President Obama told America yesterday morning that if the
sequester goes through on March 1,
It will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and
energy and medical research…. Emergency responders like the ones
who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to
and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents
will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed.
Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go.
Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks,
which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands
of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of
parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care
and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings….
So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our
economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the
unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose
their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”
This language is so far from reality that it defiled the White
House like it has never been defiled before.
President Obama’s federal government is slated to spend $3.6
trillion this year. That is $3,600,000,000,000. The supposedly
draconian sequester will reportedly cut that by $85 billion, which
is just 2%. In fact, as Mark Levin pointed out last night, the
actual cuts for this year from that level are $44 billion, which is
1% of the budget.
That won’t eviscerate anything. It won’t stop emergency
responders from saving victims of disasters, won’t shut down the
border patrol, won’t mean longer delays at airports without
security or air traffic control, won’t lay off FBI agents, won’t
stop criminal prosecutions, won’t terminate thousands of teachers,
won’t leave hundreds of thousands of Americans without health care,
won’t “add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment
rolls.”
All that is paid for with just 2% of federal spending? Even
after the fearsome sequester, federal discretionary spending will
still be $60 billion more than in 2008. The government’s
own Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified $125
billion in government waste that can be cut without hurting
anybody. Just as I said above about the effects of such tiny
cuts.
What all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth means is
that Obama and the Democrats think even cutting federal spending by
1% to 2% is the end of the world. But after the sequester goes
through, only a few hundred Americans out of 300 million will even
notice any effects at all.
And the sequester will help the economy, not hurt it. The
sequester means the federal government will not drain another $1.2
trillion over the next 10 years out of the market economy, but
leave it in the market to contribute to higher production. How does
the federal government borrowing or taxing that money out of
production in the private sector and using it to hire more
bureaucrats, or to spend on more welfare for people who are not
working and not producing, contribute to more jobs, more hiring,
more economic growth, and more prosperity? It doesn’t, which is why
Keynesian economics never works.
Obama’s retrograde, last century thinking is why the economy
still hasn’t recovered from the last recession, almost 4
years after the recession was actually declared over. What we
have is the worst recovery from a recession since the Great
Depression, and maybe before. The other ten Presidents who
suffered a recession during their terms since the Great Depression
saw the economy roaring back within a year or two after the
recession. But that was before Obama transformed our formerly world
leading, sole superpower country into just another banana
republic.
Too bad the sequester is not six times as large, which is the
amount of spending cuts Paul Ryan will propose in his budget next
month to zero out the deficit and balance the budget entirely in 10
years. Obama came back from his weekend golfing with his buddy
Tiger Woods to complain yesterday that Congress hasn’t done its
job. But what about Obama doing his job? He was required by law to
produce this year’s budget proposal weeks ago. Where is it? Ya
think he could have stayed home last weekend and made sure
his work was done?
But Obama showed up yesterday complaining about what others
haven’t done, saying we were facing that awful sequester because
“Unfortunately, Congress didn’t compromise. They haven’t come
together and done their jobs, and so as a consequence, we’ve got
these automatic, brutal spending cuts that are poised to happen
next Friday.”
The Republicans, however, have done their job. The House passed
a bill designating $1.2 trillion in rationalized cuts over 10
years to replace the more arbitrary sequester cuts weeks ago. If
President Obama and the Democrats disagreed with the Republican
cuts, it was their job to pass what they wanted instead through the
Senate. Then the two bills would have gone to a Conference
Committee, which would have ironed out a compromise between the two
bills.
But we got no action at all from the Democrats. Just as the
Senate has not produced a budget in several years, it didn’t act on
the Republican House bill on the sequester at all. That reflected
the failure of leadership by President Obama, who did nothing to
specify his own proposals, and push them through the Democrat
majority Senate.
But Obama did produce a lot of talk, and badly confused and
dishonest rhetoric. Obama said yesterday:
[S]o far at least the ideas that the Republicans have proposed
ask nothing of the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations, so
the burden is all on first responders or seniors or middle-class
families. [Or the $125 billion in identified government waste.]
They double down, in fact, on the harsh, harmful cuts that I’ve
outlined. They slash Medicare and investments that create good,
middle-class jobs. And so far at least what they’ve expressed is a
preference where they’d rather have these cuts go into effect than
close a single tax loophole for the wealthiest Americans. Not
one.
But this is the President again playing you, because he thinks
you are too stupid and uninformed to pay attention to what has been
going on. Just last month, Washington increased taxes on the
wealthiest Americans by $2 trillion (or at least it tried to — we
will see if the wealthiest Americans are too stupid to pay
attention to what is going on, and they or their money stick around
to be fleeced). There were no spending cuts in that January 1
fiscal cliff deal. It was all tax increases. Almost all on the
wealthiest Americans.
And those tax increases will affect middle class and working
people more than the rich. As the rich hustle their money into tax
shelters and out of the country to avoid the increasingly
oppressive tax burden they face, the country loses precisely the
investment capital that is the foundation for new jobs and growing
wages. So the result is more unemployment and lower wages for the
middle class and working people, which is exactly what America has
been experiencing under Obama.
Moreover, only President Obama and the Democrats have slashed
Medicare, when they passed Obamacare in 2010, which cut trillions
actually in future Medicare spending, by adopting payment formulas
that would pay the doctors and hospitals that are expected to
provide the health care to seniors even less than Medicaid pays to
doctors and hospitals for health care for the poor. The Republicans
have not cut Medicare by a single dime. Remember the last time they
had Congressional majorities in both houses, they enacted the
Medicare prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D. That may not have
been a good idea, but the point here is that every time Obama talks
about Republicans cutting Medicare, he is talking out of all three
sides of his mouth.
I thoroughly explained in last week’s column that the rich
already pay far more than their fair share, unless you are a
communist. Official IRS data show that the top 1% of income earners
pay 39% of all federal income taxes, while earning only 13% of the
income. The middle 20% of income earners, the true middle class,
pays only 2.7% of all federal income taxes, while earning 15% of
the income. So the top 1% pays 15 times as much federal income tax
as the entire middle 20%, or middle class, even though the middle
20% earns more in income. The bottom 40% of income earners rather
than paying any taxes to support the government actually receives
payments from the IRS equal to about 10% of all federal income tax
revenues.
And this was before the $2 trillion in tax rate increases on the
rich, in the fiscal cliff deal.
President Obama also persisted yesterday in spreading the
dishonest falsehood that billionaires pay lower tax rates than
theirs secretaries. That is based on a cartoon version of our tax
code. CBO reports to the contrary that in 2009 the top 1% paid an
average federal tax rate of 29%, while the middle 20% paid an
average federal tax rate of only 11.1%, and the bottom 20% paid an
average federal tax rate of 1%. We need a law that would hold
President Obama personally liable when he uses the trappings of
office to spread outright fairy tales.
Finally, President Obama said yesterday:
Now, for two years, I’ve offered a balanced approach to deficit
reduction that would prevent these harmful cuts…. I am willing to
cut more spending that we don’t need, get rid of programs that
aren’t working. I’ve laid out specific reforms to our entitlement
programs that can achieve the same amount of health care savings by
the beginning of the next decade as the reforms that were proposed
by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission [Not true].
But only if we raise taxes yet again. Obama added:
I believe such a balanced approach that combines tax
r[increases] with some additional spending [cuts], done in a smart,
thoughtful way is the best way to…avoid these [sequester cuts once
and for all that could hurt our economy, slow our recovery, put
people out of work. And most Americans agree with me.
This is the danger of the Washington media cocoon, taken over by
socialist revolutionaries, which leaves our leaders believing their
own confused and dishonest propaganda. What Obama is saying here is
that most Americans agree that cutting spending hurts the economy,
but raising taxes doesn’t. And if you do agree, and willingly allow
Obama to play you like that, it is you who are stupid.
Photo: WhiteHouse.gov
