If one pays attention then he can get past the rhetorical flourishes. Yes, I can…do what? Change that I can believe in…but in which direction? Hope for the future…that we can survive the experience or recover from the disaster? The embraceable slogans take the foreground in the battle, but what about the details? As we all should recall the devil is rumored to lurk there.
I read two newspapers each day. One, the Dallas Morning News, because it is my local/regional/state source of current events information. I also confess to following a couple of sports and reading the comics and working the New York Times crossword puzzle about five out of six days a week. The bias and superficiality of their coverage gags me, but I read it. The other is the Wall Street Journal. I read it for national and world news along with objective editorial and opinions. I skip the second and third sections because I’m not heavily invested and corporate shake-ups seldom impact me. The back section with food, wine, travel, arts and literature coverage is usually interesting.
Most Americans don’t read a newspaper at all. If they do, it might be McNews, otherwise labeled USA Today. It’s a comic-book of news nuggets with lots of color, short sentences, simple language and no analysis longer than 150 words. The result is a population with few analytical skills and ripe to be plucked by a silver-tongued politician who spins gold from straw and doesn’t need to pronounce Rumpelstiltskin, even with a teleprompter.
Yet, we find this clearly written opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal which convinces me exactly who I should vote for and why. It also illustrates why this increasingly is being manipulated to make it less likely that my team will win in the future.
The Wages of Ignorance
Sen. Obama has been explicit and detailed about what he is going to do to us. Most have ignored it, throwing their support in the bucket of hope and change. Take a look at some of these proposals:
Mr. Obama claims to offer a tax cut to moderate-income families, but a significant portion of Mr. Obama's tax plan is a welfare giveaway costing more than $648 billion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center. How so? He would authorize a hodgepodge of refundable tax credits covering everything from education, mortgage payments, child care and other items for people who do not pay income taxes now. About 38% of U.S. households pay no income tax today. Under a President Obama (whose policies would shave 15.3 million households off the tax rolls) that share would grow to nearly half of all American households.
Did you get that? He will set it up so that half of America gets a free ride! Hard to lose an election in which half the people are already promised everything for nothing. How about this blatant denial of supply/demand:
Mr. Obama's energy policy is to drill less, consume less, tax more, and spend more. With barely a nod to nuclear energy -- the only meaningfully large, carbon-free source of domestic energy -- he is promising a massive increase in domestic, noncarbon-based energy from sources that produce only a fraction of our energy now. He has also proposed massive tax increases on U.S. oil and gas companies while continuing to cut off vast swaths of U.S. territory to drilling.
Gotta like that. No nukes, no domestic oil/gas, massive taxes on the suppliers and we’ll all have energy for a booming economy. This makes the historic loaves and fishes trick a simple parlor sleight-of-hand. Feeling a bit under the weather, the Messiah’s got a proposal:
Mr. Obama's health-care proposal is not quite HillaryCare, but it comes close. A national health insurance, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, would be offered to the currently uninsured. Mr. Obama's instincts on health care are always to move more people onto rolls of government-paid and government-mandated insurance, while depriving the marketplace the oxygen it needs for greater innovation, life-saving cures, and efficiency.
The simple analogy is that we just extend MediCare to all of our citizens. Missed in that rationale is the fact that MediCare works because everyone who works contributes to pay for health care for those who are over 65. If everyone who works also gets the same benefit, the only possible way to pay for it is if the rates soar exponentially. Or, the doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are all nationalized and the relationship between value of labor and compensation is abandoned. Not a good choice in my mind.
The conclusion of the WSJ piece is that most Americans are too smart to buy this legerdemain. I’d like to believe that, but most Americans don’t read the WSJ so they won’t know how smart they are supposed to be. The Americans I encounter don’t seem to be the same ones that frequent the WSJ writer’s haunts. I hope I’m wrong.
1 comment:
Yes and no, Ras.
Obama certainly has his shortcomings, and many of them are pointed out in this article. However, the fact remains that the policies of the current administration (who the editorial author's, Hubbard and Neusner, are members of) are pretty sad as well, and for closely parallel reasons. That is, Obama's "tax and spend" solution isn't the answer, but neiteher is the "borrow and spend" policy of the current administration, who, agian, Hubbard and Neusner are members of. Just as we need to send Obama back to the Senate (or back to Illinois) we need to send these people packing as well.
McCain should have been the Republican candidate back in 2000, (an academic question now, of course). All we can do is hope Palin can keep the powder dry until she gets into power.... Meantime, maybe McCane can clean up some of the mess (debt, non-bid war contracts, Saudi influence, Wall Street, City of London, etc).
As for health care, allow me to point out that Hubbard and Neusner have nothing to say about the corporate HMO racket.... Yes, Obama's plan is a monster, but Wall Street's HMO system is worse in that it is a PROVEN travesty. Obama's remains merely within the realm of the theoretical, where, let us hope, it will stay.
I agree that the American people are leary about Obama, but rather than an analysis of his economics, I bet it's the smell of a rat they're responding to.
--Big C
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