Economic Recovery: Obama’s Vehicle For Social Change

Just like those pesky Romulan ships from the old Star Trek series, our economic recovery has an excellent cloaking device, making it invisible, too. It’s masked by recurring bad news in almost every economic sector. We’re all feeling the crunch. In the second quarter of this year, the net worth of American households fell for the first time since March 2009. The average household debt is 119% of annual income.

Not nearly as bad as the Feds, of course, but, still, not a situation many can live with. So, people default, mostly on credit card debt and mortgages. Of course, the defaults raise credit fees for the rest of us and lower the value of our homes. Lower home values further erode net worth. And so the cycle goes. Round and round until we get some real economic traction.

Why haven’t we gotten any of that traction yet? Because, Obama’s economic recovery policy is really just a bag of tools to redistribute wealth and transform society into something more to his liking. The biggest tools in the big are tax, spend and regulate, which are killers for a struggling economy.

Social change aside, the only thing we have to show for spending a trillion dollars is a claim that things would be worse without it. And we’re supposed to be satisfied with that.

In case we’re not and we start questioning too deeply, Obama’s boys simply revise history instead of owning up to failed performance. Like the recent ridiculous claim that the Summer of Recovery ballyhoo was only about projects not jobs. I guess if you’re willing to tell huge fibs, you get to be head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. If you’re not, you return to University teaching.

Underneath all this mischaracterization and re-characterization is a thinly veiled message. Lower your expectations because economic failure is an option. Since when? Since we have an Administration that can do no better. Since we have a President who is busy imposing his social policy agenda on a bad economy and pretending it’s good. But, our economic recession did not spring from societal inequities and it’s not going to be fixed by changing the social balance. I mean, really, if your high-powered engine had a problem, would you fix it with a wrecking ball?

Obama is striving to do essentially that. He is fundamentally altering how the economy functions in order to reshape society. In making that effort, he’s also making things much worse for everyone because our economy does not run on social policies. It’s fueled by the profit motive, something that benefits everyone. Businesses exist to make money. They do that by hiring bunches of people and producing and selling competitive goods and services. If they’re successful, they expand and do a lot more of the same.

Obama’s policies are crippling their ability to do that. Take the two most recent examples of Obamanomics, increasing taxes on the rich and helping small business. You can’t do both because the rich own the small business segment with the most influence on the recovery. True, the size of the segment is only 3%. But, it hauls in almost 50% of the net small business income, making it disproportionately important to the economy. So, by increasing the taxes on the rich, the ability of those particular businesses to aid in the recovery is impeded. Why would you do that if recovery is your goal?

Then there’s just the old-fashioned stupidity of taking money away from people during a recession when the economy is begging them to spend it. And the massive increase in business regulations, the targeted tax incentives that won’t work and deficits that know no end. And, of course, Congress refused to pass a budget this year so there’s zero accountability to go along with the limitless spending.

And so it goes. Obama takes from the rich because, in his view, the rich have enough money already. And, to him, wealth redistribution is just a good thing to do. So, he taxes and spends to make sure money gets where he wants it to be. Great for a grass roots community organizer, but totally irresponsible for a President of the United States in an economic recession.

When Obama said during his election night celebration that change has come to America, he wasn’t kidding. The question is, can you spare it?

See you in the mirror.