To Trust or Not to Trust Obama’s Economic Plan
Late last week, President Obama announced the formation of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which will be chaired by Paul Volcker. In addition to Volcker, renegade GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger will serve on this board.
This past year, all under Immelt’s control, GE stock lost 68 percent of its value. This despite their doing business with Iran. Not only that but, as we all know, owns the Obama Network, aka MSNBC. A presidential economic advisor with a network to tell the world that President Obama’s economic plan is great. What could be cozier?
Wasn’t that the type of thing President Obama was going to get rid of if elected?
Anna Burger is an important liaison between the SEIU and various Democratic organizations. Predictably, she favors the Union Thug Full Employment Act, aka EFCA. Not only that but she’s openly campaigned for President Obama. There isn’t anything illegal about that but it does raise questions on whether she was picked for her political connections or her economic expertise.
This video doesn’t eliminate my fears that her participation on this board is because of her economic expertise:
Thus far, I haven’t seen proof that she’s anything other than a Democrat crony, something else President Obama was supposedly going to eliminate.
To be accurate, there are people on this newly minted board that have some expertise in economics, starting with Chairman Volcker.
Rich Lowry isn’t convinced that President Obama has the chops to handle the economy either:
As far as political arguments go, “I won” has its power - provided it’s made on behalf of an agenda ratified by the American electorate. But Obama didn’t campaign on a sprawling, nearly $1 trillion new spending plan.
If he had pledged in October to double federal domestic discretionary spending in a matter of weeks, including increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by a third, spending hundreds of millions more on federal buildings and throwing tens of billions on every traditional liberal priority from job training to Pell Grants, he’d have been hard-pressed to win at all.
The president should read the transcript of the third presidential debate. He claimed his program represented “a net spending cut.” He called himself “a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” He added, “We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work.”
Does this sound like the outline of an economic plan? I know that it’s appealling to his political base. That alone doesn’t qualify it as an economic plan however.
Let’s compare President Obama to the newly elected President Clinton. Back then, President Clinton announced that VP Al Gore would be tasked with reinventing governmnet. President Clinton talked about ending welfare as we know it, though it took a Republican congress to help achieve that. After the election, President Clinton talked about cutting the deficit. He was a big free trade advocate. The message his agenda sent was that Clintonomics was all about creating jobs, jobs, jobs. Even his foreign policy focus was about creating jobs, almost to the exclusion of national security.
I certainly didn’t agree with President Clinton’s policies but at least he’d outlined what he’d do during the campaign. That helped voters trust him.
Has President Obama talked seriously about growing the economy and putting people first? President Obama talked about reforming health care but that likely won’t happen now that Tom Dashle’s taxes went unpaid for years.
Let’s remember that President Obama thinks that stimulus is spending lots of money:
“So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That’s the whole point. No seriously. (Laughter.) That’s the point. (Applause.)”
That isn’t the point of a stimulus bill. The point of a stimulus bill should be to give an instant jolt to the economy, to create jobs and inspire entrepreneurs to invest in pro-growth strategies. Anything short of that is just wasting money that we don’t have.
What in this stimulus bill indicates that President Obama has a coherent economic plan? Does his giving unions prominance in his legislative agenda and on this board indicate he supports protectionist policies? That’s a major worry with businessmen I’ve talked with.
The fact that he hasn’t come up with a more persuasive argument than “I won” sets off all sorts of red flags with me. It’s disconcerting to Rich Lowry, too:
Obama himself seems confused on what exactly “I won” means. In a meeting with Republicans, he brandished “I won” as a defense of his version of tax relief. But he later used “I won” to push back against an excessive reliance on tax cuts, claiming that it had been repudiated during the campaign even though he talked every day on the trail of cutting taxes for “95 percent of working people” and never once mentioned a commitment to extreme deficit spending.
In this post, I laid out 4 questions I wanted President Obama to answer. He hasn’t come close thus far. Here are those questions:
- Why is a bill that doesn’t create jobs “absolutely necessary”?
- Why is a bill that’s filled with pork and political payoffs to the Democrats’ allies “absolutely necessary”?
- Why is a bill that the CBO says does more harm than good “absolutely necessary”?
- Why is a bill that doesn’t set America’s economy on a sustainable growth footing “absolutely necessary”?
“I won” won’t answer any of my questions.
Another thing that’s bothering me was his over-the-top op-ed where he said that we’re in a crisis and that if we didn’t act fast, it would turn into a catastrophe:
“This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse,” Obama wrote in the newspaper piece titled, “The Action Americans Need.”
President Clinton and President Reagan created 40,000,000+ new jobs during their 8 years in office. The characteristic they shared (they shared little else) was their calm confidence with which they spoke about the economy. President Obama sounds panicked and uncertain. That doesn’t inspire confidence in investors or consumers.
If President Obama doesn’t prove that he’s got a plan to put us on the road to prosperity, the American people will lost faith in him. I don’t wish that on us or him. It’s just that I can’t be certain that he’s got a coherent plan.
Technorati Tags: Economy, Stimulus, Crisis, Catastrophe, Recession, President Obama, Cronyism, Corruption, Tom Daschle, Protectionism, Jeffrey Immelt, Anna Burger, Paul Volcker, Democrats, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Free Trade, Capitalism, Republicans
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog