Class Warfare

For Obama, Fairness Is Class Warfare By Another Name

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Posted 06:18 PM ET

Here we go again.

At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country's spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health care costs.

That was true. He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health care reform.
That was not true. It was obvious at the time that it could never be true.

If government gives health insurance to 33 million uninsured, that costs. Costs a lot. There's no free lunch. Now we know.

The Congressional Budget Office's latest estimate is that ObamaCare will add $1.76 trillion in federal expenditures through 2022.
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And, as one of the Medicare trustees has just made clear, if you don't double count the $575 billion set aside for the Medicare trust fund, ObamaCare adds to the already crushing national debt.

Three years later, we are back to smoke and mirrors. This time it's not health care but the Buffett Rule, which would impose a minimum 30% effective tax rate on millionaires.

Here is how Obama introduced it last September: "Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a (higher) tax rate than Warren Buffett. . .. And that basic principle of fairness, if applied to our tax code, could raise enough money" to "stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade. ... This is not politics; this is math."

OK. Let's do the math. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year.

If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years — a span longer than the life of this republic — it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone.

As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again this week. "It will help us close our deficit."

Does he really think we're that stupid? Hence the fallback: The Buffett Rule is a first step in tax reform.
On the contrary. It's a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform.
In three years, Obama hasn't touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to.
The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with re-election.

As such, it's clever. It deftly channels the sentiment underlying Occupy Wall Street (original version, before its slovenly, whiny, aggressive weirdness made it politically toxic). It perfectly pits the 99% against the 1%.
Indeed, it is OWS translated into legislation, something the actual occupiers never had the wit to come up with.
Clever politics, but in terms of economics, it's worse than useless. It's counterproductive.

The reason Buffett and Mitt Romney pay roughly 15% in taxes is that their income is principally capital gains.

The Buffett Rule is, in fact, a disguised tax hike on capital gains. But Obama prefers to present it as just an alternative minimum tax because 50 years of economic history show that raising the capital gains tax backfires: It reduces federal revenues, while lowering the tax raises revenues.

No matter. Obama had famously said in 2008 that even if that's the case, he'd still raise the capital gains tax — for the sake of fairness.
For Obama, fairness is the supreme social value. And fairness is what he is running on — although he is not prepared to come clean on its price. Or even acknowledge that there is a price.

Instead, Obama throws in a free economic lunch for all. "This is not just about fairness," he insisted on Wednesday. "This is also about growth."

Growth? The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

Now, in the middle of a historically weak recovery, Obama wants to raise our capital gains tax to the fourth-highest. No better way to discourage investment — and the jobs and growth that come with it.

Three years ago, Obama promised universal health care that saves money. Today, he offers a capital gains tax hike that spurs economic growth.

This is free-lunch egalitarianism. The Buffett Rule redistributes deck chairs on the Titanic, ostensibly to make more available for those in steerage. Nice idea, but the iceberg cometh.

The enterprise is an exercise in misdirection — a distraction not just from Obama's dismal record on growth and unemployment but, more importantly, from his dereliction of duty in failing to this day to address the utterly predictable and devastating debt crisis ahead.

Obama's Coming "Dirty Campaign"

Karl Rove: Obama's Campaign Will Take the Low Road

The 2008 pledge not 'to pit Red America against Blue America' is no longer operative. 

By KARL ROVE

Rick Santorum's decision Tuesday to suspend his campaign effectively ends the GOP nomination fight. But it doesn't mark the start of the general election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That contest has long been under way. Mr. Obama's speech to the Associated Press last week and two appearances in Florida on Tuesday provide a glimpse of the low road the president and his campaign likely will take.

He will distort beyond recognition his opponent's arguments. For example, he explained to news executives at the AP that Republicans want to "convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts—especially for the wealthy." Actually, no one has suggested that.

No honest differences are possible with Mr. Obama. He will impugn the motives of any who disagree with him. As he told the AP, his opponents want to "let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity." His agenda "isn't a partisan feeling . . . [it]isn't a Democratic or Republican idea. It's patriotism." To disagree with him is unpatriotic. That's to be expected from Republicans, whom Mr. Obama says stand for "thinly veiled social Darwinism . . . [that is] antithetical to our entire history."

