Some 85% of Americans have health insurance, and many who do not nevertheless receive health care. Gallup reports that 82% are satisfied with the quality of the health care they receive, and 73% with their insurance coverage, up from 79% and 69%, respectively in 2007. And over half are satisfied with the cost of care. Yet President Obama wants to spend a trillion or so to radically reform the system.
All Americans have a wide choice of cars made in America by American workers at Ford, Toyota, BMW and other plants. Yet President Obama wants to spend billions keeping General Motors and Chrysler in business.
The American energy system produces reliable power at prices that are the envy of the rest of the world, yet President Obama is allocating billions of dollars to make it “smarter”. American factories are more pollution-free than most in the world, reducing their emissions cannot begin to offset the increases from new coal plants in India and China, yet President Obama wants to spend billions on a cap-and-trade system that will have little effect on the world’s climate.
When I say the President wants to spend all of this money, I mean of course that he is willing to spend other people’s money — the taxes that we and future generations will have to cough up to prevent soaring deficits from triggering the high inflation that would reduce the dollar to third-world status. Obama is in essence robbing from some of us — mostly from “the rich”, and the yet-unborn — to pay the auto unions, builders of uneconomic sources of energy, and others he deems worthy.
This is not to quarrel with his decision to spend hundreds of billions to stimulate the economy. Leave aside the question of whether the money will hit the streets in time to make much of a difference: there are already signs that the economy will be recovering while most of the funds remain unspent, imprisoned by federal and state government bureaucratic obstacles to their disbursement.
Leave aside, too, the perfectly plausible criticisms by anti-Keynesians who say we cannot borrow and spend our way to recovery. They might be right, but are not certainly so. Which means that it probably makes sense to attempt to stimulate the economy: doing too little, too late, might prove worse than too much, too soon.
But spending on a temporary stimulus is one thing. Deciding to transform the economic system is quite another. Historian Andrew Roberts’ description of Franklin Roosevelt as “stratospherically self-confident” applies as well to Barack Obama. He is confident that he knows what is best, and can make government actually produce the results he desires. And when it cannot, he simply declares that it has, and moves on to his next transformative venture.
His recent declaration that the cap-and-trade bill put together by Congressmen Waxman and Markey is “historic” is the best recent example. On the campaign trail Obama derided John McCain for proposing that the permits to emit CO2 gases be given away. In March he told the Business Roundtable, “If you’re giving away carbon permits for free, then basically you’re not really pricing the thing and it doesn’t work.” Budget Director Peter Orszag went further, calling free permits “the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.”
Well, Waxman-Markey gives about 85% of the permits away to companies that can, if they choose, immediately sell them. Out the window is the $646 billion that Obama had included in his budget for 2012-2020 to fund health care and a middle-class tax cut. No problem for the flexible President. The system he denounced as unworkable will do just fine — declare victory and move on.
Obama sees himself in the great tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. He is determined to leave office having transformed America: health care for all, managed by the government; smaller cars; an energy system dependent more on sun and wind than on coal and the atom; income redistributed from higher to lower earners; the courts staffed with judges more likely to give weight to the experience of ordinary people than to the Constitution; an America that relies more heavily on UN resolutions for its national security.
The President rightly claims that a majority of American voters voted for change. Along with the rest of us, they might just get more of it than they bargained for.
Examiner columnist Irwin M. Stelzer is a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Studies.
