The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (21 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

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Indeed, the debt-ceiling agreement only seemed to make Obama more partisan and combative. On a campaign blitz through Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois, a frustrated Obama sought to re-fight the just-finished debt battle. He lashed out at all his GOP presidential rivals, saying, “That’s just not common sense. You’ve got to be willing to compromise to move the country forward.” He added, “I make no apologies for being reasonable.”
Obama failed to mention that the GOP’s resistance to his pleas for a tax hike was a perfectly reasonable position, since higher taxes would hinder economic growth and make it even harder to balance the budget. In fact, to agree to
his
plan, which he had demanded because his stubborn ideology required punishing the “rich,” was
not
reasonable if the goal was to improve the nation’s fiscal position.
56
At any rate, after the debt-ceiling agreement, Obama demanded yet more spending, this time for his proposed $447 billion jobs bill. The administration claimed the bill would “support”—another meaningless, immeasurable metric—400,000 education jobs via grants to the states. As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey pointed out, the administration used a similar rationale when arguing about all the jobs its original stimulus bill “saved or created.” But, he noted, many of the “saved” jobs were bureaucratic ones—not just the teachers, police officers, and fire fighters continually touted by Team Obama—and the stimulus simply enabled the states to delay painful but necessary cost-cutting measures. Morrissey also pointed out that Obama had a calculated political motive for subsidizing these particular employees—many of them belong to Obama-supporting public employee unions such as the SEIU and AFCSME.
57
In fact, the entire jobs bill was a farce. Obama knew it couldn’t pass the GOP-controlled House, but he pushed for it anyway to stoke his leftist base and to position himself to blame Republicans for obstructing his “recovery.” Sam Youngman, in
The Hill
, likened the American Jobs Act to Elvis: “The King made $60 million last year even though he died in 1977. The lesson: Just ‘cause something is dead doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. And so it is with President Obama and his jobs bill. It’s dead as is.” Republican as well as some Democratic leaders had made that clear but, wrote Youngman, “that will not stop Obama from talking about the jobs bill and nothing else. That’s because the White House hopes the president’s steady drumbeat of ‘pass the bill’ can become a rallying cry for his supporters even if it doesn’t create a single job.”
One Democratic strategist noted cynically, “He has to keep this up so long that after people stop thinking it has a chance, they start thinking that he is some sort of crazy for creating jobs. Repetition, repetition, repetition.”
58
This charade reached the pinnacle of absurdity when Senate Democrats changed Senate rules in part to avoid a symbolic vote on the jobs bill.
59
Even after Democrats obstructed the vote on his own bill, Obama continued to hammer
Republicans
for obstruction.
“THE FOOD STAMP PRESIDENT”
As documented in
Crimes Against Liberty
, Obama repeatedly breached his promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families making $250,000 or less. He has also flirted with implementing a Value Added Tax (VAT), which would necessarily obliterate his tax pledge. In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood in April 2010, Obama refused to rule out imposing a VAT, as had his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.
60
Some have speculated Obama has racked up so much debt, at least in part, to justify enacting a VAT as a desperate deficit-reducing measure—even though a VAT would utterly fail in that role, as seen throughout Europe. On the
Journal Editorial Report
on Fox News Channel,
Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot mused, “I think the strategy is—has been all along—increase spending, then ultimately, you will have to raise taxes to pay for it. And in a second term, the idea is, try to get a value added tax, if possible, or a major energy tax. Because they know they can’t pay for this spending just by taxing the rich.”
61
Obama’s redistributionist philosophy is reflected not only in his tax plans, but in his drastic expansion of welfare programs. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich took heat for calling Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” but the evidence supports Gingrich. Judicial Watch reported that the Obama administration rewarded the state of Oregon a $5 million bonus for its efficiency in adding food-stamp recipients to already bulging rolls. This was under the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to reduce “food insecure households” by increasing access to food stamps. According to Judicial Watch, the Department of Agriculture has recently launched a multi-million dollar initiative to recruit more food-stamp participants.
62
Some claim these types of awards date back to the Bush administration.
63
That may be partially true, but the Heritage Foundation reports that between FY2008, the last of President George W. Bush’s fiscal years, and FY2011, the average per capita benefit of SNAP almost doubled from $39.3 billion to $75.3 billion (in constant 2011 dollars).
