{"id":6265,"date":"2010-11-09T13:08:57","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T17:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=6265"},"modified":"2010-11-09T13:09:06","modified_gmt":"2010-11-09T17:09:06","slug":"the-real-disconnect-between-obama-and-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/11\/09\/the-real-disconnect-between-obama-and-the-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"The real disconnect between Obama and the economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> points out the way in which Barack Obama’s worldview does not reflect economic reality:<\/p>\n

\n

[. . .] what troubles me is that the president seems unaware of this old divide — that what allowed the pre-presidential Obamas, respectively, to make quite a lot of money as a legislator, author, professor, lawyer, or hospital representative was a vibrant private sector that paid taxes on profits that fueled public spending and employment or made possible an affluent literary and legal world. All that was contingent upon the assurance that an individual would have a good chance of making a profit and keeping it in exchange for incurring the risk of hiring employees and buying new equipment.<\/p>\n

Instead, Obama seems to think that making money is a casual enterprise, not nearly so difficult as community organizing, and without the intellectual rigor of academia — as if profits leap out of the head of Zeus. I say that not casually or slanderously, but based on the profile of his cabinet appointments, his and his wife\u2019s various speeches relating Barack Obama\u2019s own decision to shun the supposed easy money of corporate America for more noble community service in Chicago, and a series of troubling ad hoc, off-the-cuff revealing statements like the following:<\/p>\n

As a state legislator Barack Obama lamented the civil rights movement\u2019s reliance on the court system to ensure equality-of-result social justice rather than working through legislatures, which were the \u201cactual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.\u201d To Joe Wurzelbacher, he breezily scoffed that \u201cmy attitude is that if the economy\u2019s good for folks from the bottom up, it\u2019s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it\u2019s good for everybody.\u201d When Charlie Gibson pressed presidential candidate Obama on his desire to hike capital gains taxes when historically such policies have decreased aggregate federal revenue, a startled Obama insisted that the punitive notion, not the money, was the real issue: \u201cWell, Charlie, what I\u2019ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.\u201d And as President Obama, again in an off-handed matter, he suggested that the state might have an interest on what individuals make: \u201cI mean, I do think at a certain point you\u2019ve made enough money.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, for most of his life Barack Obama has done quite well without understanding how and why American capital is created, and has enjoyed the lifestyle of the elite in the concrete as much as in the abstract he has questioned its foundations. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson points out the way in which Barack Obama’s worldview does not reflect economic reality: [. . .] what troubles me is that the president seems unaware of this old divide — that what allowed the pre-presidential Obamas, respectively, to make quite a lot of money as a legislator, author, professor, lawyer, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,53,13],"tags":[158,86],"class_list":["post-6265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-criticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1D3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6265"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6268,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions\/6268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}