Thread: Deception at Core of Obama Plans

March 06, 2009
Deception at Core of Obama Plans
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... udget.html

UB, that's it exactly!

'Bama fooled a lot of people, but he can't fool the financial markets. Now he and the 'Crats will try to jam thru legislation giving as much to illegals as they can get away with.

Wow, universal college education - and all Americans have to do is a little community service, to get it for free. And don't even think about how much faster Americans could be trained to do entry level construction jobs, which would give them the pride that comes from putting a paycheck on the kitchen table on a Friday night!

Hes just a figure head for the planned events we see unfolding before our
eyes. This is no accident, no failure, but intended consequences to break
our economy and bring about the two tiered NWO...elites on the top and
enough scared worker bees to keep them up.

Dependent people are easy to control....lets not become dependent.

The illegals dont wish to be independent. How convenient. No wonder
many dont want to see them kept out.

I don't get to post here a lot but I do lurk and support you all. I have got to say Obama is just unbelievable, I can go and on but I am sure I don't have to. Each time that man opens his mouth with one of his personal agendas, the markets tank right after. He's a disaster, total disaster. Trust me when I say this, I lived in England for 2 years, socialized medicine is not what everyone thinks it is so when I heard about that, I just had to laugh.

Speaking of laughs, here's a good one:
Remember the headlines when Obama said "its a good time to invest in the stock market"? Well, the smart investors took full advantage of that and quickly bought up stocks knowing the "sheeple" will listen to Obama. (I think this was on Tuesday.) So they sold the stocks, etc, the market went up, but then the market tanked and tanked some more. So the smart, clever, investors basically took the "sheeple" for a ride and made a profit off of them. (My husband told me this story because he works in the financial industry.)

So the moral of that story....don't listen to Obama.

Jennifer in NJ

Moving to other topic's....no illegal aliens here?