Investors Business Daily reviewed President Obama’s economics speech from Monday, and similarly found it lacking:
In that speech Tuesday, Obama once again tried to build a case for his liberal, big-spending, tax-hiking, regulatory agenda. But as with so many of his past appeals, Obama’s argument rests on a pile of untruths. Among the most glaring:
• Tax cuts and deregulation have “never worked” to grow the economy. There’s so much evidence to disprove this claim, it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin with the fact that countries with greater economic freedom — lower taxes, less government, sound money, free trade — consistently produce greater overall prosperity.
Here at home, President Reagan’s program of lower taxes and deregulation led to an historic two-decade economic boom. Plus, states with lower taxes and less regulation do better than those that follow Obama’s prescription.
Obama also claimed the economic booms in the ’50s and ’60s somehow support his argument. This is utter nonsense. Taxes at the time averaged just 17% of the economy. And there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Departments of Transportation, Energy or Education, and no EPA. …
• Bush’s tax cuts on the rich only managed to produced “massive deficits” and the “slowest job growth in half a century.” Budget data make clear that Obama’s spending hikes, not Bush’s tax cuts, produced today’s massive deficits.
And Obama only gets his “slowest job growth” number by including huge job losses during his own term in office. Also, monthly pre-recession job growth under Bush was about 40% higher than post-recession growth has been under Obama.
• During the Bush years, “we had weak regulation, we had little oversight.” This is patently false. Regulatory staffing climbed 42% under Bush, and regulatory spending shot up 50%, according to a Washington University in St. Louis/George Washington University study. And the number of Federal Register pages — a proxy for regulatory activity — was far higher under Bush than any previous president.
• The “wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century.” Fact: the federal income tax code is now more progressive than it was in 1979, according to the Congressional Budget Office. IRS data show the richest 1% paid almost 40% of federal income taxes in 2009, up from 18% back in 1980.
Similarly lacking is any credibility in the assertion that Theodore Roosevelt and Obama are comparable, as Ron Radosh points out:
… a more substantive look at what Roosevelt really argued belies his argument. As Ben Soskis correctly notes at TNR.com, “there was another stratum of meaning in TR’s speech at Osawatomie — a more conservative one that has received less attention.” Roosevelt, he points out, “did not mean for his speech … to be a statement of radical beliefs. He had initially hoped that by championing progressive principles, he could take control of the potentially irresponsible insurgent forces within the GOP and orchestrate a reconciliation with the party’s more conservative wing. In fact, in the address itself, he did not merely define himself as a crusader against special interests; he also signaled his resistance to the excesses of radicalism as well.”
Radosh quotes from a better authority on Roosevelt than Obama, Martin J. Sklar, scholar of the Progressive Era and author of The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916:
Roosevelt … had not become a socialist, still less a radical or populist. It seems more accurate, and more illuminating of both the substance and thrust of his political thinking, to describe his position …by 1910-1912 as that of a left-wing statist who was prepared to achieve play a leadership role in achieving significant changes in the “form of government…and the nature of property rights. … Roosevelt himself put the matter succinctly in his Osawatomie speech in the summer of 1910, when he said that in standing for the “square deal,” he meant “not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed,” and he wanted the rules changed in the direction of effecting “a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.”
Does Radosh’s next paragraph read like anything Obama would espouse?
Sklar goes on to explain that in TR’s eyes, his “New Nationalism” meant an alternative to a corporate capitalism less subject to public control, as well as “an alternative to socialism…to the elimination of private property in large-scale enterprise and its replacement by state ownership.” Sklar argues that TR favored a limited statism confined to management of the economy and that TR did not favor “extending state power beyond that to the restriction of individual rights, political democracy, or civil liberties.” As he sees it, TR’s form of statism was “partial and libertarian, not totalistic and authoritarian.”
So, if we continue to look at and evaluate the Obama record and position today, it is precisely the opposite of what TR intended and believed in. Favoring equality of opportunity and reward for service are conservative positions; not those of today’s liberals or socialists. They favor equality of outcome, obtained in advance by forced redistribution of wealth by the state. As TR put it, he favored “the triumph of a real democracy…and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” He favored enlarging the possibilities for “equality of opportunity.” If that did not occur, then the possibility occurred of the kind of class war and revolution from below he sought to avoid.
Roosevelt believed Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the patron saint of Wisconsin progressives, was a dangerous radical. (My source is “Fighting Bob and the Bull Moose,” a term paper written for UW’s U.S. History 1877–1914 course, written by UW student Steve Prestegard. Too bad the paper isn’t online.) Roosevelt also loved his country and believed in American supremacy. The love for the U.S. in the residential quarters at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is in direct proportion to its political fortunes.
Radosh gives Roosevelt the last word, words you’ll never hear coming out of Obama’s mouth:
When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 