64
The
Wall Street Journal
reported in November 2011 that nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population—45.8 million—received food stamp assistance in the month of August and that food stamp rolls had risen 8.1 percent over the preceding year, according to the Department of Agriculture.
65
The number of Americans who receive some form of federal government aid has skyrocketed just in the past five years to 67.3 million people, or 21.8 percent (excluding government employees). The following charts show how the percentage was about half that in the 1960s, before President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty and Great Society programs. The numbers then rose until the mid-1990s, fell slightly, and then rose slightly again during the George W. Bush administration. But during President Obama’s term the trajectory has been nearly vertical:
66
1 in 5 Americans Dependent on Government (Not Including Government Employees)
Source:
Heritage Foundation calculations based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

 

Chart 12 * CDA 12-02
heritage.org
A shocking 70.5 percent of federal spending is now dedicated to dependence programs of one kind or another, and this percentage has grown sharply during Obama’s term as well, as shown in the following chart:
67
More than 70 Percent of Federal Spending Goes to Dependence Programs
Sources:
Office of Management and Budget,
Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2012,
20 11, Table 1.1, pp. 22 and 23, and Heritage Foundation calculations sourced throughout the Index of Dependence on Government.

 

Chart 2* CDA 12-02
heritage.org
In addition, under President Obama, an even greater percentage of Americans—49.5 percent—is not paying income taxes. Thus, we have more and more Americans depending on federal transfer payments, set against a dwindling number of taxpayers. This trend imperils our national destiny, for the electoral power grows ever stronger among those whose vested interest is in receiving transfer payments from others rather than contributing to society’s productivity and wealth. Again, this number has been steadily rising, with intermittent dips, since the 1960s, but it has exploded during Obama’s term, as this chart shows:
68
Nearly Half of All Americans Don’t Pay Income Taxes
Source:
Heritage Foundation calculations based on data from the Internal Revenue Service,“Individual Income Tax Returns,” Publication 1304, 1962—2009, Table 1.4, and various IRS reports.

 

Chart I CDA 12-02
heritage.org
This trend reflects the administration’s redistributionist philosophy, but also its nonsensical belief that welfare payments stimulate jobs. When the
Wall Street Journal
‘s Laura Meckler asked White House press secretary Jay Carney how exactly extending unemployment insurance creates jobs, Carney issued a reply that sounded like a
Saturday Night Live
parody of Keynesian theory:
Oh, uh, it is by, uh, I would expect a reporter from the Wall Street Journal would know this as part of the entrance exam. There are few other ways that can directly put money into the economy than applying unemployment insurance. It is one of the most direct ways to infuse money directly into the economy because people who are unemployed and obviously aren’t running a paycheck are going to spend the money that they get. They’re not going to save it; they’re going to spend it. And with unemployment insurance, that way, the money goes directly back into the economy, dollar for dollar virtually. Every place that, that money is spent has added business and that creates growth and income for businesses that leads them to decisions about jobs, more hiring.
Carney estimated that unemployment benefits alone could create up to one million jobs.
69
Unsurprisingly, Obama’s Agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, just a week later argued that food stamps are a stimulus as well. “I should point out, when you talk about the SNAP program or the food stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus,” Vilsack declared. “Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity. If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, someone has to stock it, package it, shelve it, process it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It’s the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.”
70
OSAWATOMIE PROGRESSIVISM
If there had been any expectation that Obama would set politics aside and begin working toward a bipartisan solution to our entitlement and debt problems, he emphatically removed it in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011. According to his aides, he chose the location because Teddy Roosevelt had delivered his “New Nationalism” speech there in 1910.
In the speech, Obama invoked Teddy Roosevelt’s memory in support of Obama’s belief that capitalism just can’t work without a beneficent federal government keeping it in check and restraining capitalist predators. He wholly distorted American history to imply that our free market system, which has produced the most economically successful society in history, only worked when progressives had tweaked it. But America’s economic problems, especially the ones we are currently facing, have not been caused by unregulated capitalism, but by profligate federal spending, excessive taxation, and overregulation by unaccountable officials and bureaucrats. The problem hasn’t been unfettered robber baron capitalists, but an overreaching, over-intrusive federal government that won’t let the market breathe.
