Barack Obama allowed himself another moment of juvenile socialism
this week, quickly assenting in principle to the Democrats’
proposed penal use of taxation against AIG executives. Even
Charlie Rangel, chastened by his own tax troubles, hesitated at
the sound of his colleagues’ raw Bolshevik braying. “It is
difficult for me to think of the code as a political weapon,”
Rangel was quoted as saying.
Not so for Obama. Taxation is his avenging angel. But why doesn’t
his avenging angel, while he’s at it, also swoop down and take
money away from other publicly financed failures? Perhaps it is
time for an excise tax on the bonuses of principals at disastrous
public schools. Or how about an excise tax on the ballooning
salaries of bureaucratic managers whose social-engineering
schemes extend pathologies year after year?
No, in the special-interests sweepstakes that is Obamaism,
failure produced by liberal recklessness is to be rewarded
generously: public-school teachers can expect to see their
salaries rise as test scores fall; bureaucrats are more likely to
receive bonuses for enlarging their client case load than
reducing it.
Obama gets worked up about rewarding failure at AIG, but
rewarding failure has never stopped him before. Indeed, rewarding
failure is the organizing principle of liberalism; the squeaky,
destructive special interest almost always gets the grease. It
complains about some needless or corrupt government project
failing, demands more money for said project, and in short order
receives more millions to waste. Were AIG executives a liberal
special-interest group, they could expect bonuses for years to
come.
Obama’s supposedly transcendent, fresh politics is drearily
familiar, a populism of the cheapest and most unimaginative sort.
Yet another week is wasted on a nothing issue.
Instead of focusing on problems at AIG, its government-appointed
head, Edward Liddy, had to belly up to the socialists’
scapegoat-spit and spin it around a few times while pretending to
explain to Congress what it already knew and permitted, all so
that Chuck Schumer could find a microphone and say to
bonus-receiving executives, “If you don’t return it on your own,
we will do it for you.”
The legality of AIG’s bonuses is due to the incompetence of the
Obama administration: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who had
awarded himself an inadvertent bonus through clueless tax evasion
and still got the job, apparently just didn’t notice them. In
other words, the Obama administration is using an outrage it
helped create to justify a new one — the hasty, amateurish use
of taxation as an instrument of retaliation.
Earlier in the week Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs,
captured the cheapness of this presidency by indulging in a
sophomoric slight at Dick Cheney. Not even Clinton’s shabby and
immature press aides ever behaved that boorishly. The touchiness
of Gibbs was particularly gross and hypocritical given that the
Obama campaign spent a good year or so defaming Cheney at every
chance. Cheney has every right to unload on them.
In their Olympian arrogance, Obama and his surrogates can dish
criticism out, but they refuse to take it. Notice that Gibbs’
idea of a comeback was to gloat over Cheney’s unpopularity.
The Obama presidency is as much or more of a demagogic “permanent
campaign” than Clinton’s, moving from one phony, poll-tested
issue to the next. During the campaign Obama pandered to crowds
by promising to confiscate the wealth of oil executives. Now,
seeking more quick applause, he finds another villain of the hour
and sanctions confiscatory excise taxes for AIG executives.
His political gain is the economy’s loss. Turning the tax code
into a penal code will just frighten markets even more.
