The game plan at the lip of the cliff
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPoltics.com
Barack Obama ain’t afraid of no stinkin’ fiscal cliff. Why should he be? When the rest of us go over the cliff, doomed to pain and oblivion among the soup cans, plastic bags and empty soda-pop bottles at the bottom of the abyss, he’ll be soaring over the rooftops as only a tin-pot messiah can.
When
the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on
New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a
tearful adieu to Auld Lang Syne, the president will
be popping corks. He’ll have his higher taxes. The
joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the
cliff will be laughing.
Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he
does that is of small consequence. He is determined
not to cut spending. This has become clear enough to
all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra –
“Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in
a way that Mr. Roosevelt could never have imagined.
Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the Americans
who get a monthly government check, will balloon
toward a hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints,
disciplines of any kind will be silly notions of the
past. Dependency will be enthroned.
Once
this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the
“negotiations” between the Democrats and the
Republicans have never amounted to very much. Mr.
Obama reads the November 6 election result as a
landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide.
Nevertheless he is bold, and acting as if it were.
He, and even a lot of timid and fearful Republicans,
never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes
like success.
For
now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision
of America is one he learned in his
community-organizing days. Americans have to give up
the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable
formulation, the exceptional nation, and learn to be
miserable in solidarity with both Upper and Lower
Slobbovia.
The
president’s intelligence chiefs have given him the
“good news” that by the year 2030, only 18 years
from now, the United States will no longer be the
world’s great superpower. “In terms of the indices
of overall power – Gross Domestic Product (GDP),
population size, military spending and technological
investment – Asia will surpass North America and
Europe combined,” reports the National Intelligence
Council of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. That mouthful of titles and capital
letters comprise the president’s own intelligence
gurus.
With
rapid rise of other countries,” the report goes on,
“the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and no country –
whether the U.S., China or any other country – will
be a hegemonic power. The United States’ relative
economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is
inevitable . . . ”
These
are only opinions, of course, but the intelligence
agencies are occasionally correct in their estimates
and appraisals. But there is in the assessment a
noticeable whiff of barely suppressed glee, and a
suggestion that this could be the good news the
president has been waiting for. Mr. Obama, a happy
native of Hawaii, is nevertheless a man of the
third-world attitudes and sensibilities inherited by
birth, nurtured when he grew up in Indonesia, and
it’s just these sensibilities that endear him to
sordid allies on the left who dream of a world
liberated from American example and influence.
Preaching the angry exploitation of the “rich,” as
he defines “rich,” comes naturally to him and the
Democratic left. Envy and covetousness are powerful
emotions, easily manipulated, and Mr. Obama is a
master of manipulation. Demonizing a neighbor in a
bigger house who drives a new car is easy work. A
new Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of
Americans polled now think raising taxes on
households – not individuals but households – making
more than $250,000 a year is a good idea. The
president has done a splendid job of portraying
these taxpayers as big-bellied plutocrats who summer
in France, winter in St. Moritz, and dine on roast
swan.
But
nearly 70 percent in the Battleground Poll think
raising taxes on small-businesses earning more than
$250,000 is a bad idea. Republicans have done a
lousy job of explaining that many, perhaps most, of
the “rich” Americans and these small businesses are
one and the same. That’s why abusing small
businesses is likely to send the country reeling
into another recession at the bottom of the cliff.
This one won’t be George W.’s fault.