Mr. Obama will build entire edifices on top of one fake premise, all dressed up in one big phony assumption. Take the House GOP budget plan. It increases federal outlays from roughly $3.6 trillion this year to nearly $4.9 trillion in 2022. In the AP speech the president called this a "cut" because he wants to increase spending to $5.8 trillion in 2022.

He warned that if the GOP's "cuts . . . were to be spread out evenly across the budget," then "Alzheimer's and cancer and AIDS" research would be slashed, 10 million college students denied assistance, and "thousands" of researchers and teachers "could lose their jobs." But Republicans don't cut across the board. Instead, their focus is on waste, duplication, programs that do not work, and on reform.

As he did Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University, Mr. Obama will attack "these same trickle-down theories" about taxes that almost led to "a second Great Depression." But if the Bush tax cuts were so evil, why didn't Mr. Obama repeal them during his first two years, when his party controlled both houses of Congress? Instead, in December 2010 Mr. Obama agreed to extend them for two more years.
To divert attention from his administration's many failures, Mr. Obama will also offer poll-tested nuggets that pit the many against the few. Take Tuesday's demands for the so-called "Buffett Rule," a new 30% tax on anyone making $1 million a year.

He claimed at a California fund raiser last fall that this would "stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade." But Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation projects it will only raise $47 billion in the next 10 years while Mr. Obama's budget spends $46.9 trillion and adds $9.6 trillion to the debt during that time. The Buffett Rule would cover 17 days of the president's next decade of deficits.

 What Mr. Obama calls a "loophole" is the policy of taxing capital gains and dividends at a lower rate than income. He favors penalizing savings and investment when America needs more of both.

Among Mr. Obama's more appealing 2008 campaign lines were his pledge not "to pit Red America against Blue America" and his promise to "resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long."

 Mr. Obama gave into that temptation the moment he was inaugurated. His harsh attacks, angry misrepresentations and outright falsehoods are light years away from the message of unity and post-partisanship that propelled him into the Oval Office.
Mr. Romney will need to tap into the disappointment and regret that many Americans, even the president's supporters, feel about Mr. Obama. Yet while setting the record straight about the last three dismal years and Mr. Obama's attacks is important, it is not enough. Winning candidates for the American presidency offer a positive, optimistic agenda that reassures voters about what they will do once in
the White House.

Mr. Romney also should remind Americans of Mr. Obama's lofty words from his 2008 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver. There he said, "If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."
Mr. Obama attacked such a strategy then. Lacking any fresh ideas or a record to run on, it's the strategy he's adopted now.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Seth Leibson 04-06-2012

April 6, 2012

By Seth Leibsohn



Good morning.  It’s Friday, April 6, 2012.  For our Jewish brethren tonight it’s Passover, a story of redemption, of fleeing slavery and entering freedom.  For our Christian brethren it is Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified.  As I’ve heard any number of pastors say over the years, “I don’t know why we call it ‘good’ Friday.”  But the reason, and the story, for both, is about redemption and freedom.  It is also the day Abraham Lincoln—the man our school children used to be taught was the man who freed the slaves—it is the day he was shot.  Lincoln of course died the day before Easter— the Christian story of hope and redemption.  Given all that Lincoln stood for, and the unique timing of his death, the great political science professor Clinton Rossiter wrote of him that he was the “Christ-martyr of America’s democratic passion play.”  What a phrase.



The Jews, Ruth Wisse has said, needed a desert experience to obtain their freedom—and they crossed the Sinai to begin that journey.  Similarly, Christians have a risen Christ to take on the sins of the world and show the way of forgiveness and peace.  It is with some sadness, then, that I have to report on a few contemporary events that also put me in the mind of all this.  One man who helped preach and teach the story of the redemption through Christ and has helped show the way of reform for thousands of prisoners is Chuck Colson.  Every Easter he would go to a prison and preach.  Not this Sunday—he is unwell and in need of our prayers.  Few have done as much for prison and prisoner reform as Chuck Colson.  As Joe Loconte wrote of him:  “His work among inmates earned him the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, placing him in the ranks of Billy Graham, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Mother Teresa.”



