The Fragile Obama Whackosystem

The Fragile Obama Whackosystem
By John Ransom
8/31/2011

Another guy with nice hair and a good tan is working on the Obama job plan. He’ll be a great addition at Martha’s Vineyard.

This ought to work out as well as Geithner doing his own taxes.

This week, Obama announced his new econ czar would be Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who figured out that if you gave billions away to the auto industry in price incentives, auto sales would go up.

OK. Sales only went up temporarily. But he’s the only member of the Obama administration who possesses an understanding of the relationship between price and sales. Maybe that’s progress for an administration that seems to sabotage every economic plan they come up with.

However, count me as skeptical.

Krueger likes taxes.

He likes them a lot.

He likes taxes on the rich, the poor, carpools, employers, employees.

Did I say he likes taxes? He really, really does.

He proposed a national sales tax- he calls it a consumption tax- that would be a hardship on the poorest Americans and be a direct drag on the economy, as even he admits.

“The main downside of this proposal,” he said of his sales tax scheme, “is that taxes reduce economic activity. But the government must make critical trade-offs, and a consumption tax could be the most efficient means to raise revenue to finance essential government functions.”

Taxes reduce economic activity? A startling admission from an Obama administration official, especially one who is an economics professor. I never thought they’d figure that part out.

But then Krueger goes on to strain credibility by claiming we have “essential government functions.” I didn’t know we had a government that functioned at all, yet alone essentially.

They don’t work off a budget; they don’t pass bills that accomplish what they propose to do; they fight more wars even as they condemn the cost of war; they shut down energy production even as they decry our increased dependence on foreign oil; they kill jobs in industries they don’t favor, like oil even while they complain that rich people aren’t doing their fair share to help create jobs.

“That’s our money,” the government’s ketchup-stained court jester Michael Moore told us.

How about we just stop killing jobs? No?

“The Administration believes that it is no longer sufficient to address our nation's energy needs by finding more fossil fuels,” says Krueger, “instead we must take dramatic steps towards becoming a clean energy economy.”

Forget finding new oil. Can we just use the oil we have?

We are sitting on 4.3 trillion barrels of oil in the western US, enough to keep us going for 600 years without importing another drop. This is oil that would keep $400 billion in our economy every year and reduce our trade imbalance by 2/3rds. And the economics professor says no?

Did he use TurboTax to deduce this?

They strained might and main to raise taxes on the rich most of this year- which conservatives opposed- yet now, by appointing Krueger as the new czar of the Obama whackosystem, they seem to be signaling that they will be willing to compromise by agreeing to raise taxes on everyone, rich and poor alike.

“Another downside is that a consumption tax,” Krueger says as an aside, “is a greater burden for the poor, who spend a relatively high share of their income.”

But the government really needs the money so that they can help the poor, says Obama.

The poor being taxed to help the poor. Finally the Obama administration has come full circle.

Now you know what happens when socialists run out of other people’s money: They tax the poor.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.