Sorry Obama, Government Didn't Build That
Leadership: President Obama whines that he didn't mean what Mitt Romney says he did when he uttered, "You didn't build that." But even if you take Obama at his word, he's hopelessly and terribly wrong.
After endlessly complaining that Romney has taken his words out of context and deliberately altered their meaning, Obama can't seem to shake off the damage done by his remark two weeks ago that "if you've got a business — you didn't build that."
Obama says he wasn't referring to the businesses themselves, but to the roads and bridges, and to the whole "unbelievable American system" that "allowed you to thrive."
"Somebody," he says, invested in those things. And by "somebody," Obama means government. But Obama's got it all backwards.
Successful businesses and individuals are largely responsible for all those roads and bridges, and most of the rest of the "system," since they paid for the bulk of it. In fact, just the income taxes paid by corporations and the richest 5% accounted for 41% of all federal revenues in 2007.
And what happens when businesses don't succeed, or the rich start to lose their money? Federal and state tax revenues collapse, forcing them to scale back all those grand public works projects.
Between 2007 and 2009, federal corporate tax revenues plummeted 62%, and income taxes paid by the top 1% fell nearly 30%. States still haven't made up the revenue hole caused by the recession and Obama's painfully slow economic recovery.
The second mistake Obama makes is to assume that only the government can build new roads and bridges. Most of the roads built in the 1800s were the work of the thousands of private road companies. And today, cash-strapped states are increasingly turning to private companies to finance highway construction.
One such road, the Dulles Greenway, starts just 26 miles away from the White House. Private financing is also behind new "high occupancy toll" lanes under construction on the D.C. Beltway.
And Obama's claim that only through government were we able to build the Golden Gate Bridge or invent the Internet is equally wrong. Obama apparently is unaware that Bank of America founder Amadeo Giannini financed the Golden Gate Bridge after the state couldn't sell its construction bonds in the wake of the 1929 market crash.
In other words, the government "didn't build that" bridge. It was one of Obama's "fat cat" bankers.
And even if some researchers at the Defense Dept. did manage to put together the initial pieces of the Internet, it was entirely the work of the private sector that made it a reality.
Private companies, not the government, created the browsers, the search engines, the social networks, the easy access, and most of the content that makes the Internet worth anything to anyone.
And it was the private sector — the phone companies, cable companies, private satellite companies — that invested their own money to construct all the pipes, the wireless networks and the transmission technology to transport all that data. Without the contributions made by those successful businesses, the Internet would still be a minuscule government project.
By the way, when Obama tried to get the government involved in the Internet with his push to expand broadband access, it was a hugely expensive flop.
It goes without saying that everyone benefits from roads and bridges, safe streets and a strong national defense. If government limited itself to those things, we'd be delighted.
But for Obama to then claim that we'd all be better off with ObamaCare, oppressive EPA regulations, a massive European-style welfare state, and a bottomless pit of federal debt, is, well, a bridge too far. |