But Obama needed to allege there were inherent flaws in capitalism itself, in order to support his claim that without his intervention, the system, and its capitalist (read: Republican) exploiters, would gobble up all the wealth for themselves and leave the rest of the American people—Obama’s constituents—with nothing. So he doubled down on class warfare, telling some of his fellow Americans just how unfair other Americans are. “Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as one percent,” Obama intoned. “One percent. That is the height of unfairness. It is wrong. It’s wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker, maybe earns $50,000 a year, should pay a higher tax rate than somebody raking in $50 million.”
It didn’t matter to Obama that what he was saying was untrue—as
Washington Post
fact-checker Glenn Kessler verified when he coaxed an admission from an administration official that the White House had no data to support Obama’s claim.
71
What mattered was that it was inflammatory enough to divert attention from our real financial crises. This would be critically important as Obama headed into the final year of his term to face off with Congressman Paul Ryan, once again, on the budget.
REPUBLICANS PASS RYAN BUDGET; OBAMA GOES BALLISTIC
In February 2012, before Obama submitted his FY2013 budget, Paul Ryan predicted the president would “duck the tough decisions, he’s not going to offer a solution to our fiscal problems to our coming debt crisis and he’ll probably have sprinkled throughout his budget some of the kind of themes he threw out in the fall and the State of the Union address for his campaign.” While pledging that he and the Republicans would present a plan, like they had the year before, to tackle entitlements and reform the tax code, Ryan warned that this would be Obama’s fourth budget that failed to offer a solution to the nation’s fiscal problems and coming debt crisis. Ryan’s words were prophetic.
In a speech to news executives a few days later, Obama ripped into Republicans and their budget plan, saying they were so radical that even Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be able to win the GOP primary today. Decrying Republicans’ bleak, backward, “radical vision,” Obama denounced the proposal as “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” “It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it,” Obama proclaimed, adding that “it’s a prescription for decline.” He cavalierly instructed the media to report that the parties were not equally to blame, for it was Republicans who were unwilling to compromise.
73
Meanwhile, as Ryan had predicted, Obama continued steering the economy toward fiscal oblivion, offering no plan of his own to restructure our entitlement programs, which hang like the sword of Damocles over our country.
Obama’s demagogic response to Ryan’s budget had it completely backward, as usual.
He
is the one thwarting equal opportunity and upward mobility;
he
is the one offering a bleak, radical vision that is antithetical to our history;
he
is the one discouraging people from contributing to our society and working, and punishing those who are successful;
he
is the one who has been unwilling to compromise and has ensured our national decline. He and his party are at fault for our economic and financial crises, not Republicans, who have tried in vain to correct our national course.
At a time when attentive Americans are horrified over our nation’s fiscal condition and imminent national bankruptcy, Paul Ryan has shown true leadership with a mastery of the budgetary material and a bold, innovative, and realistic plan to restore us on the road not just to fiscal solvency, but to economic growth. His plan is the primary antidote for Obama’s destructive vision and agenda. Ryan has made clear that our problems become more intractable with every day we wait to address them. Each day more people reach retirement age, and every year our unfunded liabilities grow at an alarming rate. Experts have warned that we have two or three years at most to get our fiscal house in order. After that, our bond markets will go south and we will end up like Greece and other economic basket cases.
Our choice is either to design the solution ourselves, whereby we limit and manage the pain, or continue to kick the can down the road and eventually suffer a financial collapse, when far worse pain will be forced upon us.
The Obama administration’s approach of putting its finger in the dike today and holding it there for ten years while we forever ruminate and posture about possible solutions is reckless and immoral. The president and his economic advisers must be aware of that. Yet all they do is obstruct and demonize those, like Paul Ryan, who are trying to save the nation. The only cuts they can abide are those that ensure the “wealthy” enjoy much less of their own money, and those that slash our defense budget and endanger our national security.
You may or may not support Ryan’s proposals, which the Republican Congress has largely embraced, but at least he has presented a serious, comprehensive reform plan. By contrast, Obama has offered no plan to solve or even to address our nation’s monumental debt problems.
