Karl Rove - July 13,2012

Obama's Shrinking Majority

He won 9.5 million more votes than McCain. That won't happen again.

By KARL ROVE

Elections are about numbers, and right now the president's are bad. To understand why, consider 2008 as a reference point. That year, Barack Obama received 69,456,897 votes to John McCain's 59,934,814.

But a big chunk of President Obama's 9.5 million-vote advantage is probably gone. Let's break this down. According to exit polls, 44.8 million Republicans showed up to vote in 2004 while only 41.4 million did in 2008. Almost all those 3.4 million Republicans who stayed home have been energized by Mr. Obama's agenda and are now eager to vote against him.

Gallup found in April that Republicans were five points more likely to vote than Democrats. More recent measures, including by the Pew Research Center in June, show Republican voters displaying more intense interest than Democrats. If 2008 stay-at-home Republicans vote, Mr. Obama's margin would shrink by more than one-third (to 6.1 million). Similarly, the 2.4 million veterans who voted in 2004 but did not in 2008 could turn out in 2012. Mr. McCain's winning margin among vets was 10 points.

Nor can Mr. Obama count on winning the support of 9% of Republicans—or roughly 3.7 million—as he did in 2008 (according to exit polls). If he instead wins the same 6% of Republicans as Sen. John Kerry did in 2004, then 1.25 million Obama Republicans would be subtracted from the president's column and added to Mr. Romney's. That would narrow Mr. Obama's popular-vote margin to 3.6 million.
According to the exit polls, Mr. Obama won independents by eight points in 2008 (52% vs. 44% for Mr. McCain). But the July 1 CNN/Opinion Research poll showed Mr. Romney winning independents by seven points, 49% to 42%. The June 24 Gallup poll found

Mr. Romney up by one among independents, 43% to 42%. Independents will shift back and forth, but if they split 49% to 49% (with the rest going to minor candidates), then Mr. Obama's vote total would be shaved by 1.1 million and Mr. Romney's would grow by an equal amount, cutting the president's margin to 1.4 million.

Among voters age 65 years or older, Mr. Obama lagged behind Mr. McCain by eight points, 45% to 53%. That margin has doubled to 16 points (41% vs. 57%) in the July 1 CNN/Opinion Research. In the June 24 Gallup, the gap among seniors is 15 points, 39% to 54%. A big gap in November implies that Mr. Obama would lose some undetermined number of Democratic or independent seniors.

Mr. Obama also has a problem with middle-class voters. In the June 24 Gallup, he led among those making up to $36,000 a year by 51% to 39%, and he trailed among those making $36,000-$90,000 by 44% to 51%, both well behind his 2008 pace.

Finally, Mr. Obama faces real challenges in generating the turnout he needs from blacks, Hispanics and young people.

If the turnout of African American voters this fall is just a half-point less than in the last election, Mr. Obama would lose roughly 700,000 votes. With black unemployment at 14.4%, that's a real possibility.

Mr. Obama captured Hispanics by 67% to 31% in 2008. But the June 24 NBC/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll found Latino "interest in this election remains far below 2008 levels." Even after Mr. Obama's June 15 decree exempting young illegal immigrants from deportation, his approval rating among Hispanics is down to 58%. In the June 25 Gallup poll, four in 10 Hispanic voters list unemployment and economic growth as their greatest concern. This is no surprise, since Latino unemployment is 11%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Another group vital to Mr. Obama's 2008 victory—young people—are now less enthusiastic about voting and about Mr. Obama.

According to a June 24 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Mr. Obama leads Mr. Romney among them by 23 points—11 points less than Mr. Obama's margin over Mr. McCain. If this holds up, it would cost Mr. Obama up to 1.25 million votes.

Still, Romney isn't home free. To win 270 Electoral College votes, he will have to keep Republicans energized, increase his support among independents, seniors and the middle class, and make inroads among Hispanics and young voters. To do that, he will need to do much more than just criticize Mr. Obama's many failures.

The closer Nov. 6 gets, the more pressure there will be on the GOP challenger to offer a principled, practical, detailed governing vision. He has many important policies on his website. He could cite them more consistently in his speeches and point voters to them in his campaign ads.

