Barack Obama seems like a decent, hard-working and admirable fellow. He is clearly smart, well-educated, and reasonably honest (for a politician). He is a good family man, and is doing largely what he said he would do during the 2008 campaign and in his platform. In the foot-steps of Jackson and Lincoln and Hoover and Reagan he is a self-made man with extraordinary ambition.
However, you could not devise a more destructive economic policy mix than the president is implementing, short of direct kinetic effects. It is a numbing thing to watch. With 10 percent unemployment he is raising a myriad of taxes on corporations and upper income people, the very people who create new businesses and jobs. His fiscal, regulatory and tax policies reward failure and punish success with bailouts and confiscatory taxes and arbitrary limits on economic activity. He is nationalizing everything in sight, including the credit markets and health care sector, and has an escalating government power grab at the energy sector. His “insourcing” initiative sucks even more jobs away from the private and into the public sector.
There are indications the economic advisors around the president like Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke recognize the string has run out on these policies. Current polling indicates a majority of voters see this, too. It is not a stretch to suppose that the president himself already knows he is about to be devoured by The Great Recession, which is starting to look more and more like a depression.
I recently took my cousins from Denver on a midnight tour of the Washington Mall. It is terrifyingly beautiful at night, particularly between the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials. When you see the reflection of the Washington Monument in the shiny, dark tomb of the Vietnam Memorial you shudder for the future of our country. It was warm and windy that night, and the planes had stopped landing at Reagan airport. We thought we saw an apparition. It disappeared in an instant. It looked like Herbert Hoover.
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