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PrintJanuary 26, 2010
President Palliative
With the passing of the anniversary of his first year in office, Obama's already rummaged through his playbook on how to manufacture a crisis, polarize a nation, and hamstring his political party. Now as a result of his continuing ailing job approval and loss of congressional supermajority, he's returned to the pages of working-class populism and pandering with the intention of furthering his radical agenda.
Last week, he began with a declaration of war on Wall Street via a far-sweeping, pejorative proposal that will serve as the largest regulatory crackdown on the banking industry since the 1930s. Then yesterday, the president announced a new series of initiatives aimed to "help" the middle-class.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
At a meeting of the White House's Task Force on Middle Class Families, Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden announced their support for a near doubling of the child- and dependent-care tax credit for families that make less than $85,000 a year. The tax-credit rate would be boosted to 35% from 20% of qualifying expenses.(snip)Mr. Obama also proposed limiting a student's federal loan payments to 10% of his or her income above a basic living allowance, requiring all employers to give employees the option of enrolling in a direct-deposit IRA, expanding the "saver's tax credit," and adding $52.5 million to a program that helps families care for aging relatives.
Turn on the applause lights for Main Street, because after all, there's no better joy than that of watching the president's demonization of "fat-cat bankers" and more handouts to create a welfare-driven nanny state. Since the economy continues to shed jobs and the residential real estate market erodes further, you'd think the president really would actually take that "hard pivot" towards the economy he's always talking about. But he's not going to do that, and we know that he's not because when the going gets tough, he turns to the morphine chapter.
When seniors came out en masse last summer to protest the impending weakening of their medical coverage as a result of health-care reform, he offered them $250 to shut up and go home. When the LGBT community was angry because the president wasn't honoring the commitments he made to them on the campaign trail, he signed a partner benefits memo so they'd get off his back.
Now we've reached 2010, and a recent Pew survey shows the public's priorities for the president are the economy and jobs, and what they get is a costly product--that has nothing to do with economic recovery--from the president's middle-class task force?
Programs of this nature, whether they be in the form of extensions of homebuyer tax credits, gimmicky cash for whatever programs, and/or flat out bribes to the electorate only serve to temporarily ease the pain, but unfortunately scientists recently concluded that morphine only delays healing.
Until the president gets away from that chapter of governance, we're going to continue to feel the pain, and this nation will not get any better, any faster.
J.C. Arenas is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your comments at jcarenas.com
