Catastrophe - Dick Morris [3]
And now is not the time to accept or reject solutions based only on whether they fit an extremist political agenda. Not while we are drowning in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, with record unemployment rates, staggering numbers of home foreclosures, decimated 401(k)s, and rising numbers of tent cities and shantytowns for the homeless.
And now is especially no time to accept or reject solutions based on whether they fit or don’t fit a particular philosophical agenda. The trendy economic populism we hear from the White House will do nothing but turn neighbors, families, and friends against one another. Americans don’t want that. We can’t afford that. It may sound tough for President Obama to say he’ll take every legal step possible to get back the AIG bonuses (the ones his administration initially okayed), but do we really want to encourage populist vigilantes to hire buses to bring ACORN community organizers and the press on a tour of the homes of the AIG employees? That’s what happened in Connecticut after Obama made his remarks. What does this do to the children of these people when they see protests outside their homes, their previously safe havens?
It’s not going to help us to condone this vigilantism. We can face our problems only by coming together as a nation and facing, with confidence, the storms that surround us. But our president would have 95 percent of us turn on the other 5 percent in an economic civil war, making class conflict the engine of our economic and tax policy.
Obama may speak eloquently about working together, but he doesn’t really seem to understand the fundamental necessity of support and respect for all sectors of our economy. Not just those who are at the core of the Democratic Party, not just those who are union members, not just those who are the poorest among us, but all of us.
Thus far, Obama’s behavior in office suggests that he has a flawed—and sometimes arrogant—approach to government. He needs the cooperation of business, yet he spurns it because of his class bias. He is desperate for more investors in our nation’s stocks and bonds, yet he hounds these potential investors, overregulates them, and taxes them because they have too much money. Does he really think that this will work?
Anxious to stimulate consumer spending, Obama would raise taxes on the most prodigious consumers—the wealthy—by almost 50 percent. Eager to return to the days of prosperity and opportunity, he leads us, instead, into his notion of entitlement.
We want to make capitalism work. He wants to replace it with socialism.
But Barack Obama is only our president, not our dictator. Even armed with top-heavy majorities in both houses of Congress, he cannot get around the fact that we still live in a democracy. We are still a free people. The more we understand what he’s doing to us—and why he’s doing it—the more we can defend ourselves and reverse his disastrous course in 2010, when the congressional elections will offer us the next opportunity.
But we need to start today—by remembering that it’s our country and taking it back.
Right now, in the darkness of the recession, that might seem difficult, even impossible. At the moment, reemerging into the light of prosperity is our primary concern. We all have immediate worries: our jobs, our families, our homes, our future.
But the very policies designed to extricate us from this hellish economy are those that will keep us in the darkness. Obama’s spending—his massive, massive spending—will not hasten the end of the recession. What it will do is ensure a period of rampant inflation and, likely, yet another recession after that, before the inflation can be cured.
Yet, as desperate as our agony is today, it is not our major threat.
Only when we come out of the darkness, blinking in the light of a more normal economy, will the true nature of our catastrophe become apparent.
Unless we act today, we’ll be returning to a very different world.
Will the bank on the corner be run by the government? Will it be like the Bureau of