Wheels Are Off The Wagon
Rory Cooper /
President Obama has dismissed criticism of his economic policy in the past as “political” and has said “that’s what right now we don’t have time to do.” The President does not have “time” to listen to conservative criticism of his economic policies. Fair enough, apparently Washington doesn’t change overnight. But does the President have time to address criticism from some of his strongest supporters?
Stuart Taylor, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, Managing Editor at Newsweek, contributor to National Journal and a self-identified “Obama-admiring centrist” joined the chorus of Obama supporters begging the President to take a second look at what he is doing to the economy.
Having praised President Obama’s job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.
Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.
With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both. All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn’t “believe in bigger government” and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.
This is not to deny that the liberal wish list in Obama’s staggering $3.6 trillion budget would be wonderful if we had limitless resources. But in the real world, it could put vast areas of the economy under permanent government mismanagement, kill millions of jobs, drive investors and employers overseas, and bankrupt the nation.