PrintOctober 7, 2010
Erasing America: Barack Obama's Motivation and Method
"It took time to free the slaves," proclaimed Barack Obama during a recent speech aimed at salvaging support for his fundamental transformation of America. Our president, a man who views the world through an oppressed-versus-oppressor lens, puts an agenda of economic destruction on moral par with the emancipation of the slaves. Obama is trying to reduce America to a second-rate ration. But why and how?
The answer may be found in a discussion that starts with the "Laffer Curve." Thirty-six years ago, Arthur Laffer, father of "supply-side economics" and member of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, postulated that as tax rates rise, government revenue would first rise, then peak, and then decline. Just before her August resignation as chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer and her husband confirmed Laffer's thinking. Graph-of-the-Day blogger Randal Hoven analyzed the Romers' study and found that government revenue would max out just above the 44-percent tax rate, higher than the current average. But Hoven cautions that higher taxation would still not yield enough revenue to pay off the federal debt.
So we have a situation in which an Obama minion may no longer have been able to stand for an agenda that willfully invites a harmful economic reality: Excessive taxation generates negative feedback. As individuals' spending power drops, businesses sell less. Manufacturing output drops, followed by business income and tax revenue. Stated simply, when government confiscates too much income, the economy weakens and people grow poorer. Worse yet, increasing the rate of confiscation won't ever take in enough to eliminate the government debt nuisance to taxpayers.
So we have a situation in which an Obama minion may no longer have been able to stand for an agenda that willfully invites a harmful economic reality: Excessive taxation generates negative feedback. As individuals' spending power drops, businesses sell less. Manufacturing output drops, followed by business income and tax revenue. Stated simply, when government confiscates too much income, the economy weakens and people grow poorer. Worse yet, increasing the rate of confiscation won't ever take in enough to eliminate the government debt nuisance to taxpayers.
But refusal to grasp such truth permeates the left side of the sociopolitical spectrum. Barack Obama dedicated an entire book to describing how his father's dreams, not reality, inspired a personal-turned-presidential agenda. Now most Americans see nightmares in Obama's dreamed-up schemes.
Dinesh D'Souza discusses a frightening dream that Barack Jr. must have noticed in the elder Barack's 1965 article, "Problems Facing Our Socialism." The president's father insisted that "there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
D'Souza marvels that Obama "has never mentioned his father's article." But the lapse should come as no surprise. As soon as he decided to run for president, Barack Obama, publicly at least, developed amnesia regarding his father's ideas as well as his own associations with Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, and other radicals from Hawaii to Chicago to Columbia University and elsewhere. But D'Souza's analysis lays the truth bare. Barack Sr.'s dreams, thriving within the agenda of Barack Jr., have hatched policies that will terminate the American experiment.
Our president is in the process of ending American prosperity. Obama has repeatedly stated his intention to take more income from top earners, the people who create jobs. Eventually there will be insufficient earnings to produce both economic growth and confiscable income. The federal government will suffocate the private sector, as happened in the Soviet Union. Faced with the Soviet horror story, who would still want to maximize government power and riches?
Barack Obama wants to maximize government power and riches. The president wants to supersize government to provide the mechanism and funding to achieve something which he seems hell-bent on achieving: the redistribution of America's wealth.
Obama's first twenty months in office revealed an agenda designed to choke the American economy and move dollars abroad through debt repayment and other means. The president has already pushed through trillions of dollars for Obamacare and a non-stimulating "stimulus," both of which will heap wealth-crushing debt on current and future generations. Burdensome environmental and financial regulations as well as a continuously-expressed desire to raise taxes are frightening off business investment and stifling growth.
Obama is also pushing specific policies that give away Americans' earning power. In a flagrant example, our president continues the Gulf of Mexico drilling moratorium that has already destroyed more than 23,000 American jobs while lending billions to Brazilian oil company Petrobras to drill in areas forbidden to Americans.
Weakening our country economically while enriching other nations is a major thrust of the Obama agenda. Additional background will help connect the president's motivation to his method.
Randal Hoven discusses two studies which show that a 25-percent tax rate would maximize combined government and private wealth. But government's peak revenue intake occurs just above 44 percent. So Obama's call for higher taxes constitutes a conscious decision to maximize government income and decrease the wealth of individual Americans. This agenda-driven treachery has drawn scarce public attention.
Obama's agenda grew out of a creed know as "anticolonialism." Anticolonialists believe that after gaining independence from a colonizing nation, the colonizer's corporate and government powers continue to oppress the colonized country with economic strong-arm tactics. Since becoming president, Barack Obama has (no surprise here) behaved as though anointed by dreams from his anticolonialist father. Dinesh D'Souza writes, "From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage." In Obama's mind, America must be made to pay.
From the president's perspective, America must be stripped of the wherewithal to act American. Afflicted with the typical fallacy-based, limited-wealth, left-wing mentality, Obama sees a need to reduce Americans' quality of life in order to free up wealth for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Now we know why the ideologue in the White House wants to raise high earners' taxes and build the most business-hostile, authoritarian American government ever. Obama's "it took time to free the slaves" pronouncement exposed the thinking of a man who sees moral equivalence between his imagined personal power to emancipate victims of oppression and Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves.
In response to this analysis, the American left will shriek, viciously attack, and maintain that Barack Obama has not taken on his father's dreams of payback for oppression. The progressive herd will claim that the president embraces America's economic might as a vehicle for improving the human condition. But Obama's words and actions demolish both arguments. Americans deserve an explanation. Why does Barack Obama want to "spread the wealth around" when the entire human experience shows that the approach impoverishes all but the wealthiest people and withers the human spirit?
The people are beginning to see the truth. But Barack Obama will never admit the truth.
A writer, physicist, and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér invites you to visit his website, www.chuckroger.com. E-mail Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com.
