Everyone but the blind and reckless agrees that the United States faces a dire financial crisis. But only one of the two major political parties is offering a plan that has a reasonable chance of averting this crisis and restoring the nation to financial health.
Obama's ever-changing proposals, allegedly designed to tackle the problem, simply could not work. One of the following must be true: He doesn't agree that the crisis is grave, doesn't understand that his policies can't work, doesn't have the same vision about America as most of us, or doesn't intend for his policies to work. Some people believe he's intentionally damaging America, because they believe he's too smart not to know that we face a crisis and that his policies can't work.
I don't pretend to comprehend the inner child of his past that apparently impels him to pursue this current path of destruction. My educated guess is that his leftist ideology blinds him to the inefficacy of failed liberal prescriptions but also that this same ideology tells him that if things don't get appreciably better, then that's OK, too, because America's had more than its fair share of prosperity anyway.
Think about it. Through every fiber of his being runs a sense of injustice at what he perceives to be a grossly inequitable distribution of income in America. He largely blames these inequities on capitalism. Please don't call me an extremist for saying that, either; I hear it in almost everything he says and see it in what he does.
I correspond with liberals like Obama every day, whose angst reflexively attaches to those who have succeeded under our system: villainous corporations, oil companies, fat cat bankers and wealthy individuals. It's not just that capitalism is inherently flawed for fostering a climate that guarantees such disparities in prosperity but also that those who have exploited these flaws are evil.
As the leftists' sense of fairness and "economic justice" tells them that people's incomes in this country should be more equitably distributed, it likewise tells them that the wealth of the world's nations should be more equitably distributed. Call it "balance," the administration's most recent euphemism of choice.
I only indulge in this brief inquiry into Obama's mindset because it enables us to see that he doesn't view the nation's financial problems with the same degree of urgency as most of us do. To him, the stakes don't seem quite so high, because if we fail, the worst that could happen is that we get our comeuppance and/or become a European socialist state — and what's so bad about that?
Obama's ideology tethers him to the idea that the central government should be the primary engine of economic growth and the super-arbiter of the winners and losers in our economy. He cannot countenance the possibility that Keynesian stimulus spending does not appreciably stimulate and probably does just the opposite; never mind that we can't afford it. He can't process that we cannot tax ourselves into prosperity or out of debt. He is viscerally unwilling to restructure the programs that have us committed to $88 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And he either cannot comprehend or is morally hardened to the evil and ineffectiveness involved in the government's making command-control decisions rather than free people through the invisible hand of the market, especially in health care. He cannot understand or is rebellious against the truth that capitalism is morally superior to and produces greater prosperity across the board than any other economic system, bar none.
Paul Ryan's plan is light-years from being radical, but it is eminently realistic and promising. He proposes phasing in his Medicare reforms so as to keep the government's faith with those who've already reached retirement age and converting it into supplemental government aid while introducing market forces; restructuring Medicaid as block grants to the states; and establishing a deferred trigger for Social Security reform. Not being a slave to class warfare thinking or a defiant scoffer of the 10th commandment, he has proposed, along with Obama's deficit commission, tax cuts that would stimulate economic growth, which is indispensable to reversing our debt picture.
Obama, captured in his maximum-security class warfare prison mindset, has proposed even higher taxes on the already overburdened producers, which would further smother the economy and prevent economic recovery, growth and abatement of the national debt. His only real remedy for Medicare is to empower the Independent Payment Advisory Board to ration health care according to its one-size-fits-all lunacy. This might artificially control some costs, but not without destroying the quality of health care and defeating Obama's stated purpose of Obamacare: to make health care vastly more accessible.
There can be no workable compromise with Obama because his plan could not work to retire the debt and avert our national crisis. The only solution is to retire him.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
