President Obama didn’t offer a budget plan yesterday. The White House hasn’t released anything beyond a set of talking points.
But that’s not terribly surprising since his speech was really the opening salvo of his 2012 reelection fight. And it’s clear that a central theme of his campaign will be class warfare.
But if we translate his campaign-style demagoguery into the overall budget framework, we get something like this fiscal continuum. Obama, for all intents and purposes, has taken the moderately left-wing proposal crafted by his Fiscal Commission and moved it significantly in the wrong direction by adding class-warfare tax policy. As such, he is close to the left end of the line, which represents “Statism.”
The Ryan plan, by contrast, is the moderately right-wing mirror image of the Fiscal Commission. But rather than cementing in place bigger government, as proposed by Simpson and Bowles, Ryan’s budget slowly shrinks the fiscal burden of government. As such, it is on the “Liberty” side of the continuum.
America’s Founding Fathers had the right idea, of course, They envisioned a very limited central government, and for much of our nation’s history, the federal budget consumed about 3 percent of GDP. Unfortunately, the Hoover-Roosevelt policies began the process of moving America in the wrong direction, and federal spending now consumes nearly one-fourth of America’s economic output.
But enough history. Let’s revisit Obama’s speech and the accompanying talking points. In addition to the class warfare (more on that below), we also see an explicit call to reduce the growth of Medicare spending by “strengthening the Independent Payment Advisory Board.”
In other words, Obama wants to use his control of the purse strings to give bureaucrats more ability to decide what kind of care seniors can receive. It’s politically incorrect to call this type of entity a “death panel,” so I’ll simply contrast Obama’s top-down bureaucratic approach with the Ryan plan, which is based on giving vouchers to future seniors so they can pick the health plans that best fit their needs (people over 55 would be stuck with the current system). And since this is very similar to the system used to provide health care for Members of Congress and their staff, you know it must work reasonably well.
Let’s briefly return to the tax side of the fiscal equation. I’ll have more to say about this in a separate post giving a behind-the-scenes look at what Democrats really hope to achieve in the area of tax policy, but I want to offer a basic explanation of why the soak-the-rich approach is doomed to fail. There are five reasons in this video to reject class warfare, including a very important warning that high tax rates on the rich almost always are a tactical move to facilitate higher taxes for the rest of us.
