A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street
Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page
banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly
Overseas.”
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare.
Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making
“the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking
away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It
can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs
that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving
overseas.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big
U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than
other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly
three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies
have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of
jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.
If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it
seems certain that the President of the United States has economic
advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean
that the president is interested in the same thing.
In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in
Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for
others, those policies have had a track record of political success
for many politicians in many places.
To put it bluntly, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is
a viable political strategy, provided the goose doesn’t die before
the next election. In this case, the goose simply lays its golden
eggs somewhere else, so there is no political danger to President
Obama.
Unemployment may remain a problem to many Americans, but that
only provides another occasion for the Obama administration to show
its “compassion” with extended unemployment benefits, more food
stamps and various interventions to save home buyers from mortgage
foreclosure. This can easily be a winning political strategy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt won his biggest landslide victory after
his first term in office, during which the unemployment rate was
never less than twice what it has been under Barack Obama.
The “smart money” inside the Beltway says that a high
unemployment rate spells doom at the polls for a president. But
history says that people who are getting government handouts tend
to vote for whoever is doing the handing out.
The Obama administration has turned this into a handout state
that breaks all previous records. Lofty rhetoric about “stimulus,”
“shovel-ready projects,” “green jobs” or “investment” in “the
industries of the future” all give political cover to what is plain
old handouts to people who are likely to vote to re-elect
Obama.
At the local level as well, history shows that some of the most
successful politicians have been people who ruined the local
economy and chased job-creating businesses away. Mayor Coleman
Young of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was not worried when
affluent whites began moving out of the city in response to his
policies, because they were people who were likely to vote against
him if they stayed.
Of course they took their taxes, their investment money and the
jobs they created with them. But that was Detroit’s problem, not
Coleman Young’s problem. Barack Obama may win re-election by
turning the United States into Detroit writ large.
Something similar happened in earlier times, when James Michael
Curley served 4 terms as mayor of Boston, and 2 terms in prison. As
the non-Irish left the city, in response to Curley’s policies, that
increased Curley’s likelihood of being re-elected.
This kind of cynical politics is even more likely to succeed
when political opponents fail to articulate their case to the
public. And Republicans are notorious for neglecting
articulation.
The phrase “tax cuts for the rich” has been repeated endlessly
by Democrats without one Republican that I know of saying, “Folks,
I don’t lie awake at night worrying about millionaires’ tax
problems. Millionaires have lawyers and accountants who get paid to
do that. But I do worry about jobs being lost to millions of
American workers because we make the business climate here worse
than in other countries. That’s a high price to pay for
rhetoric.”
The case can be made. But somebody has to make the case.
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