That doesn't mean rolling out everything right now. If Team Romney were to do that, the media will declare it old news by Labor Day.
But to close the sale, Mr. Romney needs to be perceived on Election Day as the man with a plan.
 
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Arab Spring - The Winners Are: Islamists

Islamist Political Parties Are Arab Spring's Biggest Winners

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Posted 07/12/2012 06:15 PM ET

 

Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes.

Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception.

Consider: Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still.

Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn't just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25%. Combined, they command more than 70% of parliament — enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).

As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power.
Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood's Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.

What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.

It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history.

Islam Ascendant

Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century.

Stage II was the Arab nationalist era — secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical — ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.

Its vehicle was military dictatorship and Gamal Nasser led the way. He raised the flag of pan-Arabism, going so far as changing Egypt's name to the United Arab Republic and merging his country with Syria in 1958.

That absurd experiment — it lasted exactly three years — was to have been the beginning of a grand Arab unification, which, of course, never came.

Nasser also fiercely persecuted Islamists —as did his nationalist successors, down to Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the Baathists, Iraqi (Saddam Hussein) and Syrian (the Assads) — as the reactionary antithesis to Arab modernism.

But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.

Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011.

Many Westerners naïvely believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square.

Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.

Politics, Not Facebook

This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim

Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality.
"Islam is the answer," it preached and carried the day.

But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?

To be sure, Recep Erdogan's Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China.

Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).

For now, the new Islamist ascendancy in Arab lands has taken on the more benign Turkish aspect. Inherently so in Morocco and Tunisia; by external constraint in Egypt, where the military sees itself as guardian of the secular state, precisely as did Turkey's military in the 80 years from Ataturk to Erdogan.

Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran.

As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution).

Or it might adapt to modernity, accept the alternation of power with secularists and thus achieve by evolution an authentic Arab-Islamic democratic norm.

Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor.

This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.

Global Affairs - Changing

Sweeping Global Changes Upend Conventional Wisdom

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Posted 07/12/2012 
 

We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.
Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism.
With its strong euro, soft power and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar.
Germany, ostracized after losing two world wars and struggling with the guilt of the Holocaust, as penance was to be permanently submerged in European alliances, as its economic power was always expected to prop up the eurozone experiment.
The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world's cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe.
In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region's oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists.

Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. The world would increasingly make the necessary political corrections as it pivoted eastward.

But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

The eurozone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. War guilt and EU membership will no longer ensure German subsidies, but rather serve to alienate the German public. Europe's cloudy future hinges not on Brussels technocrats, but on Europeans learning how to deal with a dynamic, increasingly confident and peeved Germany.

The Arab Middle East is now in a free fall. Tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen were ousted, while one in Syria totters. But while the world hoped secular democrats would follow in their wake, more likely we are witnessing the emergence of one-election Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood.

The region will be mired in turmoil whether these upheavals turn out to be like the hijacked Iranian revolution that ended in theocracy, or the Turkish democratic model that is insidiously becoming Islamist.

Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil fuel reserves in the world — in theory, soon with enough gas, oil and coal never to need any imported Middle Eastern energy again.

"Peak oil" is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras. If the U.S. utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside.

These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks and Walmart.

In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics.

But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably look modern sooner than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory.

Even more surreal, tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference.

Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies.

Instead, it will become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society. Will Europe still snub Israel when it has as much oil, gas and money as an OPEC member in the Persian Gulf?

Who would have thought that a few fracking innovators in Texas would change the world's carbon footprint far more than did Nobel laureate Al Gore — while offering a way for the U.S. to be energy-independent. Or that Angela Merkel, not the European Union, would run Europe. Or that Arabs would be overthrowing Arabs, as oil-rich Israel idly watched.

Bennett - Commencement Address 2011

Love Life and Live It

Bill Bennett


Five years ago, I delivered what I believe was the first national commencement address on radio. Given this season of graduations, I thought I would take this space to offer those thoughts to the CNN.com audience as well.

First of all, for your perseverance, your hard work, your stick-to-it-iveness, your intelligence and your drive, I congratulate you -- that's for the parents.

Now I want to offer the graduating class four pieces of advice, general but personal advice to each one of you about the parts of the real world to which you are being transferred. I don't wish to speak of life in the government or of public policy or some burning public issue of the day, but rather of some steady and enduring issues of every day. Of the particular blessing of civilization and literature and history and philosophy that has advised us about these things.

My first piece of advice, my longest one: Try to like life. Be good-humored about your mortality. I don't mean that you should like all parts of your life, or all parts of the world, or that you should be happy with everything that occurs in your life -- you certainly won't be. My advice is that your attitude be one of optimism, engagement and interest, and that's largely under your control.

Writing about disappointment, the great novelist George Eliot once wrote, "Everything depends not on the mere fact of disappointment, but on the nature affected and the force that stirs it." Let disappointment, when it comes, and it will come, stir you, stir your force. So that is practical optimism that I recommend to you.

If you think about it, living with interests and engagement is an attitude to which there is simply no reasonable alternative. Beware the cynics; beware the dampers. Cynicism, gripping a state of chronic disappointment and complaining about the world, is no way to have life work for you or to live it. And those who start out feigning cynicism soon become cynics for real. Cynicism corrodes. It corrodes passion. It corrodes commitment. So take into your enterprises what the writer E.M. Forster calls "pluckiness." Pluckiness of spirit. Take good will and take a good sense of humor.

My second piece of advice is a corollary of the first. Look forward to work, don't dread it. Look forward to it and approach your work with passion and engagement. Listening to my contemporaries, I can tell you that I have found over and over again that those men and women who like what they do from day to day are happier than those who do not like what they do, even if the latter make twice or three times or five times as much money as the former.

Think of your work in terms of what you know and what you love. Try to expand the number of things that you know and love. There are blessings, ladies and gentlemen, blessings to be won in this way, blessings to be won from work that cannot be won from idleness or leisure. The humanities have long taught that work killed fewer hearts than boredom or idleness do. Modern medical science bears this out.

Perhaps for some of you, your first job may not be the one you really want. It certainly wasn't for me. That's not unusual. The idea that every person should be able to choose the job he or she wants is in fact, as history goes, a very new idea, still a relatively rare reality. So if that's your situation, the only reasonable thing to do is to make the best of it. But, while making the best of it, don't let your passions dry. Don't lose the passion to do what you know and what you love. We are at our best when we do that which we know and which we love.

In the movie "Chariots of Fire," the great English runner Eric Liddell told us he loved to run. "When I run," he said, "I feel God's pleasure." I think all of us have the opportunity to feel God's pleasure through us, but only if we're willing to stay at it. To be at one with one's work, whether it is dentistry or running or sales or teaching or farming or even government, is worth a very great deal.

My third piece of advice has to do with an old issue and a contemporary occupation. You see it all the time on television, and they talk about it in the movies, and no doubt the subject is still a late-night dormitory conversation. That subject is called happiness.

Here is what I've learned about it. First, I say to you that I wish happiness for all of you. But my advice to you, strange as it may sound, is not to seek happiness. There are all sorts of people who think that happiness is a condition that can be sought, then caught and then maintained indefinitely, kept in a jar or in a cage.

Some also believe that the quality of a life is determined by the number of hours of happiness you can chalk up. That's not true. The thing is, the irony is, that you will have a much better chance of finding happiness if you don't bother your head about it, if you worry about other things.

No doubt, some of you have already discovered that happiness is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure comes and pleasure goes, but happiness is a different thing. The point is, as Robertson Davies has written, "The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it."

Happiness is like a cat. If you coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it won't come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you will find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.

So forget pursuing happiness. Instead, pursue learning, pursue work, pursue honor, pursue your commitments and keep them, pursue the truth, pursue decency, look honestly for God. Be faithful to your spouse, to your children, to your friends, to your country. Forget pursuing happiness; pursue other things and with luck happiness will come to you.

Finally, the fourth and last piece of advice, is about your mind. A very smart man, a philosopher, once said,

"The sole purpose of education is to be able to detect when a man is talking rot." 

 I hope you know it when you hear or read it. I hope you haven't read it today. For this advice, this very brief last piece of advice, is about your mind. Here I offer this saying: "Keep an open mind. An open mind is a very good thing. But don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out."

Thank you. Congratulations. I wish you and your families well.

Agriculture Bill - another $1 Trillion

Ag Reform Bill, At $969 Billion, Is A Mammoth Waste

By REP. DAVID SCHWEIKERT
Posted 07/10/2012 05:51 PM ET

Although our friends in the U.S. Senate routinely dismiss common sense solutions to our fiscal crisis, they have shown little resistance in considering an expensive 1,010-page farm bill.
Dubbed the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012, this $969 billion monstrosity speaks to exactly why the American people sent us to Washington: To stop the spending, waste and corruption.
Only in Washington could this bill be considered fiscally responsible.
Despite the fact the Senate cosponsors claim this farm bill could save $23.6 billion over the next decade, the actual 10-year cost of this bill dwarfs the 2008 farm bill at a CBO-projected $604 billion.
It does not take an economist to note that a 62% increase in spending while we approach $16 trillion in debt is simply unsustainable.
In addition to its bloated numbers, this bill includes an endless parade of special interests.
Washington is picking winners and losers through a combination of price controls, import restrictions, subsidies and cash payments; and it reeks of corporate welfare in an era of record-high farm incomes and record-low debt ratios.
Loser Subsidies
Compounding these problems, the Senate has proposed a new crop insurance subsidy known as "shallow loss" that effectively creates a 90% revenue guarantee. What other industry gets a 90% revenue guarantee?
With that kind of safety net in place, it would not be hard to envision a scenario where the system is abused. What incentive would farmers continue to have to work hard and contribute to the food supply when their risk is removed and their profit ensured?
Moreover, a government safety net removes private competition from the marketplace and with it any hope of fostering economic growth.
Government intervention in the mortgage industry, the real estate industry, in health care, and in farming has sapped the ability of private enterprise to compete with a massive organization that has millions of taxpayers to generate revenue from, not to mention the freedom to take out unsustainable loans and print its own currency.
This administration has made a habit of doling out corporate social welfare, and robbing our economy of the chance to heal. That said, the most egregious problems with the farm bill have absolutely nothing to do with farming.
Eighty percent of farm bill spending goes to the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
And like most programs that have their roots in the New Deal and the Great Society, this one has grown exponentially.
In the 1970s, just one in 50 Americans received food stamps. Today, that number is one in seven, or more than 46 million Americans — that is 15% of the U.S. population.
The cost of the program doubled between 2001 and 2006 and again from 2008 to 2012. Taxpayers now spend $80 billion a year on food stamps, a level the Senate bill would lock in for the next decade.
Culture Of Dependency
Thanks to the stimulus, misaligned incentives for states, and a consistent weakening of eligibility criteria, we are in the midst of a dependency crisis.
This is a huge victory for liberals. By inserting food stamps into an agriculture bill, it makes it nearly impossible to pass common sense reforms to either.
The first step in long-term farm bill reform is to split agriculture away from food stamps and let each provision stand or fail on its own merit.
In 2010, Americans sent reinforcements like me to the people's House to ensure we did not repeat the mistakes of the past.
While our friends in the Senate do not appear to have learned that lesson, the House must stand firm and unequivocally oppose any farm and food bill that does not restore free market principles to our agriculture system and rein in America's bloated food stamp program.
• Schweikert, a Republican, represents Arizona's 5th congressional district.

Ag Reform Bill, At $969 Billion, Is A Mammoth Waste

By REP. DAVID SCHWEIKERT
Posted 07/10/2012 05:51 PM ET

Although our friends in the U.S. Senate routinely dismiss common sense solutions to our fiscal crisis, they have shown little resistance in considering an expensive 1,010-page farm bill.
Dubbed the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012, this $969 billion monstrosity speaks to exactly why the American people sent us to Washington: To stop the spending, waste and corruption.
Only in Washington could this bill be considered fiscally responsible.
Despite the fact the Senate cosponsors claim this farm bill could save $23.6 billion over the next decade, the actual 10-year cost of this bill dwarfs the 2008 farm bill at a CBO-projected $604 billion.
It does not take an economist to note that a 62% increase in spending while we approach $16 trillion in debt is simply unsustainable.
In addition to its bloated numbers, this bill includes an endless parade of special interests.
Washington is picking winners and losers through a combination of price controls, import restrictions, subsidies and cash payments; and it reeks of corporate welfare in an era of record-high farm incomes and record-low debt ratios.
Loser Subsidies
Compounding these problems, the Senate has proposed a new crop insurance subsidy known as "shallow loss" that effectively creates a 90% revenue guarantee. What other industry gets a 90% revenue guarantee?
With that kind of safety net in place, it would not be hard to envision a scenario where the system is abused. What incentive would farmers continue to have to work hard and contribute to the food supply when their risk is removed and their profit ensured?
Moreover, a government safety net removes private competition from the marketplace and with it any hope of fostering economic growth.
Government intervention in the mortgage industry, the real estate industry, in health care, and in farming has sapped the ability of private enterprise to compete with a massive organization that has millions of taxpayers to generate revenue from, not to mention the freedom to take out unsustainable loans and print its own currency.
This administration has made a habit of doling out corporate social welfare, and robbing our economy of the chance to heal. That said, the most egregious problems with the farm bill have absolutely nothing to do with farming.
Eighty percent of farm bill spending goes to the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
And like most programs that have their roots in the New Deal and the Great Society, this one has grown exponentially.
In the 1970s, just one in 50 Americans received food stamps. Today, that number is one in seven, or more than 46 million Americans — that is 15% of the U.S. population.
The cost of the program doubled between 2001 and 2006 and again from 2008 to 2012. Taxpayers now spend $80 billion a year on food stamps, a level the Senate bill would lock in for the next decade.
Culture Of Dependency
Thanks to the stimulus, misaligned incentives for states, and a consistent weakening of eligibility criteria, we are in the midst of a dependency crisis.
This is a huge victory for liberals. By inserting food stamps into an agriculture bill, it makes it nearly impossible to pass common sense reforms to either.
The first step in long-term farm bill reform is to split agriculture away from food stamps and let each provision stand or fail on its own merit.
In 2010, Americans sent reinforcements like me to the people's House to ensure we did not repeat the mistakes of the past.
While our friends in the Senate do not appear to have learned that lesson, the House must stand firm and unequivocally oppose any farm and food bill that does not restore free market principles to our agriculture system and rein in America's bloated food stamp program.
• Schweikert, a Republican, represents Arizona's 5th congressional district.

O's Class Warfare vs Success

Obama's Class-Warfare Rhetoric Demonizes Success

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07/10/2012 06:19 PM ET
 Anyone who wants to study the tricks of propaganda rhetoric has a rich source of examples in the statements of President Barack Obama.

On Monday, for example, he said that Republicans "believe that prosperity comes from the top down, so that if we spend trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that that will somehow unleash jobs and economic growth."

Let us begin with the word "spend." Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can?

Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama.

Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called spending but "investment." You can say anything if you have your own private language.

But let's go back to the notion of "spending" money on "the wealthiest Americans." The people he is talking about are not the wealthiest Americans. Income is not wealth — and the whole tax controversy is about income taxes. Wealth is what you have accumulated, and wealth is not taxed, except when you die and the government collects an inheritance tax from your heirs.

People over 65 years of age have far more wealth than people in their 30s and 40s — but lower incomes.

If Obama wants to talk about raising income taxes, let him talk about it, but claiming that he wants to tax "the wealthiest Americans" is a lie and an emotional distraction for propaganda purposes.

The really big lie — and one that no amount of hard evidence or logic seems to make a dent in — is that those who oppose raising taxes on higher incomes simply want people with higher incomes to have more money, in hopes that some of their prosperity will "trickle down" to the rest of the people.

Some years ago, a challenge was issued in this column to name any economist, outside of an insane asylum, who had ever said any such thing. Not one example has yet been received, whether among economists or anyone else. Someone is always claiming that somebody else said it, but no one has ever been able to name and quote that somebody else.
Once we have put aside the lies and the convoluted use of words, what are we left with? Not much.

Obama is claiming that the government can get more tax revenue by raising the tax rate on people with higher incomes. It sounds plausible, and that may be enough for some people, but the hard facts make it a very iffy proposition.


This issue has been fought out in the United States in several administrations — both Democratic and Republican. It has also been fought out in other countries.

