Tommy Gun
Charter Member
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson033010.html
>
> March 30, 2010
> Chicago Does Socialism
> Connect the dots of Obama’s first year — an ugly picture emerges.
> by Victor Davis Hanson
> National Review Online
>
> We can have a rational debate on any one item on President Obama’s vast
> progressive agenda, arguing whether adjectives like “statist” or “socialist”
> fairly describe his legislative intent. But connect all the dots and
> lines of the past year, and an unambiguous image starts to materialize.
>
> New Programs
>
> The problem is not individual legislation, whether passed or proposed,
> involving the gamut of issues: healthcare, bailouts, stimuli,
> education loans,
> amnesty, cap and trade. Rather, the rub is these acts in the aggregate.
>
> The president promises a state fix for healthcare; then student loans; and
> next energy. There are to be subsidies, credits, and always new
> entitlements for every problem, all requiring hordes of fresh
> technocrats and Civil
> Service employees. Like a perpetual teenager, who wants and buys but never
> produces, the president is focused on the acquisitive and consumptive urges,
> never on the productive — as in how all his magnanimous largesse is to be
> paid for by someone else.
>
> That Medicare and Social Security are near insolvency, or soon will be;
> that the Postal Service and Amtrak are running in the red; that a day at the
> DMV, county-hospital emergency room, or zoning department doesn’t inspire
> confidence in the matrix of unionized government workers and large
> unaccountable bureaucracies — all this is lost on the Obama administration.
>
> Utility means nothing. So long as the next proposed program enlarges a
> dependent constituency and is financed by the “rich” through higher taxes and
> more debt, it is, de facto, necessary and good. Equality of result is to
> be achieved both by giving more to some and by taking even more from others.
>
> Taxes
>
> The same pattern emerges when it comes to taxes. Most Americans could live
> with Obama’s plan to return to the Clinton tax rates of about 40 percent
> on the top brackets. But that promise is never made in a vacuum. Instead,
> there is an additional, almost breezy pledge to lift caps on income subject
> to Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes — 15.3 percent in some cases —
> on top of the income-tax increase.
>
> At other times, an idea like a new healthcare surcharge is tossed about —
> on top of the previous proposals for payroll- and income-tax increases.
> That new bite likewise, in isolation, perhaps is not too scary. But Obama is
> planning these 1-2-3 increases at a time when most of the states are already
> upping their own income-tax rates — in some cases to over 10 percent.
>
> Once again, Obama never honestly connects the dots and comes clean with
> the American people about the net effect: On vast swaths of upper income, new
> state and federal taxes — aside from any rises in sales, property,
> capital-gains, or inheritance taxes — could confiscate an aggregate
> of 65 to 70
> percent.
>
> These proposals thus raise the question: Exactly what sort of total tax
> bite does the president think is fair for those making more than $200,000 or
> $250,000? Can the citizen be allowed to retain 45, 40, 35, or 30 percent of
> his income? And if, with combined governments starting to take 60 to 70
> percent of income through the various tax increases, we still have record
> annual budget deficits, how much higher should these high taxes go to prevent
> national insolvency? Eighty percent? Ninety? One hundred?
>
> Perhaps we could have a rate of 110 percent: Those who make $250,000 might
> pay a redemptive $275,000 to the government on the theory that in the Bush
> era they “made out like bandits.”
>
> “Let Me Be Perfectly Clear…”
>
> Then there is Obama’s chronic dissimulation. Most Americans were
> indifferent rather than outraged when Obama became the first
> presidential candidate
> to renounce public campaign financing in the general election — despite
> both earlier promises that he would not, and later crocodile tears over the
> Supreme Court’s rollback of some public-financing rules.
>
> Perhaps most Americans also were only mildly irked that Obama demagogued
> the Bush anti-terror protocols during the campaign, only to continue
> unchanged precisely those practices that he had most fiercely railed against —
> tribunals, renditions, Predators, the continuing presence in Iraq.
>
> And perhaps most Americans did not believe Obama when he promised to close
> Guantanamo within a year and to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian
> court in New York — and they were right. These too were isolated Obama
> untruths.
>
> Then some of us were troubled that Obama had once decried passage of
> healthcare reform by mere 51 percent majorities — only to do
> precisely that last
> weekend. Candidate Obama likewise damned the use of executive orders to
> countermand legislative action — and then did just that on matters of
> abortion and Obamacare. Chalk it up to the Chicago style of the ends
> justifying
> any means necessary.
>
> So was anyone surprised that the healthcare bill did not sit on the
> president’s desk for five days before the signing, as he once bragged
> would be
> the new administration’s policy, for reasons of transparency? And wasn’t
> that reminiscent of his continued, but reneged on, pledges to air all the
> healthcare debates on C-SPAN?
