Obama’s deceptive and cynical proposals
TOM BURGUM
Contributing Columnist
burgum@lbknews.com
The 2013 budget is now revealed to us. It is a masterpiece of deceptive budgeting and cynical politics. Liberals can relax; the spending goes on. Future generations look out; we are still using your credit card.
Despite all the hoopla, the president’s budget is a non-starter. There is even a real question whether Harry Reid will even bring it to the floor for a vote. He did float Obama’s 2011 effort and it was defeated 97-0. Talk about real bipartisanship. Still, his new budget is worth looking at even as a campaign document.
Don’t let all the competing numbers fool you. The essential fact is: In the next 10 years Mr. Obama’s austerity proposals will increase spending every year. Spending will increase from $3.7 trillion in FY 2012 to $5.8 trillion in FY 2022. It will likely increase far more than that because even the proposed cuts in the budget are deceptive.
Mr. Obama’s proposal to cut $597 billion in health care costs simply won’t happen. The cuts come from Medicare and Medicaid but he knows, and we know, that no Congress is going to back their proposals. Even AARP might drop its sycophantic support for the president’s proposals if Medicare is threatened. AARP, the supposed guardians of health care for the aged, swallowed hard when accepting a $500 billion hit to Medicare in Obamacare and another $300 billion might be several billions too far. Even this effort would only save $600 billion over 10 years. The awful reality is that Medicare and Medicaid will spend $11.4 trillion over that period.
James Pethokoukis, according to Jim Geraghty in NRO’s “Morning Jolt,” summed up the budget pretty well. “Here’s pretty much all you need to know about Obamanomics: In 2011, the Obama White House suggested raising the top dividend tax rate to 20 percent from 15 percent. Keeping the dividend rate at a relatively low level, the White House said, ‘reduces the tax bias against equity investment and promotes a more efficient allocation of capital.’ Yet in his brand-new, 2013 budget, Obama calls for taxing dividends as ordinary income, essentially raising the top rate all the way to 39.6 percent and when you tack on the 3.8 percentage point Obamacare surtax — and an additional 1.2 percentage point itemized deduction phase-out for high-end taxpayers — the rate raises to 44.6 percent.
“So apparently Obama is now in favor of greater bias against equity investment (and in favor of debt) and promoting less efficient allocation of capital. And this helps create an economy ‘built to last’ in some way?”
No it doesn’t, that is if you agree with the 2011 version of Obama economics.
On a wholly different subject, Mr. Obama now stands as “the only supreme head on earth of the Church.” Or, as Mark Steyn wrote in his inimitable fashion, “The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass.”
Give Mr. Obama credit, he didn’t need the modern equivalent of the 1534 Act of Supremacy that elevated Henry VIII from horney sovereign to head of the Church of England and anointed him “the only supreme head on earth of the Church.” No, Mr. Obama simply used one of the 1,039 grants of discretion in Obamacare that allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to do if it has even a tangential relationship to health care.
Catherine Sebelius, in her role as Cardinal of Health and Human Services, decreed that all employers provide co-pay free coverage of contraception, sterilization and day-after pills. Mr. Obama graciously exempted the actual houses of worship so there won’t be condom-dispensing machines on the altar. But, of course, the mission of the Catholic Church, and many others, extends beyond the sanctuary to that of ministering to the sick and the poor. It is even difficult to imagine the hole that would be left in the safety net if Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals were forced to cease operation. As important, in such an eventuality, the Catholic Church itself would be greatly diminished.
Mr. Obama proposed to modify the rule as criticism mounted from Catholic Bishops, religious colleges and universities, Jewish, Evangelical and Lutheran leaders, and even some noted liberal leaders. What he proposed is not in the least bit important or relevant. He spoke at noon last Friday and while he talked of compromise, accommodation or whatever he called it, the following federal regulation went into effect: “Accordingly, the amendment to the interim final rule with comment period amending 45 CFR 147.130(a)(1)(iv) which was published in the Federal Register at 76 FR 46621046626 on August 3, 2011, is adopted as a final rule without change.” [Emphasis added.] What this means is, the Obama administration Friday afternoon put into federal law the very regulation they claimed to be amending without changing so much as a comma. This has to set a record in the domain of the cynical and the deceptive.
Whatever Mr. Obama’s reason for overruling two centuries of Catholic doctrine, I can’t believe it is out of real concern for women’s ability to avail themselves of contraception. Planned Parenthood passes out IUDs in buckets and morning-after pills like aspirin to those women who can’t afford them, and to many who can. Well they can afford to do so. The government shovels Planned Parenthood half-a-billion dollars every year and they must make at least another half-a-billion dollars shaking down groups like the Komen Foundation. Colleges hand out free condoms, and morning-after pills may soon be available in campus vending machines.
Maybe the purpose of all this is to satisfy the Obama administration’s desire for a kind of perverse national order where one-size-fits-all and conformity is the order of the day. If he succeeds in establishing a national one-size-fits-all, Mark Steyn predicted, “On the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.”
