(Centennial Fellow) President Barack Obama, who has been working like the devil to wipe out jobs in America, finally said he was going to give us less government to help more, although he soon enough was pledging more government to help less. Union members cheered him while one of their bosses went a step further.
“President Obama, this is your army,” Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa said in introducing the commander in chief at a Detroit rally on Labor Day. After asserting the Tea Party was waging a war on workers, he yelled, “We are ready to march. Let’s take those sons of guns out and give America back to an America where we belong.”
He was not quoted as saying “guns,” of course, and neither, in their more sober moments, have unions been saying how much they love all the president has been doing for them. Unions representing miners, electrical workers, mechanists and more were reported in one recent compilation as agonizing over various EPA regulations and other interventions that will cost them not just a few jobs, but tens of thousands. Have mercy, sir, they have pleaded.
And suddenly, after news stories that unbelievable misery had just become worse, there Obama was, giving us at long last a more angelic, less leftist, reasonable persona, announcing he would stop his EPA’s smog assault sure to cost the economy billions in employment opportunities. Environmentalists wailed that unconscionable pain and suffering would result. That’s less likely than a drought–caused flood. The ozone in the smog is too itsy bitty to hurt, and convincing evidence proving otherwise is zero.
But in Detroit, Obama transmogrified into Mr. Hyde again, talking about spending more to create more jobs with more infrastructure projects. You remember all the good that did us the last time—increasing debt and its threat while shovels weren’t ready? Does he really want to repeat policies diminishing America?
That’s exactly what those policies have been doing, and if you think differently consider these few items taken from a longer list of Obama’s failures by Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center: losing 2.2 million jobs; a 9.1 percent unemployment rate up from 7.7 percent; three years of trillion dollar deficits in a country that never had one before; a two–and–a–half year $4 trillion debt increase that is greater than what George W. Bush was able to give us in eight years—and a record increase in poverty. This is what he meant by hope and change?
None of this came easily. It first off required disbelieving the libertarian-preached truth that virtually all that borrowed money was less likely to help the economy than if left to free market decisions. It required juvenile anti–corporate cursing, negligent and worse energy policies, tax threats and growling at states trying to tame public union extravagance. It required the future–threatening encumbrance of already malfunctioning Obamacare, a National Labor Relations Board mistaking the United States for the expired Soviet Union and a vast, near despotic array of EPA and other regulations that were death to both existing jobs and entrepreneurial ambition to no discernible avail.
This president, who is forever playing blame games while taking reckless, un-presidential pot shots at the opposition, has had opportunities for compromise, maybe the best being a plan from leaders of his own debt commission on both revenue–raising tax reforms and serious spending limits. But no, that would keep in place the old America he promised he would fundamentally transform. He kept thinking of big time redistribution, colossal projects, a country of, by and for the state, all those joys.
Give it up and get real, Mr. President. You are setting the middle class back like it has only once has been set back before, and demolishing the working class. Get back on the deregulation track, quit the spending, start compromising, forget bold new adventures in Europeanizing us and offer up some competence and leadership.
