The Engaging Rhetoric of Statist Politics

Obama's speech last night was nothing if not superb made-for-TV drama. It was however, long on (sometimes) hopeful rhetoric and short on details. What did you hear?

I won't review the speech in detail, as that has already been badly overdone. However, I would like to point out a few things that I believe make it full of deceit and intentional obfuscation, all of which must be corrected in the minds of Americans if we are to survive the next four years. Obama, and many of the Democrats interviewed later, in what appeared to be practiced repetitive and misleading tag lines, played the same two lines over and over: "The debt we inherited" and the "failed policies of the past". The first of these is meant to pass the blame for irresponsible spending to the last administration, even though the numbers don't add up, even though we have had a Democratic majority the last two years, and even though those numbers have doubled in the first month of this Presidency. The second is intended to provide a jumping off place for the huge, unprecedented expansion of federal government the Democrats seek, by placing blame for all our ills on the policies of Bush (which, in large part, are indistinguishable from those of the Democrats), and then doing precisely what Bush did, but with a new and insidious goal - to expand government and the welfare state so broadly, and so fast, that we cannot retreat. Once entitlements appear, our history shows that they never go away. Hello, European statism.

Obama talked about three initiatives - everything else, such as defense, foreign relations, and for the most part, taxes and deficit spending, came up only as asides, or in relation to other topics - the economy, healthcare, and education. Here's what I heard:

This administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit, and he will cut that inherited deficit in half by the end of his "first" term. Oh? What does that mean? Bush's deficits (he was a big spender by any fair estimate) ranged from $158 to $455 billion. In 2007, the deficit was $162 billion. In 2008, which we hoped was to be a one-time debacle, that swelled to $455 billion, due in large part to the emerging recession and a lot of stimulus and bailout packages that should have been temporary and not repeatable. A large amount of that deficit is represented by the part of the $787 billion stimulus, passed by THIS Congress, that will be spent this fiscal year. When Obama says he will reduce the deficit in half, what he is actually saying is that he will reduce the $1.3 trillion to about $534 billion by the end of fiscal year 2013. To do that, he will pass the largest budget annual deficits in history, year after year, throughout his "first" term. The lowest one, according to Obama, will be this year, and it is larger than any Bush ran in his entire Presidency, except for this year. The resulting deficit he seems so proud of will be three times as large as Bush's 2007 deficit. This is a permanent and very irresponsible increase in the scale of government borrowing. Worse, it makes assumptions that have not taken into account the new crop of baby-boomers who will be retiring and accessing Social Security and Medicare, and it does not tell us what happens when the paper debt resulting from the government's robbing the Social Security trust fund actually has to be ponied up because real people will be demanding their checks. He did not address or even mention how he intends to shore up Social Security, which in current form is unsustainable. One thing we know, however, is that raising taxes on "the rich" will actually lower government revenues over time, and will likely stall or slow economic recovery, so it is going to be a demanding task indeed. The rhetoric? He says he will take steps to "strengthen capitalism" when he means statist programs that expand government at the expense of capitalism. He says he will "promote financial accountability" when he means more government bailouts, ownership, and even nationalization of banks. He plans to "trim back deficits" when he means he will begin by expanding them to unrecognizable proportions, then "scaling back" and "cutting worthy projects" but passing budgets that are far above anything we have seen under even the most spendthrift of Presidents.

On healthcare, I don't entirely disagree with Obama. This spiraling-upward cost scenario needs to change. But my concern is with how he plans to do that. He gave us no details. Will he address the reasons healthcare costs are spiraling upward? One big one is that government is by far the biggest payor in the system, has expanded programs such as Part D drug coverage, grown the federal healthcare bureaucracy by twofold, and has not modified its plan designs substantially in years. Business, on the other hand, when faced with these cost increases at double digit levels, began to put tighter controls and higher cost-sharing in place, while accenting consumerism and prevention, resulting in actual negative growth in many plans (increases of 2-3% during inflationary cycles in the broader economy of 3-5%). Yet government cost numbers have continued to rise at alarming levels, still in double digits. One wonders, if government is the culprit, how is more government going to fix it? Perhaps his plan is to adopt the practices that businesses have adopted, but how likely is that when the Congress has among the richest healthcare plans extant, and believes that Medicare represents a baseline coverage? What I believe I heard is that, using the threat of unaffordable health care costs that the government has created, he will launch a massive further intrusion into that arena, so that, even if it begins with a public-private partnership, will inevitably become socialized medicine. His language? Again, he speaks of "free medical coverage", "protecting the uninsured" and "full access to medical care" to say that we, the taxpayers, will cover the costs, and government will increasingly involve itself in both pricing and treatment decisions.

Finally, he laid out a vision, but no details, for fixing our educational system. Again, I agree it needs to be fixed. But I do not agree that federal bureaucrats will ever be able to fix it. I believe that history is on my side. Recent legislation has already expanded the access to higher education, even though it is fair to say that a college degree is wasted on many who will access that money. America doesn't need another few million folks in political science, criminal justice, sociology, or the other "soft subjects", but needs substantially more math and hard science majors who will eventually end up as scientists, engineers, IT designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. If most of our current teachers are in the soft subjects, and have no capacity to teach anything but whiffenpoof, how are these kids going to enter colleges, technical schools and trade schools to learn the required subjects and disciplines to find the work we will need for the next decades? Yes, nice, inspiring words, but what is it masking? Less choice for American parents, more federal programs and bureaucracy, and much more on the taxpayer's tab.

Statists and socialists tell great stories about individual charity and initiative, but then they move charity and initiative to the government, and create corresponding obligations on those who produce in our society, so that whatever good is done, the government may take the credit. They talk a lot about "ideals and principles" for government transparency, individual liberties, freedoms and democracy, but then they resort to partisnaship, opaque backroom deals and bullying, and create government oversight that ends up inhibiting liberty and the free exercise of ideas, in the name of the collective good. That is how they rise to power, that is how we are all taken in, and that is how we end up with an overly powerful, super-sized central government instead of the smaller, smarter republican government envisioned by the Founders. Where is Obama in this? His first TV drama doesn't give me much hope.