Obama once proclaimed that he believes in American exceptionalism just as “the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Well, if America continues on our current fiscal path, we’re going to learn firsthand what “Greek exceptionalism” really feels like.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WAR ON OIL
He had once laid out a similar, gradualist strategy for healthcare reform, telling a group of fellow leftists that he supported a single-payer health insurance system—that is, a government-run system—but cautioning that it might take time to lay the political groundwork for such a change.
2
This is sophisticated, strategic thinking from a central planner determined to bring “fundamental change” to our nation.
Obama’s support for higher gas prices reflects his statist, ideological hostility to oil. He dreams of transforming the economy into one that runs on windmills, algae, solar panels, and other forms of alternative energy, with plentiful “green-collar jobs” for all. Although oil is the essential mainstay of U.S. industry, to Obama it’s just a dirty fossil fuel that obstructs our transition into a “clean energy” economy. The more expensive and rare oil becomes, the more we will be forced to cultivate other energy sources—or so he believes.
Affecting this transition has become a fundamental goal of Obama’s presidency, with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and countless onerous energy regulations being dedicated to the cause. But it has created political problems for Obama, since Americans don’t want higher gas prices and would rather drill for more oil in America than place our faith in windmills and algae—not to mention Middle Eastern tyrants. Nevertheless, by disguising his plans when he must and ramming them through when he can, Obama has greatly hindered U.S. oil production, setting our economy further back at a time we can least afford it.
BOOSTING PRICES TO EUROPE’S LEVELS
Obama’s energy agenda is spearheaded by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who said in 2008 that higher gas prices would be useful for coaxing Americans into energy efficient cars and for encouraging them to move closer to their workplaces. “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to levels in Europe,” Chu said, at a time when gas prices in Europe averaged $8 a gallon.
4
Chu’s statement, issued before he became energy secretary, is not something administration officials are supposed to say in public. So Obama later declined to publicly endorse Chu’s remarks, and Chu himself, after his appointment, claimed he no longer holds that view. But the duo’s governing record speaks for itself. Under Obama and Chu, the Energy Advisory Board does not include a single executive from an oil company, nor, for that matter, from a natural gas, coal, or nuclear company, though 92 percent of the energy consumed in the United States is from these fuels. The board also lacked representatives from electrical utilities, which are the single greatest source of the nation’s power consumption, at 40 percent.
5
Other cabinet members are working from the same playbook. As I documented in
Crimes Against Liberty
, Obama’s secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, said he wanted to “coerce people out of their cars” and onto public transportation and bicycles, an utterance that prompted columnist George Will to lampoon him as the Secretary of Behavior Modification.
6
Similarly, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in 2008, when he was a U.S. senator, that he would oppose all offshore drilling irrespective of rising gas prices, even if they were to reach $10 a gallon.
7
“COMPLETELY UNINFORMED ABOUT THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY”
One constant theme in Obama’s energy rhetoric is his demand that Congress raise taxes on oil companies, which he often phrases as a plea to end “subsidies” for these firms. By presenting this as a matter of simple fairness, Obama avoids discussing the damaging ramifications of such a policy. These were detailed by Democratic Congressman Dan Boren, who noted that ending the “percentage depletion” and “intangible drilling costs (IDCs)” tax incentives will drive up the costs of oil production and increase our dependence on foreign oil.
Describing the existing tax incentives as “absolutely critical for domestic oil and gas production for thousands of independent producers across the nation,” Boren said Obama “is completely uninformed about the oil and gas industry,” which “is not made up of just major companies,” but “of small independent firms … that produce a vast majority of our domestic production.” Stunningly, Boren declared, “It is estimated that eliminating percentage depletion and IDCs for domestic independents would reduce U.S. drilling by 30-40 percent.” Boren further noted that these legal changes would not affect the major oil companies that Obama constantly flays, since they are barred by law from receiving percentage depletion.
9
Boren’s only mistake was to assume Obama was uninformed about the consequences of his proposals. To the contrary, it appeared Obama had completely given up fighting higher gas prices when he commented in April 2011, as gas prices approached $4 a gallon, “I’m just going to be honest with you. There’s not much we can do next week or two weeks from now.”
10
Most Americans believe increasing our own oil production will lower gas prices, but Obama willfully obstructs that path in favor of pouring billions into untested “clean-energy” projects that are compiling an impressive record of failure.
When a man asked Obama during an April 2011 town hall meeting about high gas prices, the president laughed and replied, “If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know, you might want to think about a trade-in.”