You see, Colson took a different view of crime, prisoners, and humanity:  He believes the taproot of crime is sin and until people deal with that, they will not deal with their temporal guilt or habit of recidivism—and thus it is no accident that the prisons where Colson has operated have much lower recidivism rates than those that do not. Chuck Colson has done more for prison and criminal justice reform than any 20 or 40 departments of criminal justice in America. Our prayers are with him.



And, globally, our prayers must be with Israel right now, as well.  The Sinai—which, let us remind, Israel returned to Egypt in a “land-for-peace” swap in 1979—is now “a terror zone,” according to the Israeli Prime Minister and as evidenced by the latest rocket attack on Israel, i.e., yesterday.  By the way, one important fact here:  When people say Israel must return the lands it took in the 1967 war against Israel: Israel has returned more the 90 percent of that land, it’s called the Sinai.  And it is now a terror zone.



Israel has never been in more danger than it is right now—and not just because of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and not just because of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah running of the West Bank, and not just because of Hamas’ running of the Gaza (land from 1967, by the way, Israel also returned “for peace”), and not just because Iran has threatened to remove Israel from the face of the earth as it tries to acquire nuclear weapons and funds both Hamas and Hezbollah.  But, also, it must be said, because the United States has, by and under President Barack Obama, undermined Israel and, at the same time, emboldened her (and our) enemies.



Let us pause a moment on Egypt, which, along with Iran’s weapons program, will be President Obama’s foreign policy legacy.  President Obama helped usher our ally Hosni Mubarak out of power.  Mubarak kept the Muslim Brotherhood illegal in Egypt.  The Brotherhood’s motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”  Today, Mubarak is gone from power and the Brotherhood now controls the Parliament and has just fielded a candidate for President.  Meantime, an even harder line Islamist is leading in the polls there, if he is not ultimately disqualified based on ancillary grounds having to do with his mother.  We have turned an ally into an enemy—and it is the most populous Arab state in the world.  



As we ask questions of our friends about President Obama, with what we call “intuitive empathy,” here is one:  President Obama has weakened Israel and in fact strengthened her and our enemies:  Why would he do that?



Perhaps, though, we need to set the predicate for this point.  I contend there are few countries as culturally and politically aligned with the United States as Israel.  Indeed, just to take one crude fact, in almost any given year, no country votes with the United States at the UN more than Israel—and not just on Middle East issues, but on every issue.



Now, back to President Obama and Israel:  Just a few facts.  Can you name me one other country our President has publicly lectured about its borders and what they need to be?  President Obama did that to Israel last year.  And if Israel actually heeded President Obama’s lecture, it would make Israel 9 miles wide at its most vulnerable point, half the width of the Washington Beltway.  But let’s look at the longer record here, courtesy of Dan Senor in the Wall Street Journal:



President Obama, from day one of his administration, has been pressuring Israel to freeze settlement building—and putting such building of housing on par with Palestinian terrorism.  Housing on the one hand; the slaughter of innocents on the other.



In October 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta publically said Israel was “isolating itself” in world affairs.



By the way, Mr. Panetta's criticism was promptly endorsed by the Turkish Prime Minister, a harsh critic of Israel, who said Mr. Panetta was "correct in his assumptions." Indeed, almost every time the Obama administration has scolded Israel, the charges have been repeated by Turkish officials.



In November of last year, in advance of meeting with the Israeli Defense Minister, Mr. Panetta publicly previewed his message. He would warn Israel against a military strike on Iran's nuclear program: "There are going to be economic consequences . . . that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy." Even if the administration felt compelled to deliver this message privately, why undercut the perception of U.S.-Israel unity on the military option?



That same month, an open microphone caught part of a private conversation between Mr. Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Sarkozy said of Israel's premier, "I can't stand Netanyahu. He's a liar." Rather than defend Israel's back, Mr. Obama piled on: "You're tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day."



