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Jewish World Review Jan. 10, 2013/ 28 Teves, 5773 When big deficits became good By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As a senator and presidential candidate, In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush's continued Keynesian borrowing: "The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Strong words. But so worried was Obama about the debt that just two weeks after he took office, he promised still more: "And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office. ... I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay." In his first term, Obama has added more than The recession that ended in 2009 cut revenues, and the population continues to get older and draw more on federal entitlements. But all that said, we have spent record trillions of dollars during the last four years expanding the size of government. A vast 2009 stimulus plan; new Obamacare; new federal employees; vast new expansions in food stamps, disability and unemployment insurance; and spiraling Obama, for all his overblown rhetoric in 2006, was once right about the deficits. But the antidote for the profligacy of the Bush administration was not to increase the borrowing even more. What, then, explains the vast gulf between the prior Obama rhetoric and his current record on deficits? Either one of two things occurred. The first possibility is that Obama and his advisors really believed that record deficit spending, near-zero interest rates and expansions in federal entitlements would jump-start the economy into prosperity. In fact, the opposite occurred. Economic growth continued to hover around or below 2 percent of GDP. Unemployment has never dipped below 7.8 percent during Obama's entire presidency. The massive borrowing made things worse, not better. A second explanation for Obama's "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" behavior is that, at some point, he began to see political advantages to massive borrowing when combined with near-zero interest rates. The growth of entitlements is popular with many voters, especially given that 47 percent pay no federal income taxes. Politically, it proved wiser to provide free birth control pills than to be demagogued as wanting to throw granny over a cliff. Who wants to run on giving fewer things to voters and making everyone pay more for what they receive? Perhaps the Reagan-era notion of lower taxation could only be ended through a sense of impending calamity. As former Reagan once advocated a "starve the beast" philosophy -- lower taxes resulted in less money for out-of-control government. Obama flipped that sequence to a "gorge the beast" paradigm of an out-of-control government demanding far more in taxes. Higher taxes, weighted heavily toward the affluent, spread the wealth and correct the inequities of market-based compensation. They punish the culpable 1 percent. And they remind some that they did not build their businesses on their own. Deficits force income redistribution through changes in the tax code that in any other political climate would have proven impossible. But beware of what you wish for. Obama has already gotten his dream of a vastly increased government, federalized health care, near-zero interest rates and record debt to force higher taxes. The problem now is that there are not enough millionaires and billionaires to make up for the shortfall. And if interest rates rise just a bit, the debt will bury us all -- fat cats and thin cats alike.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. Comment by clicking here. © 2013, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
