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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Dr. Victor Davis Hanson拆穿奥巴马的各种此一时彼一时：2006年投票反对提高借贷
上限的奥巴马，现在说反对提高借贷上限是胡闹
Reckless Fiscal Policies”
Why did Obama only enumerate George W. Bush’s big spending as responsible
for the out-of-control $14 trillion-plus debt, while not mentioning his own
contribution of $5 trillion? Why is there a debt limit standoff now, rather
than, say, in 2009 or 2010? Why did this latest $1.6 trillion Obama budget
prompt the current crisis? Why did not Obama earlier start debt limit talks
the moment that his own hand-picked Simpson-Bowles commission presented
their findings? Why did Obama just recently submit, and have rejected, a
budget that would have scheduled even larger deficits of the sort he is now
warning against (“Armageddon”)?
Why is voting against the debt limit reckless now, but in 2006 Obama
lectured us thusly:
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is
a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t
pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial
assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless
fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and
internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead,
Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our
children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of
leadership. Americans deserve better.”
(He then failed even to vote on the issue in 2007 and 2008 when the limit
was raised again. So Obama has an even weaker case than the weak case of the
congressional Republicans who approved the Bush deficits, given that if
Obama was right at the time to vote “no,” then $6 trillion later, with a
ruined, rather than robust, economy, he could now be really right to vote
again “no,” when he has the political power not to raise the debt ceiling.)
Why is Obama talking of new tax increases when he ruled that out in December
2010: taxes then bad, now seven months later good? Why does the president
claim 80% of the people want taxes when polls prove no such thing?
Failure, Failure Everywhere
In 2009, newly arrived Obama was convinced of redistributive Keynesian
postmodern economics, a sort of updated fable that borrowed money would
spawn more money, or at least would not have to be paid back, or could be
excused along the lines: “If a Republican Bush borrowed nearly $5 trillion
in eight years, then, dammit, why cannot a liberal Democrat be allowed to
borrow more than $5 trillion in three?” And if Reagan gave us “starve the
beast” (cutting taxes would cut revenue that would force smaller government
), Obama could console himself with “gorge the beast” (growing government
in extraordinary fashion would force higher taxes that in turn would
redistribute income from those who “didn’t need it” to those who work for
or receive from the government and who most certainly did need it).
The architects of his economic policies — Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag,
Christina Romer, Larry Summers — did not even last three years. All now are
either back in tenured academia, making millions in the revolving door that
Obama once blasted, or writing op-eds why following their former advice is
leading to insolvency, or all three combined. None are making the argument
any more that we need more of their stimuli or ObamaCare will save us
billions and create “400,000 new jobs.”
Their borrowing did not stop unemployment from plateauing at 9.1% or prevent
the housing market from getting worse, or growth from stalling, or gas from
soaring, or the beginnings of a new inflation. In the meantime, the model
of Obamism (e.g., Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland) in Europe of high
taxes, redistributive government, astronomical debt, and unsustainable
pensions has crashed. So Obamism did not work, and now is the politically
opportune time, before the 2012 election, to follow the famed Obama
reinvention stratagem: Cite straw men and extremists on both sides, and put
St. Obama plop in the middle as the sober, great dragon slayer, who blames
both his contemporaries and his predecessor. Hard to do, I know, when you
wasted $5 trillion, but do it nonetheless he has. In the word of Obama,
wasted borrowed money is “stimulus,” not so shovel ready jobs are “
investments,” and hiking taxes on someone else is “revenue enhancement.”
2012 on the Brain
The Tea Party won the largest midterm election victory since 1938 on the
theme that Obama’s rate of borrowing and debt-creation were unsustainable
and made worse, not better, by massive new Obama health care and green
initiatives. So Obama, now well below 50% in the polls, is to be reinvented
as a reasoned budget cutter. Note the logic that suddenly after ObamaCare
and green fiascos we pause in midstream, and talk of fiscal restraint and
again more taxes. The thinking is analogous to this: the adolescent takes
the chronically indebted family Master Charge card, maxes it out, has no
more credit, and then asks his father and mother to take on additional jobs
to find the money to pay off the debt, but while insisting that he keep all
his previously charged junk — and the card as well. At some point in July
2011, all the money borrowed since 2009 was deemed absolutely essential.
Nothing was wasted. There was no fraud. Instead, all that $5 trillion saved
lives and the planet as well. Borrowing a trillion dollars for ObamaCare
cannot be renegotiated.
Obama 2.0 is talking, then, of some cuts to projected added expenditures,
not going back and cutting a $1 trillion ObamaCare initiative or the tens of
billions in green subsidies, much less just balancing the budget by
adopting the 2007 budget levels. Any argument that government expenditures
have reached a record percentage of GDP, or that combined state, federal,
and payroll taxes can gobble over 50% of one’s income, or new figures that
the U.S. is the most progressively taxed of the Western democracies, or that
almost 50% of the population pays no income taxes, or that 5% now pay
almost 60% of the aggregate income tax obligation — all that is rendered
meaningless.
Sacred Borrowing
Again, today everything borrowed since 2009 is considered wise “investment,
” and thus pruning back any of the unnecessarily added spending is deemed
heartless. Remember the logic of the debtor (I knew it well during the dark
years of farming in the early 1980s when I saw the indebted everywhere): the
debtor always asks himself why he should have to pay anything back, since
his lenders still have more money than he. A Greece shrugs that even without
their $180 billion paid back, Germans are still wealthier than Greeks; an
Obama shrugs that even with higher taxes, the “wealthy” still have more
than the recipients of federal largess.
If anyone thought that past Obama lamentations about the Supreme Court’s
failure to force “redistributive change,” about the need to spread the
wealth, about the notion that at some point we have made enough money were
aberrant, then examine the most recent Obama toss off that he has hundreds
of thousands in income “he doesn’t need” and thus doesn’t mind paying
higher taxes on it (so should we all if we just had a government-paid-for
house, car, plane, food, and expenses).
There Is a Pattern Here
Note well this pattern of suddenly turning to the neglected debt: Obama
lectured for most of 2008 that “drill, baby, drill” was silly, given his
belief that increased supply would only marginally affect then climbing
prices, and his religion that high gas prices are good in that they make
wind/solar subsidized energy more attractive, encourage less energy use and
thus cool the planet, while favoring government mass transit rather than the
mindless individual’s use of a private car. Then as reelection neared, he
tapped the strategic petroleum reserve on the logic that while drilling more
new oil does not lower prices, pumping previously drilled oil most surely
does.
Note well that suddenly Obama called for withdrawal in Afghanistan, on the
logic that, while a few months ago a surge, a new commander, and a
sustainable commitment were vital to winning the “good war,” now, with
reelection looming, it is time to start packing it in.
Aspirin for Cancer?
So what is the status of the debt limit crisis now? The annual deficit and
the aggregate debts are so massive that all the talk of a few billion cuts
here and there, or even a trillion or so, means little. To save us, we would
have to slash two or three entire departments (e.g., perhaps energy,
education, agriculture, etc.), end all agriculture subsidies, raise the
retirement age, freeze cost of living raises for Social Security, clamp down
on food stamp and entitlement abuses (almost 50 million now receive them),
and do far, far more — while encouraging the private sector to drill, mine,
grow food at unprecedented rates, as government trimmed regulations and
revised the tax code to encourage wealth creation.
But it is far easier to create monsters and joust over the slices of a
shrinking pie. So the current economic paralysis will persist as we continue
demonizing the mythical “them” — until we stop acting like Greeks
cursing better off Americans as if they were German bankers who are to be
damned for their success. |
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