Mark Steyn sizes up Barack Obama:
In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does our President often seem to reason like an antagonist straight out of Atlas Shrugged? Maybe it has something to do with the fact his advisers have less private sector experience than any President… well, ever, apparently. The chart only goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, but given that the growth in government is fairly recent I think we can safely assume past Presidents and their staff had some familiarity with not living off the taxpayer (Honest Abe famously did some honest work as a railsplitter and Jefferson was a farmer; the American Brahmin class itself is a recent result of the state’s increasingly voracious appetite for taxpayer dollars). And Obama’s staff have a lot less than any other President: the next least appears to have three times as many staffers with exposure to the private sector.
Maybe that explains why the Obama coterie also engages in the kind of fantasy bookkeeping that would get you thrown out of any boardroom in America (and probably in jail as well):
Whether it’s the $650 billion projected by the Senate bill or the $873 billion of the House bill, it appears highly unlikely, to put it charitably, that either measure will make it to Obama’s desk with the cap-and-trade program intact. That means Obama will be counting phantom revenue as part of his next federal budget proposal.
But then Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program has produced two million phantom jobs located in phantom zip codes in phantom congressional districts, so perhaps nobody should be surprised to see phantom revenues in a White House budget proposal.
But the rubes eventually figured out his “magical government ponies will answer your every hope and and prayer” health care reform claims were utter bull, ultimately electing Scott Brown in Massachusetts just to drive the point home, and as Ed at HotAir notes, they’re starting to notice this guy kinda just makes stuff up:
Only a fifth of respondents believed that Obama cut taxes for 95% of Americans, and even Democrats couldn’t believe the “two million jobs saved or created” fantasy
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The major problem of these articles is you could have heard the exact same arguments against W about 3 years ago, with anyone defending him being called worse than rubes. I was in college and heard the same rhetoric of how W had no knowledge of the real world and business, blah blah blagh. Yes, W had both military and business experience, but it still did not mean long term economic success, as we saw with the economic troubles by Sep of 2007 and the continuing downfall. People were also calling W and emperor without any clothes and an idiot, etc. for years. How is all this “realization” over Obama any different?
To me this is the same “Cowboy/Redskins” rhetoric that I’ve come to despise in political blogs. The blogs that I once come to rely on for proper criticism, analysis of situations and possible solutions have turned into sniping, petty, i-told-you-so, he’s-not-one-of-us attitude that fortunately a few (Dean’s World, Stubborn Facts) have avoided. The supposed solution is bring in more Republicans. But how can that solve anything? I saw Paul Ryan’s health plan: it is the same “pay now, we might pay you something later” ideas of tax credits for health care that were rejected when W was in office. Add the purity chase that is going on amongst the Reps(I’ve read Hot Air and PJ Media for years and see this ) Scott Brown is the Palin of 2010 just for stymieing Obamacare. In the meantime neither I nor my fiancee can get health insurance. Explain how bashing O makes America a better place.
If the Reps do get more positions in Congress come Nov, I predict they will look as lost as they were in 2006 soon enough. They are too fractured and seem not to understand that everyday Americans need help now, not just April 15 of each year. I’ll agree that O’s responses are out of touch, but so is the Reps’ ideas of constant tax cuts.
Yes, W had both military and business experience, but it still did not mean long term economic success, as we saw with the economic troubles by Sep of 2007 and the continuing downfall.
But it did mean his policies had some semblance of Hayek/Friedman-ish economic sensibility, which is what’s important in the real long run (i.e. decades), as the last 50 years demonstrated. In the short term, we were overdue for recession (and you’ll note I rarely, if ever, claim that short-term economic indicators like current unemployment or quarterly GDP are the result of POTUS policy, because that’s generally a silly claim regardless of which party is in the White House) and the housing bubble was a bipartisan failure, as was allowing financial institutions to become “too big to fail.”
Explain how bashing O makes America a better place.
Well, that’s easy. By criticizing his policies and misleading rhetoric, fewer of his destructive, dishonest policies will be enacted.
Anyways, you’re making a false equivalence here for two reasons. One, Bush was much more honest. Even if you disagreed with his policies, the man meant and did what he said. Two, Obama’s priority isn’t economic growth. That’s where left and right differ on economics; the former value equality over growth, the latter vice-versa. I’m prepared to accept arguments that Obama was better at promoting equality (but I will question how desirable that really is) but the notion Obama is better at promoting long-term growth just doesn’t hold any water as a matter of basic policy goals.
I really enjoyed the President’s Q&A session at the GOP retreat. He did a fine job. He looks presidential, he speaks presidential, he captures a presidential tone quite well in my view.
The problem, though, is that he does not yet recognize that the natural byproduct of nearly everything he proposes is an increase in government employees, power and money — which history shows results in a corresponding decrease in private sector liberty.
It would be great for him to continue this tradition and for Dems to invite leading GOP types (Romney, Huckabee, Palin(!)) to do the same.
–HB
In the meantime neither I nor my fiancee can get health insurance. Explain how bashing O makes America a better place.
Please don’t take my snark as being disrespectful to you; but considering Obama’s policies snark is warranted.
You can’t afford health insurance? Well, O’s solution to that problem is just to force you to buy it.
Both the right and the left have “bashed” Obama for this. “bashing” your political opponent when he or she is wrong is an integral part of a healthy democratic Republic. To suggest we should all just “get along” is unAmerican.
In the meantime neither I nor my fiancee can get health insurance.
That’s probably because you’re trying to buy pre-paid treatment, rather than just insurance. Basic health insurance is available for less than $200, and maybe less than $100/month.
What’s out of your price range is a plan that lets you say “Money is no object”.
Things for which “money is no object” tend to be very expensive.
An example of this is speaker wire. Audiophiles are notoriously willing to spend money. It’s possible to spend $100/foot on speaker wire. What’s sad about that is that you get the same (or better) performance out of a heavy duty extension cord with the ends cut off.
(My latest design starts at $20k …)
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