When the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at
midnight on New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a tearful adieu
to Auld Lang Syne, the president will be popping corks. He’ll have his
higher taxes. The joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the
cliff will be laughing.
Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he does that is of
small consequence. He is determined not to cut spending. This has become
clear enough to all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra – “Tax
and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in a way that Mr. Roosevelt
could never have imagined. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the
Americans who get a monthly government check, will balloon toward a
hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints, disciplines of any kind will
be silly notions of the past. Dependency will be enthroned.
Once this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the
“negotiations” between the Democrats and the Republicans have never
amounted to very much. Mr. Obama reads the November 6 election result as
a landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide. Nevertheless he
is bold, and acting as if it were. He, and even a lot of timid and
fearful Republicans, never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes
like success.
For now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision of America
is one he learned in his community-organizing days. Americans have to
give up the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable formulation,
the exceptional nation, and learn to be miserable in solidarity with
both Upper and Lower Slobbovia.
The president’s intelligence chiefs have given him the “good news”
that by the year 2030, only 18 years from now, the United States will no
longer be the world’s great superpower. “In terms of the indices of
overall power – Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population size, military
spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America
and Europe combined,” reports the National Intelligence Council of the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That mouthful of titles
and capital letters comprise the president’s own intelligence gurus.
With rapid rise of other countries,” the report goes on, “the
‘unipolar moment’ is over and no country – whether the U.S., China or
any other country – will be a hegemonic power. The United States’
relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is inevitable . . .
”
These are only opinions, of course, but the intelligence agencies are
occasionally correct in their estimates and appraisals. But there is in
the assessment a noticeable whiff of barely suppressed glee, and a
suggestion that this could be the good news the president has been
waiting for. Mr. Obama, a happy native of Hawaii, is nevertheless a man
of the third-world attitudes and sensibilities inherited by birth,
nurtured when he grew up in Indonesia, and it’s just these sensibilities
that endear him to sordid allies on the left who dream of a world
liberated from American example and influence.
Preaching the angry exploitation of the “rich,” as he defines “rich,”
comes naturally to him and the Democratic left. Envy and covetousness
are powerful emotions, easily manipulated, and Mr. Obama is a master of
manipulation. Demonizing a neighbor in a bigger house who drives a new
car is easy work. A new Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of
Americans polled now think raising taxes on households – not individuals
but households – making more than $250,000 a year is a good idea. The
president has done a splendid job of portraying these taxpayers as
big-bellied plutocrats who summer in France, winter in St. Moritz, and
dine on roast swan.
But nearly 70 percent in the Battleground Poll think raising taxes on
small-businesses earning more than $250,000 is a bad idea. Republicans
have done a lousy job of explaining that many, perhaps most, of the
“rich” Americans and these small businesses are one and the same. That’s
why abusing small businesses is likely to send the country reeling into
another recession at the bottom of the cliff. This one won’t be George
W.’s fault.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment