Seven Obama Legacies That Are Gifts For Republicans
By THOMAS SMITH AND STEPHEN MOORE
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
After 6-1/2 years of his presidency, conservatives generally despair that Barack Obama has severely and perhaps permanently damaged our free-market economy and succeeded in irreversibly growing the size and scope of government.
We think the reverse may be true, that there's a bright side to the Obama legacy.
That may seem hard to believe, given that President Obama has deluged the nation with $7 trillion in new debt; higher tax rates; a stupendously ineffective health care overhaul; a blizzard of new regulations on the Internet, energy and financial services; a newly resurrected European welfare state; and worst of all, a $2 trillion growth deficit that may never be erased.
But Obama has accomplished something that even heroes like Ronald Reagan could never do: His presidency has discredited liberalism in its every form and incarnation.
He has proved in a compelling way that government really is incapable of solving most societal problems — unemployment, income inequality, lack of health care, the burgeoning national debt, poor schools, racial unrest, corruption, and so on.
Obama is the embodiment of what F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit" — the idea that the intellectual class — i.e., academics, professionals, politicians, media, authors, etc. — possess the knowledge and expertise to know, far better than the citizens, how we should live our lives and make the world a better place.
As evidence, start with one of his greatest self-described "accomplishments": the $830 billion fiscal stimulus bill. It was supposed to create millions of jobs through a multiplier effect of spending for "shovel-ready" projects.
Instead, by Obama's own economic analysis, we had fewer jobs in the U.S. economy with this avalanche of spending than we would have had if government hadn't spent a dime.
There was no multiplier effect from this spending blowout. All we have to show for the "fiscal stimulus" is nearly $1 trillion more debt — which our children, and their children, and perhaps their children, will have to pay off.
Keynesian economics was shown (once again) to be a fraud, and the economics lesson is: never again.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Then there's the glaring fiasco of ObamaCare. It began with a widely publicized and humorous birthing catastrophe — i.e., the website breakdown. An investigation discovered that it all happened because no one was really in charge. Most high-school students can create a website, but the government, which is going to spend trillions of dollars on this new program, couldn't get the site up and running on time.
The goal of Obama's 975-page health care bill was to improve the delivery of goods and services in 17% of the most successful economy in the history of man. The regulators have put out 15,000-plus pages of regulations and counting — a stack of pages taller than Shaquille O'Neill.
Already the costs of ObamaCare are spiraling — up 30% this year alone. Millions of Americans have lost their health coverage, employers are dropping their plans (so if you like it, you may not be able to keep it after all), and many can't afford the program even with the taxpayer subsidies.
Obama ignored the evidence that the federal government's attempt to take over the health system couldn't work.
Why should we have ever expected ObamaCare to be any different from the Veterans Administration and Medicaid? Given the choice, do you think veterans would choose government health care or private health care? The question answers itself, yet the Obama brain trust never thought about choice as the answer.
ObamaCare takes away health insurance choices through one-size-fits-all mandated benefits, so a 60-year-old man has to be insured for birth control and a 22-year-old has to be insured for hip replacements.
Now even the millennials who were once believers in hope and change are asking why they may have to pay three times more for an ObamaCare plan than what the private marketplace can offer them.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The FCC will now regulate the Internet through what the Obama administration calls "net neutrality." This is a regulation is search of a purpose.
Is it to guarantee access to high-speed Internet? The vast majority of Americans — even poor Americans — already have more computer and Internet power on their cellphones than all the allied powers had on all the computers in World War II. And the costs of these digital products keep falling, just as a long-distance call costs one-100th of what a call may have cost 40 years ago.
This was all about a corporate-crony payback favor to Obama's campaign contributors. Most Americans would just as soon see the government stay miles away from the Internet.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Let's also not forget the recent debacle by the Secret Service, which has been guarding the White House for decades. Decades of experience, however, did not prevent an intruder from jumping over the White House fence and entering the White House's unlocked front door, only to be caught by an off-duty officer.
Now one would think that after decades of experience guarding the White House, which is in the same location and has not grown in size, the Secret Service might have come to the conclusion that a fence ought to be high enough to prevent intruders from jumping over it, and just maybe the front door of the White House ought to be locked at all times.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Above all else, Mr. Obama has set out to "spread the wealth around" and make America a more equal society by taxing the rich and adding spending for the poor. He would be a modern-day Robin Hood and raise the living standards of the middle class and the poorest among us.
This was thought only to be possible through a fundamental "transformation" of our economy, which this president sought. Instead, by the left's own measure of income inequality — the "Gini Coefficient" — the gap between rich and poor has widened every year of his tenure.
Blacks and Hispanics were promised that they would benefit greatly from Obama's redistribution schemes. They voted for him twice in large numbers. So did the young millennials. But all three groups suffered the largest declines in income over the last six years. Hope and change haven't worked out quite as expected.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Obama promised that his expert personnel and policies would root out the waste and fraud in government. He pledged to "go line by line" through the budget to cut out extraneous expenditures. His would be an administration that would reinstate good and competent government that works for the people.
Then in early 2015, the government reported that various agencies of the federal octopus, controlled by Obama's best and brightest, made $125 billion of erroneous payments to dead people, illegal immigrants and shysters. That's more than the entire GDP produced by every resident of Indiana.
Instead of holding a press conference, apologizing to the American taxpayer for this gross malfeasance, making sure that heads would roll at the agencies involved and calling all hands on deck to end this spectacular fraud, the White House ignored the report altogether.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The ultimate irony is that the Obama crew had hoped it would restore America's faith in government. Just the opposite has occurred.
Trillions of dollars of added government spending, debt and regulation have produced, almost comically, the equivalent of fences too short, front doors unlocked and websites that don't work.
As government incompetence becomes more frequent and obvious, more Americans are awakening to the reality that our Founders had it right all along — that government's role should be limited and that the most fertile environment for innovation, progress and happier and healthier lives is minimum government and maximum personal liberty.
It took Barack Obama to remind us of that, which is why he's the greatest asset to those of us who believe that mankind's progress in the last 250 years was the result of innovation, not government programs.
Thank you, Mr. President. |
