Three years after the Hope and Change president took office, Hope turns out to mean high taxes and lots of regulations, and Change consists of celebrating the government?s takeover of General Motors and belittling technological progress that destroys some jobs even as it creates others. The Great Uniter is all about class warfare.
Such was President Obama?s latest State of the Union Address.
At times during the speech Tuesday night, it was hard to hold a straight face. Here he was, telling us first how bad things are because of vast income inequalities that he wants to address through higher taxes on the rich, but also how much better things have been since he?s been elected, with 3 million jobs created in the last 22 months.
AP
Contradictions flying fast: Obama talks of cutting small-biz taxes ? and also raising them.
Huh? The jobs that were created came after the Republicans began to thwart his push for a huge tax hike like the one he?s still touting.
The contradictions flew hard and fast. The president wants more domestic-energy production, he says ? less than a week after he blocked the Keystone oil pipeline. He basically called for a trade war with China, even though he needs Beijing to help finance his endless spending.
He talked about expanding ?tax relief? for small businesses, which create many jobs during most normal economic recoveries. But he also called for higher tax rates on those same small businesses ? though he relabeled them ?millionaires? ? ignoring the fact that as small businesses, they file their taxes under the individual income-tax code.
His plan to tax small businesses is called the Buffett Rule, named after the president?s (and the media?s) favorite fat-cat investor, Warren Buffett. But Buffett made his billions feasting off of low taxes on capital gains ? and so avoiding the income-tax code.
Obama calls his economic plans ?common sense,? but wouldn?t it make more sense to offer that 15 percent tax rate (which helped Buffett become so successful) to small businesses, so they could expand and hire?
It?s said economics has never been Obama?s strong suit. Maybe that?s why he let left-wingers like Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe chase away Bill Daley, Larry Summers and the other best economic minds in his administration.
Possibly the lowest point of the speech was the president?s portrayal of America as a nation of rigid classes, rather than a place to which millions of immigrants flock for opportunity, even during these tough times.
It?s one thing to beat up on the big banks that caused the financial crisis; it?s another to hammer any family that earns a combined income of $250,000 a year as ?millionaires,? pretending they didn?t work for their success and thus ought to pay the government more hard-earned money.
Will the great-uniter-turned-divider strategy work? The weak Republican field helps. Mitt Romney, once the GOP front-runner, offers nonsensical answers to questions about his years in private equity and how he accumulated his massive wealth. Newt Gingrich has surged largely by attacking Romney?s success.
But America is not (yet) Europe. People here still aspire to be rich more than they hate success, no matter how many times the media extols the virtues of Occupy Wall Street and its attacks on the 1 percent.
Plus, Obama is clearly alienating former supporters in the business community, like JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon ? who has the distinction of running a bank that stayed away from the risk-taking that doomed the rest of the business.
Dimon, a life-long Democrat, backed Obama strongly in 2008, but now is undecided. He?s not crazy about the GOP?s right wing, but he also notes that he?s now ?barely a Democrat, because I think the left side of the party is really destructive.?
Too bad Obama doesn?t agree.
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Source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/adding_up_to_nothing_8K1eBN3afYXNELupfK8tRL
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