11
There could be no better display of the president’s callous disregard of everyday Americans and their energy concerns.
“A FEDERAL RESPONSE EFFORT DOOMED TO FAIL”
The White House was late to comment on the oil spill, but on May 2, 2010, in one of his early remarks on the accident, Obama sounded calm and measured. “I am going to spare no effort to respond to this crisis for as long as it continues,” he announced. “And we’ll spare no resource to clean up whatever damage is caused. And while there will be time to fully investigate what happened on that rig and hold responsible parties accountable, our focus now is on a fully coordinated, relentless response effort to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the Gulf.”
13
But in reviewing the administration’s response to the spill, one could reasonably conclude that it was more focused on exploiting the incident to punish “big oil” and hinder oil production than on cleanup and assistance efforts.
On May 27, 2010, while reporting to the nation on the oil spill—which he was now referring to, accusatorily, as the “BP oil spill”—President Obama summarily pronounced judgment on BP: “As far as I’m concerned, BP is responsible for this horrific disaster, and we will hold them fully accountable on behalf of the United States as well as the people and communities victimized by this tragedy. We will demand that they pay every dime they owe for the damage they’ve done and the painful losses they’ve caused.” It’s always important for Obama to have a villain to blame to ensure that he is blamed for nothing—and BP certainly seemed to fit the bill. After acting as its judge and jury, Obama declared that BP would be using its “unique technology and expertise” to stop the leak. “But make no mistake,” he intoned, “BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance.”
14
A few weeks before the spill, when rising gas prices had produced a public clamor to allow more oil drilling, Obama had proposed expanding offshore oil exploration. But in his remarks on May 27, he announced a dramatic policy change: he would suspend the planned exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska, cancel the pending lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico and the proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia, suspend action on thirty-three deepwater exploratory wells being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico, and most notably, impose a six-month moratorium on the issuance of new deepwater drilling permits in the Gulf. He conceded oil production is important, but argued that “we can’t do this stuff if we don’t have confidence that we can prevent crises like this from happening again.”
15
In a June address to the American people, Obama shamelessly capitalized on the spill to politicize the energy issue and stump for his proposed energy tax legislation. He also vowed to do “whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy,” which was insincere, since he initially refused to waive the Jones Act, a law that barred foreign ships from assisting the cleanup efforts. Thus, Belgian and other foreign companies with advanced technology were prevented from assisting for months, possibly because Obama’s union backers viewed them as competition.
16
In his speech, Obama also blithely acknowledged that his six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling “creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs.” That was quite the understatement, considering that some were estimating the ban could potentially cost 120,000 jobs and put another 46,200 jobs on hold during one of the toughest economic times in our history.
17
Congressman Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued an investigative report debunking the administration’s claim that it aggressively and competently took charge of the cleanup effort. According to the report,
Parish officials maintain that the federal government has not been in control since day one. In four separate interviews, senior-ranking Parish officials described how, until the President’s visit on May 28, 2010, BP was running the operation. According to one official, “until two weeks ago [after the President’s May 28, 2010, visit], BP was in charge and the Coast Guard looked to them for direction.” Furthermore, “Coast Guard asks BP,” not vice-versa. When specifically asked to agree or disagree with the assertion that the federal government had been in control since day one, another official firmly disagreed.
18
The committee’s findings were astonishing. Disputing administration claims about the number and timeliness of assets it deployed in the Gulf, local officials claimed the administration was more focused on avoiding bad press than on addressing the disaster. The White House, they noted, “waited until Day 70 of the oil spill to accept critical offers of international assistance.” It also inhibited the assistance of local workers and boats by not providing them with needed supplies and equipment.
Though the White House attributed its early silence on the spill to an initial failure to find a visible leak, official documents from the scene from Transocean officials and the Coast Guard revealed “clear and early indications of a substantial oil leak days earlier than White House accounts.” Furthermore, local officials “strongly believe the President’s call for a drilling moratorium will significantly compound the economic damage caused by the oil spill and will actually increase risk associated with future offshore drilling projects.”
19
Issa concluded, “The evidence on the ground suggests that the White House has been more focused on the public relations of this crisis than with providing local officials the resources they need to deal with it.”
20

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