Last week’s State of the Union address was a sad and pathetic
affair, full of transparent rhetoric and demagoguery, brimming with
incandescent hypocrisies, variegated with an expansive assortment
of half-truths and lies, palled by a mediocrity that almost seemed
intentional, detached from reality like an unmoored hot-air balloon
that slowly ascends to the heavens, stuffed with dense and
infuriating arrogance, and draped over our nation like a
several-sizes-too-small coat with promises and ideas rendered
diminutive in the shadow of the historical moment.
All this was clear last Tuesday night. And yet somehow
over the past week, the address actually grew worse.
The president’s speech was less a factual information
session about the current American condition than it was a mawkish
parade of political images and symbols, meant to make us identify
with the president’s vision and feel at safe harbor with his
leadership. It was less a speech than a play, lavish with props and
masquerading actors tasked with immersing the audience in an
alternate version of reality. But over the past week, key scenes of
the drama have fallen apart. The president now looks less like a
seasoned political actor than like Quince at the end of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, farcically fumbling his
lines.
One of the supporting thespians was the Indiana-based
electric car battery-maker Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel received
a $118.5 million grant under the stimulus bill. EnerDel was also
showered with more than $4 million in federal gifts under the Bush
Administration. The scrappy little green boutique was meant to
symbolize the flowering benefits of the sort of business-government
handshaking that the rest of the civilized world calls “crony
capitalism.” “In three years, our partnership with the private
sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading
manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama declared last
Tuesday.
Precisely two days later, Ener1 filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy. The company had been an encore actor in the president’s
campaign theatrics. Almost one year ago, Vice President Joe Biden
visited the Ener1 facilities, effervescent about the
administration’s promise to airlift 1 million electric cars onto
the road by 2015. That pledge has since crashed on the shoals of
reality and the cardboard prop that is Ener1 has blown
over.
Watching Ener1 fold, it’s hard not to recall that last
great monument to the progress of the green revolution: Solyndra.
President Obama lauded that company in his 2010 State of the Union
and it promptly imploded last year. One imagines executives at
Pepsi placing urgent phone calls to the White House, encouraging
the president to mention Coca-Cola in next year’s address. If
you’re employed by a business receiving checks from the Department
of Energy, you may want to dash off a few copies of your résumé
this afternoon.
But the star of the State of the Union show, the leading
lady, was Warren Buffett’s Secretary. “Right now, Warren Buffett
pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” Obama declared. “Do we
want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we
want to keep our investments in everything else — like education
and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans?”
So central was Warren Buffett’s Secretary to the performance, she
attended as the special guest of the president and belle of the
ball, standing in the audience as a quiet testament to the
grinding, Dickensian class divide that darkens the backstreets and
alleys of modern America.
Warren Buffett’s Secretary was played by Debbie Bosanek,
who is Warren Buffett’s actual secretary, and who makes between
$200,000 and $500,000 per year, according to the
calculations of Paul Roderick Gregory over at Forbes.
It was a brilliant dramatic portrayal. While Bosanek herself is a
creature of the upper classes, she effortlessly slipped into the
part of Warren Buffett’s Secretary, a downtrodden proletarian
exploited by the tax code, reminiscent of Peggy Olson in Mad
Men.
This, by the way, presents a knotty conundrum for
progressives. If Gregory’s deductions are correct, then Bosanek is
likely a member of that charter club known as the “wealthiest 2%,”
a coven of blackhearted plunderers and blue-blooded aristocrats
that looted the country for all it was worth in 2008. Progressives
have demanded higher taxes on the wealthiest 2%, yet hailed Bosanek
as an overtaxed hero. They’ve blamed the wealthiest 2% for all the
nation’s ills, but hoisted up this secretary as an emblem of
justice in the class wars. Well, which is it? Should we add her
image to the Two Minutes
Hate tape, or no? And should we raise her taxes? Lower them?
Maybe we should just raise everyone’s taxes.
The overarching themes pervading the president’s State of
the Union drama were America’s greatness and stifling inequality.
America was great when it allowed for the president’s
accomplishments, like killing Osama bin Laden. But when it came to
the president’s failures, most notably three years of a doldrums
job market, it was all the fault of that yawning canyon of economic
class. Wealthy Americans — for whom Debbie Bosanek’s membership
application is still pending — were cast as the villains, cackling
all the way to their banks with insufficiently punitive Treasury
receipts.
The only solution was to sock it to them, specifically
with a 30% net tax on millionaires. This (along with solar
batteries) was the Big Idea, the great glowing light bulb of the
president’s address. And according to an analysis by the Fiscal
Times, it would raise $30 billion in revenue — and that’s
assuming that the sledgehammer of adding yet another tax didn’t
further stall the economy. Of course, $30 billion isn’t immaterial,
but the Tea Party Caucus could cut that much from the federal
budget during a bad hangover. Meanwhile, the national debt is $15.2
trillion.
And Democrats have already booby-trapped the tax code for
the wealthiest Americans. With current tax rates set to expire at
the beginning of 2013, taxes on capital gains will shoot up from
15% to 20%. And thanks to a pernicious little slice of the
Obamacare legislation, taxes on capital gains will further increase
to almost 24% in 2013. All this will happen unless the federal
government takes action to prevent it. It’s piquantly fitting,
isn’t it? If the president wants to see tax rates tighten for
millionaires, his easiest course is simply to get
reelected.
But I regret that I’ve disposed of two paragraphs trying
to refute the president’s numbers when the numbers are nugatory
here. Obama is fully aware that his tax increase would do little to
arrest the deficit and less to catalyze the economy. His purpose is
to blacken the wealthy into villains and portray himself as the
eminently reasonable hero; to siphon all the laws and details of
politics and economics into a simple, dramatic dichotomy and cast
himself on the side of good. He is, with total self-awareness,
jousting with phantoms and trying to bring the rest of us along for
the ride. It may make for a spectacular show, but at the end of the
day, that’s all it is: cheap lines and theatrics cluttering the
stage floor.
