Six Enormous Stakes in Presidential Election
IBDEditorials.com
Every four years, presidential candidates talk about the enormous stakes of the coming election. But this year, it is no mere campaign platitude.
In fact, rarely in American history has an election mattered more. The future of ObamaCare, the size and intrusiveness of government, tax rates, America's standing in the world, and the long-term makeup of the Supreme Court all rest on who occupies the White House for the next four years.
Here are the stakes, should Obama win a second term:
• ObamaCare forever. Obama is sure to block any attempts to repeal his signature law in a second term, and even if a Republican were to win in 2016, undoing ObamaCare two years after it's gone into full effect would be like trying to unscramble an egg.
By 2016, ObamaCare will have fundamentally reshaped the way people get health coverage, with millions forced into subsidized, government-run exchanges after their companies drop coverage, and roughly 17 million added to Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And ObamaCare's intrusive regulations and mandates will have fundamentally reshaped the insurance market, making the rules virtually impossible to unravel.
As with other major new entitlements, once on the books, the fights will no longer be about whether to keep it, but over arcane rules, cost controls, benefits and so on.
Romney has vowed to overturn ObamaCare entirely, which even if he wins big next week won't be a simple task.
But if Obama wins, that opportunity will be lost forever and the federal takeover of health care will be irreversible.
• Permanent big government. Obama has made it clear that he wants a permanently larger federal government. And with four more years, he'll be able to make that vision a reality.
His current budget plan calls for federal spending to reach nearly 23% of GDP by 2022 and rising — higher than any time in the country's history, except during World War II, and one of the largest sustained increases in spending in our nation's history.
And because all this new spending comes from entitlement programs — mainly ObamaCare — it will be virtually impossible to reduce.
Romney, in contrast, has specifically promised to reduce the size of the federal government to 20% of GDP — which is close to the post-World War II average — and keep it there.
• A liberal Supreme Court. One of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia will be 80 years old by 2016, as will Anthony Kennedy, who often votes with the conservative bloc. Clarence Thomas will be 68 that year.
Should Obama be re-elected, he could have the chance to replace any one of these justices and shift the court to a liberal majority, potentially for decades to come.
On the other hand, liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer will be 83 and 78, respectively, in 2016.
Should Romney win, he might have the chance to strengthen the conservative bloc.
• Higher taxes. Obama has already signed into law a raft of new taxes under the guise of ObamaCare — many of which will kick in next year if he is re-elected. He's also promised higher taxes on the "rich" and higher taxes on energy producers.
But none of these tax hikes is enough to fill the budget gap, leaving a 10-year deficit totaling $6.7 trillion, according to Obama's own budget plan.
And even that assumes strong economic growth and that health costs don't "unexpectedly" explode.
As a result, Obama is virtually certain to start pushing for higher taxes in his second term, and not just on the rich, to cut the deficit and pay for all his new spending programs.
Romney's plan is to enact revenue-neutral, pro-growth tax reforms that, combined with spending restraint, have the potential to lower the deficit without raising any new taxes.
• A regulatory tsunami. As IBD has catalogued recently, a second Obama term will bring with it a tidal wave of massively expensive new regulations.
There are more than 4,000 federal rules in the pipeline, with just the 13 biggest imposing $515 billion in compliance costs over four years.
And that doesn't include the regulatory costs from ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, both of which still require vast amounts of rules to be written.
Romney has promised to eliminate "all Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy," gut Obama's costly global warming regulatory agenda, and require congressional approval of all new "major" regulations.
• A weaker America. Obama's budget calls for reducing defense spending as a share of the economy to 2.9% by 2017, the smallest share devoted to national defense since just before World War II.
Should Obama win re-election, he will be able to claim a mandate to downsize the military while beefing up the nation's entitlement programs.
Romney, on the other hand, promises to protect the military from this huge budget ax.
Given all this, anyone who thinks it doesn't really matter whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney wins next Tuesday is, to put it bluntly, delusional.