Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Tax. Spend. Dictate.

Tax. Spend. Dictate. These three words completely summarize the economic policies of Barrack Obama.

On taxation, Obama believes that the 'rich' pay too little in taxes so his plan is to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000. Why $250,000? I assume because he feels that the number of people earning more than that are in sufficiently small numbers that they won't affect his polling numbers. Obama also wants to increase taxes on dividends and capital gains, again playing to a myth that only the 'rich' will be hit by these taxes. Obama doesn't even care if these higher taxes will actually raise revenue, he wants to do it simply to fit his notion of 'fairness'. Of course he doesn't stop there. Obama also wants to change the way Social Security gets funded so that people earning over $250,000 will have to pay additional taxes over and above the wage cap. This completely eliminates the charade that Social Security is anything but a welfare program. Finally, as part of Obama's energy policy, he wants to tax the 'windfall' profits of oil companies. Of course, what defines 'windfall'? In Obama's world it must simply be a large dollar number earned by an unpopular industry, because on a profit as a percentage of sales, the oil industry is positively middle of the road. Again, in a zeal to appeal to populist instincts, Obama would prefer to do something harmful rather than being courageous and doing something sensible.

Other than increasing 'fairness', what does Obama plan to do with all this extra cash he hopes to raise? Why spend it, of course. Every day there is an article in the newspaper about how Obama is going to give $x billion dollars to support this, that or the other thing. If there is a problem, Obama's solution is to throw money at it. It doesn't matter if this is a good solution, it doesn't matter if the origin of the problem is government meddling, if you throw money at it, the problem will go away, right? It's worked so well in the past. Obama wants to be the national Santa Claus, handing out goodies paid for by people who work for a living while he takes the credit. None of this, of course, is the President's job, but that doesn't stop him from convincing an ignorant electorate that he should be elected because of his generosity.

Tax and spend are two big impediments to true liberty. Taxation takes money by force. Your labor isn't all yours, part of it is owned by the government. Government spending is taking decisions away from the people and replacing them with decisions made by the political class (which includes corporations and other influencial people) However, Obama isn't content with attacking your liberty through tax and spend, he also want to dictate how you live your lives. For example, as part of his energy policy, he wants to ban conventional light bulbs, forcing everyone to buy CFL's. I have no problem with CFL's, they have there place, but I certainly don't want to replace every light in my house with a high mercury device which is expensive, ugly and has a host of other problems. This doesn't matter to Obama, he and his technocrat advisors know what is best for you and me and therefore he will use his power (not really granted by the Constitution) to force us to live the way he wants us to live. Health care will be a similar thing. Obama wants to implement a medical insurance scheme which will continually force us to obey new government restrictions. I predict a host of new laws to promote a 'healthier' person so that we don't cost the government so much money in health care. Again, dictate it and it will be so!

Obama is campaigning on 'Change'. I don't see this as change, but more of an acceleration. We've had continual growth of government and continual reduction in liberties. Under Obama I would expect this trend to continue. Make no mistake, John McCain isn't much better, but at least he would be a Republican President presiding over a Democrat controlled Congress. Some gridlock is bound to happen. With Obama as President and a Democrat controlled Congress there is virtually no limit to the damage they could do to this country. Just look at what happened when Bush presided over a Republican Congress.