Hopelessness And Stasis

posted at 1:58 am on September 21, 2010 by Doctor Zero

President Obama kicked off his town hall meeting in Washington D.C. on Monday with the usual dreary whining that has made him such a bore to listen to.  “I think we have to go back to what was happening when I was first sworn in… something that took 10 years to create is going to take a little more time to solve.”  He sounds like a creepy little kid, taking great pains to make sure everyone is absolutely clear on his alibi before we start talking about the trillion dollars missing out of our cookie jar.

Once the ritual denunciations of his predecessor were out of the way, the President made a few revealing comments.  Responding to a question about the perception of business leaders that his policies are hostile toward them, Obama field tested a new meme about how the recession has really been over for a year:

Well, first of all, even though economists may say that the recession officially ended last year, obviously for the millions of people who are still out of work, people who have seen their home values decline, people who are struggling to pay the bills day to day, it’s still very real for them.

And I think we have to go back to what was happening when I was first sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. We went through the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nothing has come close. In fact, if you look at the consequences of the recession in the ‘80s, the recession in the ‘90s, and the recession in 2001, and you combine all three of those, it still wasn’t as bad as this recession that we went through.

Translation: Experts say we’re all being irrational.  The recession’s been over for a year!  We should stop being such ingrates to the dazzling heroes who saved us from the Bush Great Depression, and get back to our assigned duties of creating jobs and pumping out tax revenue.  By next week, this meme will go swirling down the memory hole, since it will dawn on Obama that he’s insisting the recession ended before he and his Congressional accomplices swindled us out of that trillion-dollar “stimulus.”

After the moderator served him up a softball about “fearful voters” mistrusting him due to racism and blind envy of his Ivy League education, Obama dropped this boilerplate onto the stage with a deafening thud:

The whole reason I ran was because my life is a testimony to the American Dream. And everything that we’ve been doing since I came into office is designed to make sure that that American Dream continues for future generations.

I think the challenge right now is that I’m thinking about the next generation and there are a lot of folks out there who are thinking about the next election. If I were making decisions based on November, then I wouldn’t have done some of the things that I did because I knew they weren’t popular. But they were the right thing to do. And that’s got to be my top priority.

“Future generations?”  You mean the kids who will be born into bankruptcy because of your irresponsible spending, Mr. President?  The truth is that Obama’s policies are entirely based on the concept of robbing future generations blind, to pay off current constituencies and expand government power.  There are intravenous tubes reaching into the future to suck blood from the next generation for the nourishment of ObamaCare.  Cap-and-trade energy policies will transform the mobility we take for granted into bedtime stories, which the children of 2020 will be told by candle light.  No President has cared less about the freedom and prosperity of future generations than Barack Obama.

The President stammered uncomfortably during exchanges about tax cuts, repeating the tired leftist cant about how we “can’t afford” to give tax cuts to “millionaires.”  By “millionaires” he means people who make over $250k per year, although they should be thankful to the government for trying to find them a little tax relief on that first two-fifty.  His attempt to defend sky-high taxes on top income earners reveals a staggering level of economic ignorance:

Now, what we’ve said is that we should extend tax cuts, tax relief, for middle-class Americans — like most of the audience here — because, first of all, you’re the ones who didn’t see your wages or income rise. Second of all, you’re the folks who are most likely to spend it on a new computer for your kids, or in some other fashion that would boost demand in the economy.

[…] What the Republicans are proposing is that we, in addition to that, provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.

And by the way, I would be helped by this, so I just want to be clear. I’m speaking against my own financial interests. This is a — it is a irresponsible thing for us to do. Those folks are the least likely to spend it and –

Let that sink in for a moment.  He thinks the vital medicine for healing this economy would come from low-end retail purchases.  The wealthy are “the least likely to spend money?”  Those bloated fat cats just sit in bathtubs full of treasure all day, scrubbing themselves with gold and gems.  The middle class can generate all necessary investment capital by saving its lunch money, and solve our unemployment woes by hiring each other… but they’d better make sure they don’t earn over $250k per year by doing so, or they’ll turn into revenue targets!

Obama’s most revealing moment came when he discussed the Tea Party movement:

The problem long term are the problems that I talked about earlier. We’ve got — we had two tax cuts that weren’t paid for, two wars that weren’t paid for. We’ve got a population that’s getting older. We’re all demanding services, but our taxes have actually substantially gone down.

And so the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It’s not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it’s important for you to say, I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits, or I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I’m willing to see these taxes go up.

What you can’t do — which is what I’ve been hearing a lot from the other side — is say we’re going to control government spending, we’re going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work.

Mr. President, let me make this very clear for you: our freedom is not contingent on telling you exactly what we plan to do with it. Trillion-dollar spending plans are not the only acceptable alternatives to trillion-dollar spending plans.  Our Constitutional freedoms are not a primitive superstition you can dismiss with sneering insults.

Controlling government spending will be difficult indeed.  Step one is wiping out the Democrat Party, and replacing Barack Obama with a responsible chief executive.  The President and his Party have made it very clear that this will be a necessary precondition of meaningful reform.  The American spirit of individualism and limited government are wholly incompatible with their vision of the future… and since they haven’t been shy about imposing their vision through force, we would be foolish to leave them in a position of power.

Step two is dismantling the mechanisms of permanent State growth, like public employee unions, and unsustainable programs like ObamaCare.  After those steps are completed, the free people of the United States will set about solving their own problems, in a process of willing co-operation for mutual benefit that seems as “magical” to a socialist as space travel appears to a tribal shaman.

Isn’t it fascinating to hear the guy who ran as the avatar of Hope and Change attempt to shield himself from the rising tide of the Tea Party… by insisting the critical problems of his dying super-State are utterly hopeless, and our only course of action is stasis? Our only choices are supposed to be cutting veteran’s benefits, cutting Social Security and Medicare, or raising taxes?  What a pathetic lack of vision.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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