Tomorrow

It pretty obvious that President Obama can’t campaign on his dismal economic record, can’t brag about his jobs record, can’t tout healthcare legislation that is disliked by 60 percent of the public, and is hard-pressed to note a single foreign policy success, other than the killing of a number of terrorist leaders, most notably, Osama bin Laden. So he and his band of political advisors have decided that class warfare is a winning political strategy.

His recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas exemplifies his divisive rhetoric. He declared, “This isn’t about class warfare.” And then proceeded to suggest that income inequality is somehow to blame for the current state of the economy. He never quite explains how, except to condemn the now infamous ‘one percent’ for not paying their “fair share.” He correctly laments the plight of the middle class, but his only solution to their plight is to tax the rich for “fairness” and to extend payroll taxes, thus reducing social security revenues (for the most part, that’s what payroll taxes are) and therefore leading to even greater instability of this enormous entitlement. His only recommendation to “create” jobs is for big government to do it via his jobs bill, even though an earlier $800 billion stimulus was a failure by any objective measure.

When the President said that he wasn’t using class warfare as a tactic, it reminded me of a well-worn aphorism—Whenever you hear someone say, “It’s not about the money,” it’s almost always about the money. Whenever you hear a politician say, “This isn’t about class warfare,” that’s exactly what it’s about.

But the President persists to the cheers of his Left-leaning supporters. He fervently believes that bigger government, more centralization, and demonization of a small, very successful segment of our society will cause the economy to improve. His euphemism for more and more government spending is “investment,” as if that somehow changes the debit on our national balance sheet.

Mark Steyn comments on all of this when he writes:

The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class … and they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion …

When Corzine took over the two-and-a-quarter-century-old firm, he moved it big-time into sovereign debt — because you can’t lose with sovereign debt, right? Because a nation, even one that is in any objective sense bankrupt as Mediterranean Europe basically is, is not bankrupt in the sense that a homeowner or small business is: Corzine figured, reasonably enough, that no matter the balance sheets of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the rest, they’d somehow be propped up unto the end of time. As their credit ratings hit the express elevator to Sub-Basement Level Four, Corzine was taken down with them. The smart guy made a bet on government and lost. That’s where the rest of us are headed: The “you’re not on your own” societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.

Barack Obama and those who support him believe that “tomorrow” will never come. Those of us who are a bit more responsible look around and see “tomorrow” arriving throughout Western Europe—a union of countries that has been only too happy to make sure their citizens were the wards of big government.

If we maintain our current trajectory, “tomorrow” will arrive for us as well. And when it dawns, it will be a dark and stormy day indeed.