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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (130277)	8/3/2008 12:14:23 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Obamanomics Flunks The Test By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY \| Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 4:20 PM PT Election '08: Barack Obama the lawyer-organizer could use a crash course in economics. His economic plan's assumptions, based on long-discredited Marxist theories, are wildly wrongheaded. In arguing for a heavier mix of government, he assumes that capitalism unfairly favors the rich, almost exclusively so, and fails to spread prosperity. "The rich in America have little to complain about," he carps. "The distribution of wealth is skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age." Obama cites data showing a yawning gap between the income of the average worker and the wealthiest 1%. He thinks it's government's job to step in and close it — "for purposes of fairness" — by soaking the rich, among other leftist nostrums. "Between 1971 and 2001," he complains, "while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500%." But such a snapshot comparison would be meaningful only if America were a caste society, in which the people making up one income group remained static over time. Of course that's not the case. The composition of the rich and poor in this country is in constant flux, as the income distribution changes dramatically over relatively short periods. Few are "stuck" in poverty, or have a "lock" on wealth. Obama would discover this if only he'd put down his class-warfare manuals and look closely at the IRS' own data. Take those megarich he vilifies — the top hundredth of a percent. According to a recent Treasury study, three-fourths of them in 1996 fell out of the group by 2005. Meanwhile, more than half of those in the bottom income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005, with more than 5% leapfrogging to the richest quintile. (It's no fluke: The same high degree of income mobility is seen in prior comparable periods, as well.) Some poor moved up through personal effort, while many rode an expanding economy. Real median incomes of all taxpayers rose 24%, but the poor registered the biggest gains of all. President Kennedy understood that a growing economy is like a rising tide that "lifts all boats." Obama, on the other hand, thinks some are lifted and others lowered, as if the economy were a system of locks operated by a cabal of evil capitalists. He also fails to understand how taxes change behavior. He thinks raising taxes on the most productive members of society won't "curb incentives to work or invest." Even TV news anchor Charlie Gibson knows better. During a primary debate, the ABC host took Obama to task for proposing a doubling in the capital gains tax. History shows, he pointed out, that raising the cap gains rate actually ends up costing the government revenues. Obama just didn't get it. "Well, Charlie," he argued, "what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness." Forget growth and revenues. Let's just punish those "greedy" investors. It's the same Marxist reasoning behind his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts: The rich must be made to pay their "fair" share, Obama asserts. Never mind that the top 1% of taxpayers already pay 38% of the total tax burden, according to recent IRS data, while the bottom 50% bear just 3% of the load. Obama's economic plan also calls for mandating a "living wage." He plans to saddle retailers with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation, along with a mandate to provide seven days of paid sick leave to workers. Obama assumes business owners will just eat the added costs. But restaurants, the nation's second-largest private-sector employer, already operate on razor-thin profit margins. Faced with such mandatory paid benefits, they'll have no choice but to cut staff. In fact, the last major minimum-wage increase cost the restaurant industry more than 146,000 jobs, the National Restaurant Association says, while restaurant owners put off plans to hire an additional 106,000 employees. So Obama would get his wage-and-benefits mandate, but lose jobs in an industry that employs the very minorities Obama claims he's trying to help. "If restaurateurs had their way, every lawmaker would run a small business before starting to legislate," the industry opined in a recent press release. Lawmakers aren't the only ones. Leftist presidential candidates also could benefit from such a mandate.

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (130277)	8/3/2008 12:16:21 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Obama Cannot Keep Running On Narcissism By GEORGE F. WILL \| Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 4:30 PM PT As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that did not do it, what will? The antecedent of the pronoun "that" is his Berlin speech. The antecedent of the pronoun "it" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement soft power (diplomacy) with hard power (military force). He spoke in Berlin at the bullet-scarred base — it was in the crossfire 63 years ago as Russian troops neared Hitler's bunker about a mile away — of an 1873 monument to German militarism. To be precise, the monument celebrates the Franco-Prussian War and lesser triumphs of the militarism that would help ruin the next century. Anyway, at that monument Obama exhorted Germans — does the candidate of "change" appreciate how much beneficent change made this exhortation necessary? — to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so. But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming. Surely this fact is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security matters, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But the fact also might be related to fatigue from too much of Obama's eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory. Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." John Kennedy said in Berlin, "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free." That half-baked and badly written thought was either trivial because it was tautological (when one man is enslaved, not every man is free) or it was absurd (when one man is not free, no man is free). That absurdity is dangerous because it makes a grandiose mission seem imperative, as in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Sugary Rhetoric Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs — someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy. And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism. Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity. In Berlin, Obama neared self-parody with a rhetoric of Leave No Metaphor Behind. "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges"? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn"? The Middle East deserves one. And Berlin was the wrong place to vow to "remake the world once again." Modern Berlin rose from rubble that was the result of the last attempt at remaking "the world." Of course, from Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." No. We. Don't. The world is a fact, and facts are indeed stubborn things. After eight years, if such there are, of an Obama presidency, if such there is, the world will look much as it does today — if we are lucky. Swift and sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities — often of wars, sometimes of people determined to "remake the world." Wise voters — polls might be telling us that there are more of them than Obama imagines — hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery.