George H.W. Bush made a “read my lips” no-new-taxes pledge in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in August 1988, and broke it two years later. That seemed a fast turnaround, but President Barack Obama has outpaced him by making, and then signaling his intention to break, a no-new-taxes pledge all in the same address.
“If your family earns less than $250,000 a year,” Obama said in his speech to a joint session of Congress, “you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
Unless, that is, your family pays a utility bill. Earlier from the same podium, Obama exhorted Congress to send him “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” This cap-and-trade program would increase the cost of energy for everyone, regardless of income. It is a broad-based (if indirect) tax increase of the sort the casual listener would have thought Obama ruled out in categorical language.
Obama’s just-released budget outline proposes using revenues raised by cap-and-trade to fund his “making work pay” tax credits that were part of the stimulus bill. Of those credits, Obama said, “The recovery plan provides a tax cut — that’s right, a tax cut — for 95 percent of working families.” This was a central Obama pledge during the campaign, although he never mentioned he’d fund it with a countervailing tax increase on working families and everyone else.
If you follow the money — out one pocket, in the other — Obama’s campaign promise is exposed as a fraud. Obama counts on no one noticing, in a vindication of the French writer Frederic Bastiat’s definition of politics as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Obama is a talented, but a wily and dishonest, salesman. Nineteenth-century pol Martin Van Buren earned the sobriquet “the little magician” for his skillful manipulation of New York’s political machine. Obama is the rhetorical magician, depending — as all magicians do — on deft sleight of hand.
In his speech, Obama didn’t want his listeners to think he’s a big-government heir to Lyndon Johnson, so he talked of slashing waste. He said his team had begun going “line by line” through the budget, and “we have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
In common parlance, “savings” is taken to mean ... well, savings. But half of this $2 trillion is accounted for by Obama’s planned tax increases on the rich — in other words, he has identified revenue, not savings. Much of the rest is arrived at by assuming the Iraq War would cost $170 billion a year for the duration, even though Obama has long planned a drawdown. Obama portrays himself as ruthlessly paring back government when he is simply raising taxes and leaving Iraq.
Obama boasted of a “recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.” Again, the casual listener might conclude Obama won’t tolerate earmarks, although a $410 billion spending bill is currently speeding through Congress with 8,500 earmarks Obama stands ready to swallow.
Even as he expands government, Obama forswears any interest in expanding government and says he’s scaling back: “Everyone will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars, and that includes me.” Really? The only programs he said he’d cut were ineffective education programs, useless weapons systems, and subsidies to agribusiness, and his budget increases discretionary spending by 12 percent next year. To paraphrase Bob Dole, where’s the austerity?
Obama the writer-president prides himself on a facility with words that has fueled his political rise. He clearly respects words, including their power to manipulate and mislead.
“A good catchword,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “can obscure analysis for 50 years.”
To pass a vast program changing the relationship of American government to its citizens, Obama only needs to obscure analysis for about a year.
I'm old, white, and male. Three strikes and I'm out - disqualified, according to today's identity police, from having any legitimate opinions or making any pronouncements about race in an increasingly race-obsessed presidential campaign.
Welcome, friends! It's time once again for that fabulous game show: "App or No App!" The show where you decide if the app (short for application because that is way too long of a word) is real or not real. Today we explore the wonderful world of Facebook apps! Join us, won't you?
When it comes to the pantheon of Hoosier sports heroes - Johnny Wooden, Knute Rockne, Bob Knight, Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, Rick Mount, Bobby Plump, George Gipp - the newest name will certainly be Peyton Manning.
I realize this is a sentiment usually expressed by people who wear colanders on their heads in order to keep the CIA from reading their thoughts. That, of course, is just ridiculous. The CIA does not read people's brain waves. Queen Elizabeth does.
Mitt Romney summoned all the righteous indignation he could muster after a Newt Gingrich ad called him "anti-immigrant." Romney blasted the ad shortly afterward in an interview: "It's just inappropriate."
The city where I hang my shingle, or would if I did something shingleworthy, is all abuzz with excitement over the SuperDuper Bowl, which is coming to town one of these days soon. I forget which.
Have you heard anyone say it lately? I'm guessing you have. I'm guessing everyone within a 100-mile radius of Indianapolis has heard it many times over the past month and will probably hear it a zillion times over the next week. I just hope there are no casualties.
Rich Lowry and Brian Howey have each had commentaries in the Hendricks County Flyer that were a great PR job for Gov. Mitch Daniels. However, the recent Indiana unemployment drop from 10.5 percent to 9.8 percent was probably the result of the Bush and Obama bailout of GM and Chrysler, discouraged job applicants dropping out of the labor force (100,000 manufacturing jobs were eliminated since Daniels' election and prior to the financial/banking crises in 2008), imported cheap foreign labor (some who are illegal), and the Obama stimulus ($11 million in Hendricks County instead of collecting impact fees on new development) including energy grants and tax cuts for the middle class.
Commentary
Obama the rhetorical magician
BY RICH LOWRY
George H.W. Bush made a “read my lips” no-new-taxes pledge in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in August 1988, and broke it two years later. That seemed a fast turnaround, but President Barack Obama has outpaced him by making, and then signaling his intention to break, a no-new-taxes pledge all in the same address.
“If your family earns less than $250,000 a year,” Obama said in his speech to a joint session of Congress, “you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
Unless, that is, your family pays a utility bill. Earlier from the same podium, Obama exhorted Congress to send him “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.” This cap-and-trade program would increase the cost of energy for everyone, regardless of income. It is a broad-based (if indirect) tax increase of the sort the casual listener would have thought Obama ruled out in categorical language.
Obama’s just-released budget outline proposes using revenues raised by cap-and-trade to fund his “making work pay” tax credits that were part of the stimulus bill. Of those credits, Obama said, “The recovery plan provides a tax cut — that’s right, a tax cut — for 95 percent of working families.” This was a central Obama pledge during the campaign, although he never mentioned he’d fund it with a countervailing tax increase on working families and everyone else.
If you follow the money — out one pocket, in the other — Obama’s campaign promise is exposed as a fraud. Obama counts on no one noticing, in a vindication of the French writer Frederic Bastiat’s definition of politics as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Obama is a talented, but a wily and dishonest, salesman. Nineteenth-century pol Martin Van Buren earned the sobriquet “the little magician” for his skillful manipulation of New York’s political machine. Obama is the rhetorical magician, depending — as all magicians do — on deft sleight of hand.
In his speech, Obama didn’t want his listeners to think he’s a big-government heir to Lyndon Johnson, so he talked of slashing waste. He said his team had begun going “line by line” through the budget, and “we have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
In common parlance, “savings” is taken to mean ... well, savings. But half of this $2 trillion is accounted for by Obama’s planned tax increases on the rich — in other words, he has identified revenue, not savings. Much of the rest is arrived at by assuming the Iraq War would cost $170 billion a year for the duration, even though Obama has long planned a drawdown. Obama portrays himself as ruthlessly paring back government when he is simply raising taxes and leaving Iraq.
Obama boasted of a “recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.” Again, the casual listener might conclude Obama won’t tolerate earmarks, although a $410 billion spending bill is currently speeding through Congress with 8,500 earmarks Obama stands ready to swallow.
Even as he expands government, Obama forswears any interest in expanding government and says he’s scaling back: “Everyone will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars, and that includes me.” Really? The only programs he said he’d cut were ineffective education programs, useless weapons systems, and subsidies to agribusiness, and his budget increases discretionary spending by 12 percent next year. To paraphrase Bob Dole, where’s the austerity?
Obama the writer-president prides himself on a facility with words that has fueled his political rise. He clearly respects words, including their power to manipulate and mislead.
“A good catchword,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “can obscure analysis for 50 years.”
To pass a vast program changing the relationship of American government to its citizens, Obama only needs to obscure analysis for about a year.
(c) 2009 by King Features Syndicate
I'm old, white, and male. Three strikes and I'm out - disqualified, according to today's identity police, from having any legitimate opinions or making any pronouncements about race in an increasingly race-obsessed presidential campaign.
February 7, 2012
Welcome, friends! It's time once again for that fabulous game show: "App or No App!" The show where you decide if the app (short for application because that is way too long of a word) is real or not real. Today we explore the wonderful world of Facebook apps! Join us, won't you?
February 6, 2012
When it comes to the pantheon of Hoosier sports heroes - Johnny Wooden, Knute Rockne, Bob Knight, Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, Rick Mount, Bobby Plump, George Gipp - the newest name will certainly be Peyton Manning.
February 6, 2012
You have to be careful what you say these days.
I realize this is a sentiment usually expressed by people who wear colanders on their heads in order to keep the CIA from reading their thoughts. That, of course, is just ridiculous. The CIA does not read people's brain waves. Queen Elizabeth does.
February 3, 2012
Mitt Romney summoned all the righteous indignation he could muster after a Newt Gingrich ad called him "anti-immigrant." Romney blasted the ad shortly afterward in an interview: "It's just inappropriate."
February 3, 2012
The city where I hang my shingle, or would if I did something shingleworthy, is all abuzz with excitement over the SuperDuper Bowl, which is coming to town one of these days soon. I forget which.
January 31, 2012
A man once said, "those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
January 31, 2012
President Barack Obama is making his re-election about raising the taxes of an Omaha billionaire who is volunteering for the honor.
January 31, 2012
"Have a super day!"
Have you heard anyone say it lately? I'm guessing you have. I'm guessing everyone within a 100-mile radius of Indianapolis has heard it many times over the past month and will probably hear it a zillion times over the next week. I just hope there are no casualties.
January 27, 2012
Rich Lowry and Brian Howey have each had commentaries in the Hendricks County Flyer that were a great PR job for Gov. Mitch Daniels. However, the recent Indiana unemployment drop from 10.5 percent to 9.8 percent was probably the result of the Bush and Obama bailout of GM and Chrysler, discouraged job applicants dropping out of the labor force (100,000 manufacturing jobs were eliminated since Daniels' election and prior to the financial/banking crises in 2008), imported cheap foreign labor (some who are illegal), and the Obama stimulus ($11 million in Hendricks County instead of collecting impact fees on new development) including energy grants and tax cuts for the middle class.
January 27, 2012
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Has Indianapolis done a good job of hosting the Super Bowl?
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