In December of last year, again undercutting the credibility of the Israeli military option, Mr. Panetta used a high-profile speech to challenge the idea that an Israeli strike could eliminate or substantially delay Iran's nuclear program, and he warned that "the United States would obviously be blamed."



Mr. Panetta also addressed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by lecturing Israel to "just get to the damn table." This, despite the fact that Israel had been actively pursuing direct negotiations with the Palestinians, only to watch the Palestinian president abandon talks and unilaterally pursue statehood at the U.N. The Obama team thought the problem was with Israel.



In January of this year, Mr. Obama referred to the Turkish Prime Minister as one of the five world leaders with whom he has developed "bonds of trust." According to Mr. Obama, these bonds have "allowed us to execute effective diplomacy." The Turkish government had earlier sanctioned a six-ship flotilla to penetrate Israel's naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Mr. Erdogan had said that Israel's defensive response was "cause for war."



At a conference in Tunis last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about Mr. Obama pandering to "Zionist lobbies." She acknowledged that it was "a fair question" and went on to explain that any pandering is simply election year politics.



All of this has been so bad, that even other Democrats have weighed in. Just last year, a number of leading Democrats, including Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Steny Hoyer, felt compelled to speak out in response to Mr. Obama's proposal for Israel to return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders. Rep. Eliot Engel told CNN that "for the president to emphasize that . . . was a very big mistake."



In April 2010, 38 Democratic senators signed a critical letter to Secretary Clinton following the administration's public (and private) dressing down of the Israeli government.



Sen. Charles Schumer used even stronger language in 2010 when he responded to "something I have never heard before," from the Obama State Department, "which is, the relationship of Israel and the United States depends on the pace of the negotiations. That is terrible. That is a dagger."



Sen. Joe Lieberman said of Mr. Obama last year, "I think he's handled the relationship with Israel in a way that has encouraged Israel's enemies, and really unsettled the Israelis."



Now, just three more quick items, because the American press has not done a very good job of reporting them at all:



Item 1:   In December of last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared Israel’s religious Jews to the leadership of Iran and compared them to the Jim Crow South.  This is nothing short of a piece than the ignominious UN declaration that Israel is an apartheid, racist state.


Item 2:  President Obama’s administration has twice leaked information about Israel that both weakens Israel and strengthens Iran:



a. Just last month, The New York Times reported that the US military had just finished a secret war game to test the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran, and concluded that the chances were high that the US would end up drawn into a broader regional war that would leave hundreds of Americans dead.



"The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia….General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there."



The message was clear: The US is highly unlikely to support an Israeli strike. (h/t CS Monitor).



b.  This month, the administration leaked that Israel has obtained access to bases in Azerbaijan, on Iran's border.



President Obama has, thus, frustrated Israel’s defense and self-defense and at the same time, on the other side of the same coin, bought Iran more time.  Let it not go unknown, however, that Iran is not just Israel’s enemy, it is our enemy, too; it has been at war with us for over 30 years and Reuters reported just yesterday on Iranian and Hezbollah agents in New York City.



This moment, when we think about all that has taken place and all that we celebrate having taken place in Israel, let us remember the sobering words Charles Krauthammer reminded us of in citing Milan Kundera:  Small nations can disappear.  Czechoslovakia was a small nation and it disappeared.  Israel is a small nation, too.  And, let us add a corollary to this:  In the age of nuclear weapons, especially in an age where a suicidal cult-nation is set on acquiring nuclear weapons, large nations like the United States can disappear too. President Obama has weakened Israel and in fact strengthened her and our enemies:  Why would he do that?



Our job is simple: to prevent someone from someday ever having to write a book entitled “Why America Slept.”

THE O RULE

The Obama Rule

He says taxation is about fairness, not growth or revenue.

 

Forget Warren Buffett, or whatever other political prop the White House wants to use for its tax agenda. This week the Administration officially endorsed what in essence is the Obama Rule: Taxes must be high simply to spread the wealth, never mind the impact on the economy or government revenue. It's all about "fairness," baby.

This was long apparent to those fated to closely watch the 2008 campaign, but some voters might have missed the point amid the gauzy rhetoric about hope and change. Now we know without any doubt. White House aides made it official Tuesday in their on-the-record briefing on the new federal minimum tax that travels under the political alias known as the "Buffett rule."

The policy goal is to impose an effective minimum tax of 30% on the income of anyone who makes more than $1 million a year. When President Obama first proposed this new minimum tax he declared that the rule "could raise enough money" so that we "stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade."

Then he added: "This is not politics; this is math." Well, remedial math maybe.

The Obama Treasury's own numbers confirm that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend. When asked about those revenue projections, White House aide Jason Furman backpedaled from Mr. Obama's rationale by explaining that the tax was never intended "to bring the deficit down and the debt under control."

Okay. So what is the point?
 

President Obama speaking on the economy at Florida Atlantic University on Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla.

The goal, Mr. Furman explained, is to establish a "a basic issue of tax fairness." Millionaires should pay an effective tax rate no lower than a middle-class secretary or a plumber. But wait: IRS data show that middle-class workers on average pay just under 15% of their income in federal taxes, while the richest 0.1% pay almost twice as high a rate on average, or 26%.

The U.S. already has a Buffett rule. The Alternative Minimum Tax that first became law in 1969 was also supposed to make sure that millionaires pay their "fair share." The top AMT rate is now 28%. But the AMT has become a public nuisance, adding new complexity to the tax code and ensnaring more and more middle-class families because it isn't indexed for inflation. The surest prediction in politics is that any tax that starts by hitting the rich ends up hitting the middle class because that is where the real money is.

An even greater absurdity is the White House claim that this is a first step to tax reform because it will ensure that the "rich don't take advantage of tax breaks or structure their affairs to pay less taxes." Huh?

A basic principle of any tax reform worth the name is to broaden the tax base in order to lower rates for everyone, not to raise them. The point is to make the tax code more efficient by reducing the incentive for avoidance—legal or illegal.

The Buffett tax would only make loopholes more valuable. The White House has already carved out one exception to its own Buffett rule: charitable donations. So a billionaire could avoid the 30% effective tax rate by giving away millions of dollars—say, the way Mitt Romney so generously does.

Want to guess how long it will take for the suits on K Street to get busy trying to reinsert tax breaks for "investments" in the likes of municipal bonds, mortgages, energy-efficient toasters, windmills or by Chuck Schumer's hedge-fund buddies?

The century-long history of the federal income tax teaches us one lesson over and over: The higher the tax rates, the more loopholes Congress inserts as a way around those rates. This is why the government collected roughly as much tax revenue as a share of GDP when the top tax rate was 70% in the 1970s as it did when the rate fell to 28% in 1986.

The Buffett rule is really nothing more than a sneaky way for Mr. Obama to justify doubling the capital gains and dividend tax rate to 30% from 15% today. That's the real spread-the-wealth target. The problem is that this is a tax on capital that is needed for firms to grow and hire more workers. Mr. Obama says he wants an investment-led recovery, not one led by consumption, but how will investment be
spurred by doubling the tax on it?

The only investment and hiring the Buffett rule is likely to spur will be outside the United States—in China, Germany, India, and other competitors with much more investment-friendly tax regimes. The Buffett rule would give the U.S. the fourth highest capital gains rate among OECD nations, according to a new study by Ernst & Young, to go along with what is now the highest corporate tax rate (a little under 40% for the combined federal and average state rate). That's what happens when politicians pursue fairness over growth.
 

Corrupt U

April 5, 2012
Obama a Creature of the Corrupt University
by Bruce Thornton
Frontpage Magazine

The November presidential election was the favorite topic at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat last weekend. Amidst the prognostications and arguments about which Republican would or should get the nomination, or how pessimistic or optimistic conservatives should be about defeating the President, the personality and motivations of Barack Obama were a constant theme of conversation among participants.

What makes Obama tick? Is it psychological conflict and neuroses created by an absent father, a Muslim stepfather, and a flighty mother addled by Third-Worldism? Is he a Manchurian president, nursing socialist or Islamist agendas? A secret Muslim practicing taqqiya, or a progressive disciple of Saul Alinksy who has finished the Gramscian “long march through the institutions” by occupying the country’s most powerful political post? For me, while all these speculations could explain Obama’s personality and behavior, the answer is simpler: he is the perfect embodiment of the politicized, corrupt university.

