Obamanomics

Peter Ferrara has done America a great service by writing his brilliant piece, The Green Pied Piper from Chicago.  This is the definitive Obamanomics critique to date.  Here are a few jewels I've plucked from the article...

For the record, President Obama's budget projected a deficit of $1.6 trillion for this year, after a deficit of $1.4 trillion last year, while the deficit in Bush's last year totaled $459 billion. If President Obama didn't want his soaring, record shattering deficits, he should not have increased federal spending by 25%, and federal welfare spending by one-third, in just his first two years in office.

The Republicans Never Spent Like This

The last budget adopted by a Republican-controlled Congress provided for a deficit of $161 billion in fiscal 2007. President Obama's budget for this year provided for a deficit ten times as large at $1.6 trillion. That is why Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) accurately told Obama earlier this year, "The annual deficits under the Republicans became the monthly deficits under the Democrats."

Deregulation is not to Blame

Overregulation contributed to the crisis by bludgeoning banking institutions into making bad mortgage loans, granting monopoly powers to rating agencies that labeled ultimately toxic subprime mortgage securities as AAA investments, and then forcing financial institutions to write the value of those securities down to almost nothing under "mark to market" regulations.

I love this "green" zinger...

But the economics of President Obama's prosperity through "clean" energy plan is even more transparently nuts than the science. [...]  First, the government provides enormous subsidies, just more bailouts actually, for businesses to pursue inherently unreliable and unworkable "alternative" energy sources such as wind and solar, the energy that powered the Roman Empire.

All Energy Subsidies are not Created Equal

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that government energy subsidies amount to $0.25 per megawatt for oil and gas, $0.44 per megawatt for coal, $1.59 for nuclear, $23.37 for wind and $24.34 for solar. (Oil is actually not subsidized at all, but disfavored by punitive taxes.) And that was before President Obama's "investments" adding up to an additional $80 billion per year in federal "alternative energy" subsidies.

Ferrara closes by observing how President Obama disparages the pro-liberty idea of an "Ownership Society," and instead embraces government dependency for all.

We should not be surprised that a red diaper baby disparages ownership and property rights, a view central to socialist philosophy all the way back to Marx.

Weekend Wrap-Up

Steve Forbes cuts to the heart of the statism of Obama and the Pelosicrats
I have done it myself, but I don't think calling people fascists helps the cause of freedom.  Steve Forbes gives us a model of how to argue against the liberty grab that is going on:

One hesitates to bring up the economics of Benito Mussolini and his ilk because fascism means ugly nationalism and racism, as well as mass murder and aggressive war. So let's label the economic part of that ideology as neosocialist, corporatist, statist or--to be sophisticated and use a French word--dirigiste.

Under the corporatist state, private companies exist but take their direction from government. Competition is seen as wasteful and destructive and therefore must be "managed." There is a basic hostility toward small businesses precisely because there are so many of them, making them harder to regulate and more apt to do things without government permission.

Statism certainly creates a facade of stability...

Next Up T.R. Fehrenbach explains how business is undermined by greedy politicians:

The majority of Americans work and therefore eat and pay taxes because they are involved in some sort of surplus-producing private business, from industry to sales to finance to science and agriculture. Enterprises such as charities, education, and government — non-profits in general — are utterly dependent on profit-making business for funding. You'd think people would grasp this when things get rough.

We are dependent on business, not government, to create wealth

There are many reasons for this. Business is always being undermined by the demons inherent in democracy: greedy politicians and populist programs that gut it. By and large, educators and clergy, who create no wealth, put other callings first.

Bright people are urged not to go into business and make money but to serve their fellow man. The problem is, nobody can serve anybody without the wherewithal. Many people who live off donations and taxes affect to despise the source, much in the manner that clean-handed lords despised their grubbing serfs.

Required Reading:  George Will's Cato Institute Speech
It is too brilliant to excerpt here.  Go read the whole thing

Peter Ferrara offers a quick economic history of the 20th Century.  
He explains how supply-side, pro-growth policies worked not Just for Reagan, but for Kennedy and Harding as well.  Read it, understand it, bookmark it.  This is essential information for those of us who routinely argue with delusional liberals who claim Reagan wrecked the economy.