>
> I could go on and on, but again the pattern is clear. Each time Obama
> prevaricates, we grant him an exemption because of his lofty rhetoric about
> bipartisanship and his soothing words about unity. Only later do we notice
> that in retrospect each untruth is part of a pattern of dissimulation within
> just a single year of governance. Obama has proven so far that in fact one
> can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
>
> Abroad
>
> In foreign policy, Americans were okay with one bow to the Saudi king —
> until they saw a deeper bow to the Japanese emperor. One so-so apology was
> then followed by many more embarrassing meae culpae. His reaching out to
> Chávez was only one link in a chain that included Cuba, Libya, Syria,
> and Iran.
> We thought his serial gratuitous rudeness to Britain in matters of
> protocol was an aberration — until it proved to be the norm with the Czech
> Republic, Israel, Honduras, Poland, and the Dalai Lama. Smackdowns by
> Russia might
> have seemed singular, until China followed in suit.
>
> One perhaps can forgive erstwhile Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s
> stupid hypothetical speculation about shooting down Israeli planes over Iraq.
> And maybe the nominations of Charles Freeman and Samantha Power — not known
> as friends to Israel — were of no importance. Some raised an eyebrow, too,
> over Obama’s past close affinities with the anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah
> Wright and anti-Israelis like Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. But finally,
> the most recent outreach to the terrorist regimes in Damascus and Tehran,
> when juxtaposed with the hysterics over a few apartment buildings in
> Jerusalem, has cemented the notion that Obama really has radical ideas about
> altering the traditional American support for the Jewish state.
>
> In other words, again, connect these seemingly isolated dots and a picture
> emerges of a new radical foreign policy of “neutralism.” Traditional
> allies are ignored, and old enemies are courted — until both are on the same
> moral and political plane. The one constant is that a socialist anti-Western
> philosophy abroad (which blames the West for a nation’s own self-inflicted
> misery) wins sympathy with the Obama administration, while capitalist
> Western culture is seen as mostly passé.
>
> In any isolated circumstance, we are willing to give the president of the
> United States a pass on a particular disturbing decision. But after 14
> months of them, the Obama particulars add up to a remaking of America that is
> now clear and consistent: Grow government; redistribute income; establish
> permanent political constituencies of dependents; increase entitlements; hike
> taxes; demonize “them” while deifying their supposed victims; seek global
> neutrality abroad; and always play fast and loose with the truth.
>
> What do we end up with?
>
> You might call it: Chicago does socialism.
>
> ©2010 Victor Davis Hanson
>
> March 30, 2010
> Chicago Does Socialism
> Connect the dots of Obama’s first year — an ugly picture emerges.
> by Victor Davis Hanson
> National Review Online
>
> We can have a rational debate on any one item on President Obama’s vast
> progressive agenda, arguing whether adjectives like “statist” or “socialist”
> fairly describe his legislative intent. But connect all the dots and
> lines of the past year, and an unambiguous image starts to materialize.
>
> New Programs
>
> The problem is not individual legislation, whether passed or proposed,
> involving the gamut of issues: healthcare, bailouts, stimuli,
> education loans,
> amnesty, cap and trade. Rather, the rub is these acts in the aggregate.
>
> The president promises a state fix for healthcare; then student loans; and
> next energy. There are to be subsidies, credits, and always new
> entitlements for every problem, all requiring hordes of fresh
> technocrats and Civil
> Service employees. Like a perpetual teenager, who wants and buys but never
> produces, the president is focused on the acquisitive and consumptive urges,
> never on the productive — as in how all his magnanimous largesse is to be
> paid for by someone else.
>
> That Medicare and Social Security are near insolvency, or soon will be;
> that the Postal Service and Amtrak are running in the red; that a day at the
> DMV, county-hospital emergency room, or zoning department doesn’t inspire
> confidence in the matrix of unionized government workers and large
> unaccountable bureaucracies — all this is lost on the Obama administration.
>
> Utility means nothing. So long as the next proposed program enlarges a
> dependent constituency and is financed by the “rich” through higher taxes and
> more debt, it is, de facto, necessary and good. Equality of result is to
> be achieved both by giving more to some and by taking even more from others.
>
> Taxes
>
> The same pattern emerges when it comes to taxes. Most Americans could live
> with Obama’s plan to return to the Clinton tax rates of about 40 percent
> on the top brackets. But that promise is never made in a vacuum. Instead,
> there is an additional, almost breezy pledge to lift caps on income subject
> to Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes — 15.3 percent in some cases —
> on top of the income-tax increase.
>
> At other times, an idea like a new healthcare surcharge is tossed about —
> on top of the previous proposals for payroll- and income-tax increases.
> That new bite likewise, in isolation, perhaps is not too scary. But Obama is
> planning these 1-2-3 increases at a time when most of the states are already
> upping their own income-tax rates — in some cases to over 10 percent.
