SEA ISLE, N.J. — We’re sitting here on our
beach chairs looking for tar balls. So far, everything’s
pristine. The gulls are still white, not yet looking like
crows.
Longer run, things don’t look so good. Renters are already
calling and asking our local real estate offices if they can get
their money back if the damage from British Petroleum’s gushing
well in the Gulf turns around Florida and comes up the east
coast.
President Obama, reacting to charges that he’s been
ineffectual in the crisis, took a lawyerly approach and announced
that BP would be required to make us whole. “We will demand they
pay every dime they owe for the damage and painful losses they’ve
caused,” he said.
That sounds good. It’s the same solitary dime that Obama
brings out whenever criticism becomes too overpowering.
With the public not buying his claim that the Democrats’
health reforms will simultaneously cover everyone, increase
quality, cut costs and reduce deficits, Obama inserted the dime
in his health-care speech to Congress in September 2009. “I will
not sign a plan,” he declared, “that adds one dime to our
deficits, either now or in the future.”
With the public not believing Obama’s claim that their
taxes won’t go up to pay for his spending increases and record
deficits, the same dime popped up in his address to Congress in
February 2009. “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year,
you will not see your taxes increased a single dime,” he pledged.
“I repeat: not one single dime.”
The “not one single dime” applied to all taxes, not just
income taxes. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000
a year will see any form of tax increase,” Obama repeatedly
bellowed in campaign speechifying. “Not your income tax, not your
payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your
taxes.”
In fact, that pledge to raid only the wallets of “the rich”
went up in smoke when Obama signed the new cigarette taxes into
law, a levy that disproportionately hits the poor (Gallup
reported last year that 34 percent of people earning $6,000 to
$12,000 were smokers, while only 13 percent of people earning
$90,000 or more were smokers), producing the exact opposite in
income distribution of what Obama promised.
The new federal tax of 62 cents per pack, to $1.01, is the
largest jump since cigarette taxes were implemented in 1951. For
a couple smoking a pack a day each, that’s a tax hike of $452.60
a year. If they’re overly anxious about their economic situation
and puffing two packs a day each, that’s $905.20 in additional
taxes per year.
Obama’s pledge that his health reforms wouldn’t add a dime
to the deficit has similarly come undone with the director of the
Congressional Budget Office now reporting that the Democrats’
health law can be expected to raise costs and put the budget on
an unsustainable path without “a significant reduction in the
growth of federal spending on health care relative to the amounts
projected under current law.”
What’s coming, in short, are higher costs and more cuts in
care, exactly the opposite of Obama’s sales pitch.
And Obama’s promise that BP will “pay every dime” to make
us whole? Not much of a chance. The company’s declining assets
currently total $236 billion. Florida’s tourism industry alone is
$57 billion a year, most of it beach-related, and that’s not
counting the value of Louisiana’s crabs, oysters and
shrimp.