That the university is politicized will surprise no reader of FrontPage, but more evidence has just been presented in a report by the California Association of Scholars called A Crisis of Competence. This study of the University of California system confirms what national studies of faculty political preferences have previously learned –– that liberal professors outnumber conservative ones 8 to 1. At the flagship Berkeley campus, ratios are scarier: 10:1 in the hard sciences, 17:1 in the humanities, and 21:1 in the social sciences. And across the system, individual academic departments reveal more lopsided ratios: 29:1 in the Berkeley English department, 31:1 in the Berkeley history department, 29:2 in the UCLA English department, and 53:3 in UCLA history. Are we surprised that the University of California was one of the biggest donors to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, giving more money than even Goldman Sachs?

Given this political bias, it is equally unsurprising that, according to a study by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, a majority of professors now believe their task should be teaching not basic skills, critical thinking, and foundational information, but how to “become agents of social change.” For example, the “mission statement” of the Berkeley Department of Social Work states that students must be committed to advancing “social justice,” code for redistributionist policies predicated on grievance. Or consider the UC Santa Cruz Sociology Department’s mission statement, which proclaims the need to consider “how society is organized in relationship to a vision of a just, free, and equal society — a vision that may require fundamental social change.” You can bet that “equal” does not mean equality of opportunity but equality of result achieved by the coercive power of the government. And “fundamental social change” is redolent of Obama’s promise five days before the 2008 election that “we will fundamentally change America,” a promise he has unfortunately kept.

All these data show that, as A Crisis of Competence writes, there has been in universities a “sharp shift to the left in recent decades,” with “the characteristic pattern of an even more extreme tilt, amounting almost to exclusion of opposing views, precisely in those departments where it matters most to have the full spectrum of social and political thought.” The goals and policies that Obama has pursued have been consistent with this progressive bias, predicated as they are on the unexamined leftist orthodoxy that rules most universities and can be heard every day in a thousand classrooms: American society is racist, its political institutions are unjust, capitalism is an oppressive, corrupt con that benefits the “1%,” and corporations reap obscene profits from the misery of the working and middle classes and the exploitation of nature and the Third World. Examine Obama’s comments on everything from the Trayvon Martin killing to the Keystone pipeline, from the Israel-Arab conflict to relations with the Muslim world, from Obamacare to high gas prices, and one will find behind his words the ideological doctrines of the leftist professoriate, the received, unexamined wisdom promulgated daily in faculty lounges, classrooms, and conferences.

But there is another dimension of American higher education that illuminates Obama’s character and behavior: the corrupting effects of racial preferences and the liberal racism of low expectations that undergird them. Because Obama is “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” as Joe Biden said in 2007, that is, a light-skinned black with no trace of ghetto accent or thug swagger, he was the perfect “diversity” applicant for the universities he attended. Thus it was in those institutions’ interests to advance his career whether he deserved such advancement or not. Given the refusal to release his college transcripts or standardized test scores, one suspects that his performance was not quite so stellar, surely not good enough for the subsequent goodies showered on him, such as acceptance to Harvard Law School and the editorship of the Law Review. But his performance in those venues wasn’t the point: his function was to show their “commitment to diversity.” To paraphrase what Archibald MacLeish once said about a poem, Obama wasn’t supposed to do anything, but to “be” black.

As a result of this process, Obama during his university career is unlikely to have been challenged in the way necessary for intelligence to be developed and broadened. All he had to do was mouth the progressive dogma, and he would be advanced far beyond his actual performance. He just had to show up, and white people would do the rest. And this is the tragedy of race preferences made obvious in the failed presidency of Obama: an obviously intelligent, charismatic man never had to confront intellectual challenges, hone his critical thinking skills, and learn discipline through failure. And he was fine, as long as he stayed in the academy or community organizing, both worlds where other people’s money insulate one from failure. But as president, he had to deliver and take responsibility, both of which he has refused to do. Instead, he delegates to aids and Congress, and then blames anybody and everybody for the consequences of the flawed policies. And like the typical professor, he politicizes everything, demonizing those who challenge him with question-begging epithets and ad hominem attacks.