What is the real argument of those who want to prevent taxes from rising above a certain percentage, even for people with high incomes? It has nothing to do with making them more prosperous so that their prosperity will "trickle down."

Kennedy's Clarity

A Democratic president — John F. Kennedy — stated the issue plainly. Under the existing tax rates, he explained, investors' "efforts to avoid tax liabilities" made them put their money in tax shelters, because existing tax laws made "certain types of less-productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings" for the country.
Ironically, the Obama campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney for putting his money in the Cayman Islands substantiate the point that President Kennedy and others have made, that higher tax rates can drive money into tax shelters, whether tax-exempt municipal bonds or investments in other countries.

In other words, raising tax rates does not automatically raise tax revenues for the government. Higher tax rates have often led to lower tax revenues for states, the federal government and other countries. Conversely, lower tax rates have often led to higher tax revenues. It all depends on the circumstances.

But none of this matters to Barack Obama.
If class warfare rhetoric about taxes leads to more votes for him, that is his bottom line, whether the government gets a dime more revenue or not. So long as his lies go unchallenged, a second term will be the end result for him and a lasting calamity for the country.

Nothing produces more of a sense of the futility of facts than seeing someone in the mass media repeating some notion that has been refuted innumerable times over the years.

On Monday, on CNN's program "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer, commentator Gloria Borger discussed President Obama's plan to continue the temporary extension of the tax rates established under the Bush administration — except for the top brackets, where Obama wanted the tax rates raised.

"If you're going to lower the tax rates," Ms. Borger said, "where are you going to get the money from?"

First of all, nobody is talking about lowering the tax rates. They are talking about whether or not to continue the existing tax rates, which are set to expire after a temporary extension.

And Obama is talking about raising the tax rate on higher-income earners.


But when Ms. Borger asked, "Where are you going to get the money from?" if you don't raise tax rates, that assumes an automatic correlation between tax rates and tax revenues, which is demonstrably false.

As far back as the 1920s, a huge cut in the highest income tax rate — from 73% to 24% — led to a huge increase in the amount of tax revenue collected by the federal government.

Why? Because investors took their money out of tax shelters, where they were earning very modest rates of return, and put their money into the productive economy, where they could earn higher rates of return, now that those returns were not so heavily taxed.

Tax-Cut Rationales

This was the very reason why tax rates were cut in the first place — to get more revenue for the federal government.

The same was true, decades later, during the Kennedy administration. Similar reasons led to tax-rate cuts during the Reagan and the George W. Bush administrations.

All of these presidents — Democrat and Republican alike — made the same argument for tax-rate reductions that had been made in the 1920s, and the results were similar as well.

Yet the invincible lie continues to this day that those who oppose high tax rates on high incomes are doing so because they want to reduce the taxes paid by high-income earners, in hopes that their increased prosperity will "trickle down" to others.
In reality, high-income earners paid not only a larger total amount of taxes after the tax rate cuts of the 1920s but also a higher share of all the income taxes collected.
It is a matter of record that anyone can check out with official government statistics.

This result was not peculiar to the 1920s. In 2006, the New York Times reported: "An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year."
Expectations are in the eye of the beholder. Tax-cut proponents expected precisely the result from the Bush tax cuts that so surprised the New York Times. So did tax cut proponents in the Kennedy and Reagan administrations.

If this concept has not yet trickled down to the New York Times or CNN's Gloria Borger, that is a commentary on the media commentators.

Ms. Borger may simply not know any better, but Barack Obama cannot use that excuse.
When he was a candidate for president back in 2008, Charles Gibson of ABC News confronted him with the fact that there was no automatic correlation between the raising and lowering of tax rates and whether tax revenues moved up or down.
Obama admitted that. But he said that he was for raising tax rates on higher-income earners anyway, in the name of "fairness."

How higher tax rates that the government does not actually collect make any sense, whether from a fairness perspective or as a way of paying the government's bills, is another question. The point here is that Obama knew then that tax rates and tax revenues do not automatically move in the same direction.

In other words, he is lying when he talks as if tax rates and tax revenues move together. Ms. Borger and others in the media may or may not know that.

So they are not necessarily lying. But they are failing to inform their audiences about the facts — and that allows Obama's lies to stand.