Barack Obama could make his mark as the president who saved this country from a grievous financial mess, or he could go down in history as someone who took a bad situation and made it much worse.
To be a hero, he’s got to do two things: Refuse the siren calls of the far left and ditch his own most excessive campaign promises.
The left, you’ve likely noticed, is cheering him on to disaster, as in a Nov. 17 New Yorker article describing the current financial mess as an “opportunity” for something as “transformative” as was afforded by the Great Depression, preaching a nation-shaking New Deal kind of program and speaking of fundamentalist free-market assumptions as “a charlatan’s incantations.”
Look in the direction of Congress, and you’ll find players eager to get on with regulatory mayhem and the building of the sort of welfare state much of Europe is anxiously trying to whittle down for survival’s sake.
They love such Obama campaign stances as all kinds of new taxes and spending programs, but then, to them, that’s penny ante stuff. They want far more.
Someone should point out to the left that something close to half of our economists by one estimate think some parts of the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression, even if other parts were useful and needed.
And then that person should come to the more important point: Whatever its failings and occasional slippages, our relatively unfettered market economy has produced a degree of liberty, prosperity and opportunity that no other economic model comes close to.
As for charlatan incantations, read the news clippings on the Obama campaign and consider, for a minute, his plan to hike capital gains taxes, a sure way of devaluing stocks and even decreasing revenues at the same time millions of ordinary Americans have seen trillions of dollars of savings wiped out because of a sharply declining stock market.
Then read clippings about his wish to increase corporate taxes. To what purpose _ to make these businesses less competitive with foreign competition, to have fewer jobs, to have prices of products and services increases?
That’s what would happen, and if you do it in the current crisis, you will make it worse, the same as you will make our energy situation worse if Obama follows through on his plan for an oil-company windfall profits tax.
Of course, the excuse for that charade _ that the oil companies somehow manipulate prices for their own good _ has fallen on its stupid face as prices and profits have gone down with demand that is declining because of the economic slowdown.
Hit the rich with higher income taxes _ an Obama wish _ and you decrease consumer spending when we need it most while taking away money for private investment.
There’s another kind of tax Obama wants, a carbon tax or some system to make carbon emissions costly, which would be a body blow to some industries for the sake of pretending falsely to do something important about global warming.
Maybe Obama will back down. Along with some discomforting hints of things to come, there were signals of pragmatism and prudence in his “60 Minutes” interview this past Sunday, such as his opposition to “heavy-handed regulations that crush the entrepreneurial spirit and risk-taking of American capitalism. That’s what made our economy great.”
He didn’t back up on spending or bailouts, but projected a reassuring confidence while speaking of the worries of the day in less dramatic, scary terms than the campaign engendered.
So let’s have hope.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
