Barack Obama waged a campaign that was a little bit of George W. Bush, a whole lot of Huey Long and a touch of Herbert Hoover, that affords the gamblers among us a sure bet and that leaves Republicans with a theme that can bring them back to life.
A little bit of Bush? Yep. In 2000, he pledged tax cuts for everyone, causing liberals to moan and groan about how they weren’t justified and would create budgetary woes, and in 2008, Obama pledged much the same thing, with a five percent difference. This time the liberals applauded.
The Obama deal was to give the bottom 95 percent of wage earners the cuts while sticking it to the guys and gals at the top, who happen to pay 60 percent of the income tax. Bush knew that if you had a cancer cure, you made sure to give it to the people with cancer, although, like Obama, he was happy to give some of the returns even to workers who pay no income tax at all. Here again we have a difference, though.
Obama wants to expand the number who pay nothing by millions and enormously boost the earned income tax credit _ a form of welfare _ on top of still other tax credits. Put it all together and you’re giving up $80 billion in revenues a year while getting maybe $50 billion from new taxes on the high-income crowd, meaning an overall loss of $30 billion. How’s he going to make that up? Hard to say, hard to say.
Anyway, these massive giveaways, hits on the rich and his constant castigation of CEO salaries bring us to the 1930s Share Our Wealth program of Huey Long, the Louisiana demagogue. It would have limited the amount of wealth individuals could own while providing every family with enough cash for a home and a car and assuring a family income of no less than a third of average incomes.
Obama does not go that far, although it’s worth mentioning that the attacks on CEOs are explicable only as ginning up class hatred. As a factor in the overall economy, the salaries are spit in the ocean.
Next we come to Herbert Hoover, who signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the Depression with its trade restrictions and the retaliation it inspired. Pandering to unions, Obama has promised trade interventions that could cost thousands of export jobs during our current financial mess, and also wants to punish U.S. corporations for sending jobs overseas, as if we don’t get a significant number of jobs in this country from overseas investment and retaliation can’t happen.
Put these policy blunders next to other of his objectives _ higher minimum wages, requiring companies to pay benefits they can’t afford, excessive regulation, the establishment of new entitlements as part of an unaffordable welfare state, higher prices because of higher corporate taxes, the further devaluing of stocks and savings with boosted capital gains taxes _ and what you will get is economic deterioration.
So the bet you should have with Obama-trusting friends and neighbors is that, to the extent that he fulfills his campaign pledges, the economy will be much, much worse in virtually all categories by the end of his second year as president.
Down-and-out Republicans should respond with a second Declaration of Independence, sticking to it more than they stuck to their Contract with America. They should proclaim the right of Americans to be free from an overweening federal presence and endless social engineering, and then fight for the liberty that the pursuit of happiness demands and without which prosperity is doomed.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
