The Obama presidency: Here comes socialism!

POSTED BY: CrevanReaver
UPDATED: Thursday, January 22, 2009 04:10
VIEWED: 1129
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CREVANREAVER

Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:26 AM

By Dick Morris

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2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)

But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.

Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.

But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.

Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And

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KWICKO

Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:40 AM

I'm still trying to figure out which part of the laissez-faire America Bush's bailouts fit into.

Sorry, but once I hit that part, I was laughing too hard to finish the article.

Mike

"It is complete now; the hands of time are neatly tied."

DREAMTROVE

Thursday, January 22, 2009 4:10 AM

Quote:

I'm still trying to figure out which part of the laissez-faire America Bush's bailouts fit into.

I'm sorry, as the board's major foe of socialism, I also cracked up.

Mike, screw the bailouts for a moment. Laissez-faire means hands-off. I think that went out the window with the Patriot Act.

Here's an interesting story I read years ago that made me a Ron Paul man. He was talking about the budget. In 2001, while working on the 2002 budget, Bush and Cheney told the committee to take a budget draft they had made, and work on it, and come back to them with any problems or suggestions. Which they did. Paul and someone else, a democrat I think, went and submitted their changes to the administration.

They were told that this would be dealt with, and a new budget was written, containing none of the modifications suggested, and so Paul went back to the White House with a detailed explanation of why the budget was unworkable, how it would lead to a horrid deficit, and numerous options on ways to either reduce spending or raise revenue. He said at the end of that meeting the administration had made it very clear that there were never to be any changes to any of their policies or legislation, only the appearance of a legislative process.

Paul suspected at that moment that this was not a republic, but a dictatorship. He said those fears were realized when he was handed the USA PATRIOT Act. This document was clearly crafted to obfuscate its real aim, and when unravelled, only he and Democrat Russ Feingold were able to discern that aim: To systematically dismantle the fundamentals of the Constitution.

So, I feel confident that "Still Congressman Paul" will be sure to attack the President's plan if he feels in any way that it is traitorous to American values and freedoms, just as he was willing to strike at his fellow Texas Republican. He said he had no built in bias against Bush, he was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, all he had to do was show some willingness to listen reason, or anyone, and show some respect for the American people.

Now I'm sure he'll give that benefit of the doubt to the President, but if Obama decides to institute socialism, I'm sure we'll be hearing about it from Paul, and other people we've already learned to trust.