Bloviator-in-Chief

When he isn’t insulting our Israeli and Afghan allies or signing nuclear disarmament agreements in a world that would happily reduce the U.S. to heat-induced glass, Obama is on the talk circuit these days trying to sell ObamaCare. This is putting his bloviation skills to their greatest test yet because the American public is as mad as hornets that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid troika defied them with their “we know what’s best for you” body slam last month. So, this week’s CBS News poll couldn’t have been good news to the political class. It showed that ObamaCare is approaching the popularity of a root canal and is now 10 percentage points less popular than it was on the day of its passage.

In a North Carolina lithium battery plant last Friday a woman in the carefully screened gallery possessed the gall of a brass monkey by challenging the Loquacious One’s knowledge of Economics 101 as he tried to sell the audience on the nirvana of ObamaCare. Doris of Lake Wylie, S.C. asked, "In the economic times that we have now, is it a wise decision to add more taxes to us with healthcare?" She added, "Because we are overtaxed as it is."

Giving his best imitation of a Steve Spurrier reaction to an egregious ref call, Obama spent 17 minutes in a pyrotechnical discourse bewilderingly documented by Washington Post reporter Anne E. Kornblut. As her observations recall, “… [OB] then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer -- more than 2,500 words long -- wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, ‘F-Map’). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as ‘FICA’).” If you want to read the unexpurgated soliloquy, be my guest.

As is his custom when people challenge the infallibility of his knowledge on any subject – Bret Baier’s recent Fox News interview and Rep. Paul Ryan’s smack-down of OB’s “facts” at the Blair Summit come to mind – Obama resorts to outpouring a wilderness of words to distract his interlocutors like a raccoon employs tricks to throw a pack of hounds off of its trail. Only this time it didn’t work. Every reporter noticed (and reported) that after his soiree into audience catatonia, Doris’ question remained unanswered.

So let me take a stab at it.

Doris, you have a better understanding of basic economics than the Bloviator-in-Chief. He lives in a never-never land where hopping on Air Force One to take his wife to a Broadway show, spending several hundred thousand taxpayer dollars in the process, is not the obscenity that you and I see it to be. We have to plan our vacations and budget for them. Lately, they’re a luxury we can do without. Unlike Obama, who slips over to Oslo for a few hours to ply his charisma with criminals who accept every emolument that can pass the Olympic selection committee’s red face test, you and I will likely never see Oslo. Certainly not for only a few hours. And we can’t throw government-paid parties for the beautiful people in government-paid housing like Michelle does while unemployment among the great unwashed hovers just below 10% and eight million people have lost their livelihoods. You go girl! You get it. Obama doesn’t.

I also agree with you, Doris, that we’re taxed too much. And we’re taxed unfairly. Facts are troublesome things, old John Adams said a couple of hundred years ago, and the Tax Policy Center came out with some factual doozies this week. It reported that 47% of wage earners will pay no federal tax for 2009. When almost half of the folks don’t pay taxes, raising taxes is sorta’ a non-issue to them, don’t you think? Does democracy really work when almost half the population takes what the other half has – when the top 10% of the income earners pay more than 70% of the taxes – and those making $50,000 don’t care? Is that democracy?

Unlike you and me, Doris, when our incomes are pinched, we have to cut our spending. Not this Washington crowd. Because almost 10% of the workforce isn’t working and paying taxes, Uncle Sam’s income dropped from 18% to 16% of the GDP, which is a lot of money when you’re dealing in trillions of dollars. Yet the Obama administration kept on spending money like drunken sailors – almost 25% of the GDP – the highest peacetime percentage in U.S. history.

If Obama understood economics as well as you do, Doris, he’d see that if you’re taking in 16% of the GDP and spending 25%, you get in a hole fast. Not to worry. Thanks to all of the new taxes baked into ObamaCare, families earning more than about $250,000 (that’s only 2% of the taxpayers) will see their marginal income tax rate increase from 35% to almost 40%, capital gains taxes will go from 15% to 20%, hospitals will pay a tax of 1% of income, and 3.8% will be applied to the ill-gotten gains of “passive” income – interest, dividends, and short-term capital gains. Passive income is a government euphemism for money we don’t do work to earn, Doris; it is earnings on capital and therefore fair game for federal expropriation.

Two percent pay so 98% can play? I don’t think that’s going to work for long, therefore look for Obama to renege on his promise that if our incomes are under $250,000 “not one dime” in higher taxes will be paid.

We are fast becoming a country where instead of citizens deciding how much the government should take, the government decides how much the citizens should keep. And maybe that’s the heart of the problem, Doris. Only after ObamaCare passed did Democrats ‘fess up that this was one of their motives. Obama sold it as a way to save money and cut the deficit, which it won’t do, but its real appeal to anti-capitalist elites is that it spreads the wealth around – just like OB told Joe the plumber he would do if elected. So last week, a smiling Max Baucus, the Democrat chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, proudly admitted that alleviating the "maldistribution of income in America" from the haves to the have-nots is one of healthcare reform’s real benefits.
We call that socialism down here in Georgia, Doris, and when fewer and fewer taxpayers pay more and more of the taxes, we are getting close to what Margret Thatcher said is socialism’s failure: eventually it runs out of other people's money to spend. It’s already happening at the state level where balanced budgets are required by law; therefore new taxes are being levied on funerals, haircuts, accounting and legal services, even clowns. The tax-it-if-it-moves mentality of state legislatures would be comical if it weren’t so infuriating to those of us who pay too much in state and county taxes because governors and commissioners don’t have the courage to cut spending. If Californians have to pay more taxes, they may soon decide that Waziristan isn’t so bad a place to live.

Maybe you weren’t surprised, Doris, that so sensible a question as yours launched a pontifical downpour that didn’t even answer what you asked. If Obama had answered truthfully – yes, it’s stupid to raise taxes in a struggling economy, yes you do pay too much in taxes – he’d have been at cross purposes with his ideological belief that society’s best and the brightest become politicians not proletariats who meet payrolls, create real jobs, innovate and take risks, and fail their way to success. Always anxious to lecture those of us who just don’t get it, Obama seems convinced that in true Orphan Annie enlightenment we would all break out in singing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” if we could just see the world he sees for us.

About 150 years ago Abe Lincoln said of a lawyer in his time: "He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met." I think you saw the new record-holder last Friday.