged "no tax hikes on any families earning less than a quarter million dollars." What he didn't draw attention to was $600 billion in higher energy taxes he wants to impose through a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. These taxes will hit everyone who drives, flips a light switch, or buys anything manufactured, grown or shipped.
Mr. Obama devoted four times as much space in his campaign stump speech to cutting taxes as he did to talking about raising taxes on the wealthy. In the election's most widely watched speech, his Denver Convention address, he didn't even mention raising taxes, instead stressing he'd "cut taxes -- cut taxes -- for 95% of all working families." Yet higher taxes are what every American is going to get.
Today's White House health-care summit should also remind us of one of Mr. Obama's most popular ads, which declared, "On health care reform -- two extremes. On one end, government-run health care, higher taxes. On the other, insurance companies without rules, denying coverage. Barack Obama says both extremes are wrong."
Mr. Obama's plan will lead us to the extreme of government-run health care. And in an effort to reach that goal, Mr. Obama's budget proposes, as a starting point, a $630 billion fund to expand government-run health care. And that $630 billion comes not from reduced spending, but higher taxes.
Mr. Obama's personal popularity remains higher than support for his proposals. A raft of opinion surveys show Americans take the conservative side on issues ranging from the efficacy of government spending, to nationalization of banks, to bailouts for auto companies, to whether tax cuts or government spending will create more jobs. Packaging Mr. Obama's proposals is easier than rigorously defending them. Team Obama will find this out as the details of their budget and other plans are scrutinized.
Barack Obama has been president for a little more than five weeks. During his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, he showed what a skilled speaker he is and how persuasive he can be. But words delivered from a teleprompter, while important, have to line up with actions. Promises have to be met. And a president who promised to be one thing cannot be another. At some point, the gap between good feelings and results, between perception and reality, closes.
Eloquent words and "spin" work better in a campaign than they do while governing. And as Mr. Obama is discovering, the laws of economics won't change, even for him.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
Guest Comment: We were promised hope and change. We are getting the change, but not the change that was promised. But, what difference does it make? After all, Obama is in, in control of our destiny, and that is what counts, right? Forget transparecy, ignore the promises, and forge through the crisis, crafting changes that do not target resolving the crisis. He is a politician like no other, a product of the Chicago machine.
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Best,
Aggie
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