26 Minutes Late To Complain About Foot-Dragging

26 Minutes Late To Complain About Foot-Dragging
The perfect snapshot of a disastrous presidency.
by John Hayward 09/19/2011

President Obama rolled into his Rose Garden address 26 minutes late today, to whine “there shouldn’t be any reason for Congress to drag its feet” on a bill that Senate Democrats have said they won’t look at until October. He said they should pass his nameless bill (which lost its original name because Obama waited too long to introduce it in the House) because “I’ve got the pens all ready” to sign it. See address here.

The man who forced Americans to give Solyndra $535 million showed up to complain that people who make over $200,000 per year are not “paying their fair share,” and should submit to higher taxes – plus a Medicare funding raid - so that Obama’s latest stimulus package could be passed “without adding to the deficit.”

This is a revealing snapshot into a failed presidency. Obama is as arrogant and out-of-touch as ever. In fact, the belligerent class-warrior tone of today’s address could be read as a defiant up-yours to increasingly nervous Democrats who think he’s too badly tainted by poor job performance and corruption to sit at the top of the 2012 ticket. He doesn’t realize how pathetic he looks when he makes his latest demand that voters forget everything he’s done since January 2009, and pretend he’s an all-knowing investment genius who can spend our money more effectively, for greater public good, than we can. Never mind what happened to all that “green jobs” money. Give me more, you greedy self-centered small businessmen!

It seems funny to hear Obama wail about foot-dragging when his own party’s Senate leadership has dismissed his proposals as unserious, but it makes perfect sense if you view congressional Democrats as the intended audience for today’s address. He knows they’re talking about running away from him, and maybe even running against him, in 2012. Today’s weird, angry Rose Garden outburst was a shot across the bow, to let them know Obama is ready to run against them if he has to.

Notice how Obama complains about the following things turned “a surplus into a yawning deficit” and a “massive debt we’ve accumulated over the past decade”: profligate spending in Washington, tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, the costs of two wars, and the recession. Notice anything missing from that list? How about ObamaCare, the failed trillion-dollar Obama stimulus, or Obama’s third war in Libya? He just got here, folks. He had nothing to do with any of that stuff. Your memories of an arrogant President snapping “I won” when denying Republicans input into his stimulus plans are in error, and should be edited accordingly.

Besides serving as a continuing insult to anyone unwilling to make such adjustments to their treacherous memories, Obama’s mad hammering of the reset button sets him up to run against Congress, including congressional Democrats.

Congressional Democrats will also find themselves going under the bus if Obama keeps slipping on his new Deficit Hawk costume. The man who personally threw $4 trillion onto the national debt, much of it to pay off top contributors in crooked “green jobs” scams, is suddenly worried about the “burden” that will “ultimately fall on our children’s shoulders.” He therefore proposes to ease that burden by taxing the living crap out of their parents.

Thus are voters who rose up against irresponsible government spending in the last election informed that the problem is really their fault, because they’re just not working hard enough to keep Uncle Sam in the style to which he has become accustomed.

Even if Obama’s silly claims and empty promises were taken seriously, he’s boasting about $4 trillion at best taken out of a deficit baseline that will add over $10 trillion to the national debt during the next decade. I’ll take him seriously as a “deficit hawk” when he’s at least proposing to stop increasing the national debt. As it stands, he’s a deficit chain smoker who wants applause for promising to cut down to a pack a day, provided everyone else pays for his nicotine gum.

Watching Obama deliver this speech should answer any lingering questions you might have about why command economies are such miserable disasters. Any private-sector CEO with Obama’s record, who showed up 26 minutes late for a big meeting to discuss the huge new “investments” he wants to make, would be escorted from the building by security. Instead, President Zero Job Growth is still babbling about how spending cuts would “hamper growth.” President Solyndra castigates Congress for not “going line by line through the budget.” President Framework, who skated through the entire debt-ceiling debate without putting one single concrete proposal on the table, boasts about how public servants like himself “weren’t elected to do what was easy.” People with ironclad job security lasting for years tend to be brazen about their failures.

Here’s an idea for making evil rich guys “pay their fair share”: how about forcing every millionaire paid off by Obama to return the tax money they were given? What’s that, you say? They couldn’t possibly do that, because they lost the billions of dollars we were forced to give them? Well, I guess making everyone else pony up is a reasonable Plan B.

The President said he plans on “asking everyone to do their part, so that no one has to bear too much of the burden on their own.” Of course, his statist plans will involve no polite requests. You will be told what to pay, and if you refuse, you will suffer fines and imprisonment. If you were under the impression you had some sort of inherent right to your own labor and property, you should know that instead, you will bear whatever portion of a distributed social “burden” that your betters deem appropriate.

It won’t be the same portion for everyone – some people pay much, much more, in return for which they get hectored about “paying their fair share” when wild government spending breaks the bank. When they legally and properly avail themselves of the deductions socialists like Obama have planted throughout the tax code to control their behavior, they get lectured about “gaming the system,” and subjected to special “alternative minimum” taxes that transform thousands of pages of tax code into an elaborate fraud.

The last thing America needs from this scandal-plagued President is another lecture about “fairness,” which is what most of his Rose Garden address turned out to be. We don’t need any more politicians telling us how much secretaries or hedge fund managers should be allowed to earn. We don’t need a President who would never consider returning to the spending of the 90s telling us to accept the tax rates of the 90s. We don’t need a President who can’t account for billions of dollars he’s already spent clubbing us with our moral obligation to give him more.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.