President Obama got it right for a minute during his recent stop
in Africa. “No business wants to invest in a place where the
government skims 20 percent off the top,” he told the Parliament
of Ghana.
Then he flew home to a U.S. economy that’s losing a half million
jobs per month and started pushing for a new round of tax hikes
and costly regulations on American businesses, even though
they’re already paying double the rate that Obama warned will
kill off investment and job growth.
“I wonder if the President is referring to corrupt bureaucrats
asking for bribes,” wrote the Cato Institute’s Daniel J. Mitchell
regarding Obama’s advice to the Ghanians. “But even if that is
the case, why does it matter?” — i.e., it’s same disincentive
whether the money is pocketed by the Treasury or by a crooked
bureaucrat.
Even before the next round of tax hikes and health care mandates,
U.S. corporations are operating under an average combined federal
and state corporate tax rate of 39.3 percent, second only among
OECD countries to Japans’ combined rate of 39.5 percent.
Moreover, the combined corporate tax rate in 24 high-tax states
in the U.S. is higher than top-ranked Japan. Iowa is the worst,
hitting corporations with a 12 percent corporate tax rate,
followed by Pennsylvania with a 9.99 percent rate on corporate
income.
Does anyone think that Obama, being consistent, will stop by in
Pittsburgh during the upcoming G-20 summit and deliver the same
message that he preached in Ghana, warning that Pittsburgh is at
the top of the pile in the nation in population losses and low
job creation because the city skims too much money from what’s
left of its business sector?
Since the last census, Pittsburgh had the nation’s fifth worst
rate of decline in population among the 273 cities with more than
100,000 residents. Remove Katrina-hit New Orleans from the list
and Pittsburgh moves up to fourth place (only Buffalo, Cleveland,
and Flint, Michigan were worse).
President Obama also had another good line in his economic
pontifications in Ghana. “No country is going to create wealth if
its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” he warned.
What’s the chance that he’ll deliver that same message to the
crooks on Wall Street the next time they have their hands out for
more billions of our tax dollars?
Landing back in the U.S., President Obama immediately delivered
the marching orders on health care reform, sounding not unlike a
father who just got back from out-of-town and found that his
teenagers had been having too much fun while he was away.
“So I just want to put everyone of notice, because there was a
lot of chatter during the week that I was gone,” he declared.
“Inaction is not an option.”
Inaction, in short, isn’t an option even if his plan is
fundamentally flawed. And we have to act at once, with no more
“chatter.”
Dr. David Blumenthal, Harvard professor and a key health advisor
to Obama, explained the rush: “Bill Clinton waited nine months to
introduce his Health Security Act in 1993, which allowed the
opposition to mobilize and defeat him.”
President Obama has appointed Blumenthal as the National
Coordinator of Health Information Technology, a position that Dr.
Betsy McCaughey, a former Lt. Governor of New York and a renowned
patient advocate, describes as the head of a system of
“computer-guided medical care.”
That means that Blumenthal and Obama, by design, can decide what
we’ll be allowed to receive in medical care, not the newly
de-skilled and less-expensive physicians who can just bring up on
their computers what the central planners are mandating as the
“best practice” and most “cost effective” treatment in each of
our specific cases, given budget constraints and our age.
Dr. McCaughey describes how that’s worked in practice in the U.K.
in her “Downgrading American Medical Care”
article in the July/August issue of The American
Spectator: “In 2006, older patients with macular
degeneration, which causes blindness, were told that they had to
go totally blind in one eye before they could get an expensive
new drug to save the other eye.”
After nearly two years, the public in the U.K., still permitted
to “chatter,” got the care-denying edict by the central planners
reversed.
Here at home, with his command for “no more talk,” what is it
exactly that Obama is demanding? A nation of one-eyed sycophants?