So if you want the key to Obama’s character, look to the universities that created him, the media that slavishly serve him, and most of the voters who elected him. In other words, Obama represents a failure in our educational system that extends much, much farther than one president’s administration.

©2012 Bruce Thornton

Campagn 2012 - It's On

April 11, 2012
Freedom or Fairness in 2012?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

This should prove to be an ideological election about the economy. Not all campaigns are so clear-cut. Sometimes moderate Republicans raise taxes (as George H. W. Bush did); at other times, pragmatic Democrats cut spending (as Bill Clinton did).

But this year, Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, will run an ideological campaign, calling for smaller government and lower taxes, against an equally ideological President Obama, who wants more government and higher taxes. In this divided red-state/blue-state era, the supporters of each candidate demand no less and will have a clear choice.

This year’s campaign sloganeering will remind us of all the classic American arguments: Was it New Deal big government or World War II–inspired entrepreneurialism that truly ended the Great Depression? Were we better off under Ronald Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s economic policies? Was it unfettered Wall Street greed or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae government corruption that caused the 2008 financial meltdown? And which model has better served its people: America’s or the European Union’s?

Romney will make the implicit case that his prior success in the private sector and his free-enterprise know-how will bring Americans more personal freedom and prosperity — even if the upsurge may result in more inequality.

If we simplify or cut tax rates, slash federal spending, pay down the debt, prune away regulations, and push ahead with far more fossil-fuel development, Romney will argue, then employment will improve and those with money now who are on the sidelines will get back into the game. The economy will expand, more wealth will circulate, and greater revenue from taxes will be collected. Whether someone ends up with more money than someone else won’t be as important as the fact that those in the middle and on the bottom will be better off than they are now.

President Obama will decry “trickle-down economics” and counter with an appeal to equality. He revealed his own views about fairness in April 2008. When asked about raising the tax rates on capital gains, Senator Obama replied that he would indeed raise taxes for “purposes of fairness” alone — even if such hikes led to less aggregate revenue for all.

In the last three years, Obama has made it clear exactly what he meant. Almost half of Americans pay no income taxes, and more people than ever are on food stamps. Government is larger than ever, and more rules regulate business. The president pushed through a takeover of health care that may prove to be the greatest federal entitlement since Social Security. He has borrowed $5 trillion in less than four years in an effort to fund more social services — a gargantuan debt that he believes will require more taxes on the top brackets to pay back.

Obama editorializes about “fat-cat” bankers, “corporate-jet owners,” those who junket to the Super Bowl or Las Vegas, and those selfish Americans who should take time out from profiteering, or who do not know when they have already made enough money. He believes that most Americans are not doing well because a few on top are doing too well — as the 1 percent shear the other 99 percent of the flock in a zero-sum economy. Only more noble and competent technocratic officials can ensure that unfettered businesses spread rather than hoard their profits.

Romney will counter that if farmers do not have to worry about new “green” regulations, if oilmen can drill on more federal lands, if businessmen know their taxes won’t go up, and if financiers believe they should make — rather than apologize for — profits, then more Americans will find work, more oil found will mean cheaper gas for all, and American businesses will win a greater share abroad of the world’s trade and commerce.

These are the ancient arguments that have pitted the liberty of the American Revolution against the egalitarianism of the French, the statist visions of John Maynard Keynes against the individualism of Friedrich Hayek, and the tragic admission that we cannot be truly free if we are all forced to end up roughly equal against the idealism that if we are all roughly equal then we are at last truly free.

In blunter terms, Romney’s message is that, if you have the money to drive a nice Kia, what do you care if a sleek Mercedes whizzes by? Obama’s answer, in contrast, is that you should care, because the guy in the Mercedes probably took something from you.

The election will hinge upon how many people who can’t now afford a Kia believe that they might be able to under Romney — and upon how many couldn’t care less about the guy in the Mercedes.

©2012 Tribune Media Services

EAT The RICH - Tony Robbins - Iowahawk

How do you pay for National Debt ?????

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