>
> Once again, Obama never honestly connects the dots and comes clean with
> the American people about the net effect: On vast swaths of upper income, new
> state and federal taxes — aside from any rises in sales, property,
> capital-gains, or inheritance taxes — could confiscate an aggregate
> of 65 to 70
> percent.
>
> These proposals thus raise the question: Exactly what sort of total tax
> bite does the president think is fair for those making more than $200,000 or
> $250,000? Can the citizen be allowed to retain 45, 40, 35, or 30 percent of
> his income? And if, with combined governments starting to take 60 to 70
> percent of income through the various tax increases, we still have record
> annual budget deficits, how much higher should these high taxes go to prevent
> national insolvency? Eighty percent? Ninety? One hundred?
>
> Perhaps we could have a rate of 110 percent: Those who make $250,000 might
> pay a redemptive $275,000 to the government on the theory that in the Bush
> era they “made out like bandits.”
>
> “Let Me Be Perfectly Clear…”
>
> Then there is Obama’s chronic dissimulation. Most Americans were
> indifferent rather than outraged when Obama became the first
> presidential candidate
> to renounce public campaign financing in the general election — despite
> both earlier promises that he would not, and later crocodile tears over the
> Supreme Court’s rollback of some public-financing rules.
>
> Perhaps most Americans also were only mildly irked that Obama demagogued
> the Bush anti-terror protocols during the campaign, only to continue
> unchanged precisely those practices that he had most fiercely railed against —
> tribunals, renditions, Predators, the continuing presence in Iraq.
>
> And perhaps most Americans did not believe Obama when he promised to close
> Guantanamo within a year and to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian
> court in New York — and they were right. These too were isolated Obama
> untruths.
>
> Then some of us were troubled that Obama had once decried passage of
> healthcare reform by mere 51 percent majorities — only to do
> precisely that last
> weekend. Candidate Obama likewise damned the use of executive orders to
> countermand legislative action — and then did just that on matters of
> abortion and Obamacare. Chalk it up to the Chicago style of the ends
> justifying
> any means necessary.
>
> So was anyone surprised that the healthcare bill did not sit on the
> president’s desk for five days before the signing, as he once bragged
> would be
> the new administration’s policy, for reasons of transparency? And wasn’t
> that reminiscent of his continued, but reneged on, pledges to air all the
> healthcare debates on C-SPAN?
>
> I could go on and on, but again the pattern is clear. Each time Obama
> prevaricates, we grant him an exemption because of his lofty rhetoric about
> bipartisanship and his soothing words about unity. Only later do we notice
> that in retrospect each untruth is part of a pattern of dissimulation within
> just a single year of governance. Obama has proven so far that in fact one
> can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
>
> Abroad
>
> In foreign policy, Americans were okay with one bow to the Saudi king —
> until they saw a deeper bow to the Japanese emperor. One so-so apology was
> then followed by many more embarrassing meae culpae. His reaching out to
> Chávez was only one link in a chain that included Cuba, Libya, Syria,
> and Iran.
> We thought his serial gratuitous rudeness to Britain in matters of
> protocol was an aberration — until it proved to be the norm with the Czech
> Republic, Israel, Honduras, Poland, and the Dalai Lama. Smackdowns by
> Russia might
> have seemed singular, until China followed in suit.
>
> One perhaps can forgive erstwhile Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s
> stupid hypothetical speculation about shooting down Israeli planes over Iraq.
> And maybe the nominations of Charles Freeman and Samantha Power — not known
> as friends to Israel — were of no importance. Some raised an eyebrow, too,
> over Obama’s past close affinities with the anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah
> Wright and anti-Israelis like Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. But finally,
> the most recent outreach to the terrorist regimes in Damascus and Tehran,
> when juxtaposed with the hysterics over a few apartment buildings in
> Jerusalem, has cemented the notion that Obama really has radical ideas about
> altering the traditional American support for the Jewish state.
>
> In other words, again, connect these seemingly isolated dots and a picture
> emerges of a new radical foreign policy of “neutralism.” Traditional
> allies are ignored, and old enemies are courted — until both are on the same
> moral and political plane. The one constant is that a socialist anti-Western
> philosophy abroad (which blames the West for a nation’s own self-inflicted
> misery) wins sympathy with the Obama administration, while capitalist
> Western culture is seen as mostly passé.
>
> In any isolated circumstance, we are willing to give the president of the
> United States a pass on a particular disturbing decision. But after 14
> months of them, the Obama particulars add up to a remaking of America that is
> now clear and consistent: Grow government; redistribute income; establish
> permanent political constituencies of dependents; increase entitlements; hike
> taxes; demonize “them” while deifying their supposed victims; seek global
> neutrality abroad; and always play fast and loose with the truth.
>
> What do we end up with?
>
> You might call it: Chicago does socialism.
>
> ©2010 Victor Davis Hanson
