I was so busy making plans to celebrate Scott Brown’s victory over what’s-her-name — you know the lady who likes to jail innocent people — in the Massachusetts Senatorial race next Tuesday that I neglected to catch news of President Obama’s latest plan to tax success. It’s a doozy.
You have to hand it to Team Obama. They do have a sense of humor. Just as Obama called his preposterous budget “A New Era of Responsibility” (since when did we start giving titles to budgets? This one ought to have been called “Gone with the Wind”), so he calls this plan to impose a new tax on the nation’s 50 or so largest financial institutions “a financial crisis responsibility fee.” George Orwell, where are you?
“We want our money back,” the President of the formerly free world said, “and we’re going to get it back.”
Golly gee. Tough talk, what? None of that “monitoring the situation” or “isolated extremists” here. No siree, when it comes to putting it to Wall-Street fat cats Barack Hussein Obama gets down to business.
The money in question, of course, is the $700 billion appropriated by President Bush to help out major financial institutions that were teetering on the brink of collapse in the fall of 2008. It wasn’t long, however, before big gobs of that dough were shoveled to other institutions — Government Motors, for example (formerly known as General Motors).
As for getting his money back, he pretty much has — from the banks, that is. Many refused assistance in the first place. Most who took it have paid the dough back. Doesn’t matter. Obama still wants to tax ‘em to put a dent in what he calls “massive profits and obscene bonuses.”
What about the car companies that lined their pockets with the people’s pelf? Have they paid the government — i.e., you and me — back? No. What is the president, who is Oh-so-concerned-about-the-American-taxpayer, what’s he going to do about that $66 billion? How do you spell “United Auto Workers”?
The president’s plan is bad from just about every point of view. For one thing, as Nicole Gelinas points out in a characteristically percipient column in The New York Post today, the tax won’t even have the chastening effect on banking practices that the president claims to be interested in. ”All imposing this fee will do,” Gelinas observes, “is hammer home the idea in bondholders’ minds that the firms — reportedly the nation’s top 20 financial companies — are too big to fail, that the government will bail them out again the next time they screw up.”
Exactly right.
But I’d like to come back to those “massive profits and obscene bonuses.” I first heard about Obama’s latest plan to raise taxes from a friend over lunch. He made the interesting observation that penalizing a company for “massive,” i.e., large profits was like penalizing someone for “massive,”i.e., robust health. Generally, large profits are an outward sign that a company is doing well, just as physical robustness is an outward sign that all is well in the personal health department. Obama is constitutionally an egalitarian. Like the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, his position is “prizes for everyone.“ He looks at excellence of every kind with suspicion, because excellence is by definition discriminatory. If Sally excels in relation to John, Dot, and Timothy, that means that Sally does better. Is that fair? And if John Doe, who works for Acme Bank and Finance, has a great year and is rewarded with a fat bonus, that means he does better than Jack, George, and Aloysius, whose bottom lines were not so cheery this year.
Capitalism is all about competition. When there are competitions, there are winners and losers. The great thing about capitalism is that it is such an efficient engine for the production of wealth that everyone benefits — though some, of course, benefit more than others. The alternative, as we know “par expériences nombreuses et funestes” universal immiseration. You might have thought that the President of the United States would have taken that elementary economic fact on board. Think again.
Hold on there pardner, “the government — i.e., you and me”? You and me aint the government, despite the fact that most collectivist dictators like confuse the issue (i.e. the chinese government characterizing any criticism of the chinese government’s oppression of the chinese people as a criticism of the chinese people.) When Barry gets that money “back” from the banks, you think he’s gonna forward it on to you and me? Nosir, the government used to work for you and me, but you and me it is not.
Nice false dichotomy at the the end. The two options are not capitalism and universal immiseration. Feudal states have winners, too, as did the U.S.S.R. The fact that some will come out ahead of others is undeniable. In fact, it’s clearly desirable, which is what your petty column is banking on. The problem isn’t whether some should get more, but WHO gets more, and HOW MUCH more they get. This translates at present to the question of whether the people who were responsible for the massive leveraging of mortgage debt, and therefor for the immensity of the current recession, should be rewarded twice for their reckless greed. Home owners are being hit hard, workers are being hit hard, even small banks are being hit hard, but the big investment banks that turned the bubble into a cancer are giving out the biggest bonuses ever.
As for Obama’s worship of equality, Obama himself seems like a sterling example of the rewards of human excellence in a relatively egalitarian system. You may not like Obama’s intelligence, or his eloquence, and you may criticize his numerous faults, but all of his speeches have advocated what was once the only valuable trait of modern American conservatism–that excellence is worth pursuing. If you hadn’t been plugging your ears and shouting NHYAAH-NHYAAH-NHYAAH, you would have known that even his speech to students on the first day of school encouraged personal responsibility and ambition.
Perhaps the conservatives have forgotten what it’s like to actually BE excellent, rather than just talk about how everyone else is not living up to their ideas of excellence. It’s time to stop complaining, start the painful process of reflecting honestly on the massive failures of the Bush administration. Unless you can admit where you were wrong, it’s going to be hard to improve. And if you don’t improve, you’ll stay a bunch of mediocre stooges forever, even if you can return to power. That’s not excellence. But then, I suppose that if you haven’t faced your ignorance after the recent, massive failure of your ideology, nothing that could ever happen will show you wrong. That’s some funny virtue.
“George Orwell, where are you?”
Ah, yes, Orwell, the self-proclaimed socialist, would certainly applaud your defense of these financial institutions.
as far as i am aware, every society that has ever existed has had redistributive mechanisms of one sort or another.
everything has its limits, including the gains from renting money from the Fed at near-zero interest, and then renting it back to the Fed for a couple of hundred basis points of net profit.
Nice false dichotomy yourself, Dan. Of course every system has winners and losers. The question is whether the winners and losers deserve what they get. Capitalism, although nasty and vicious, is the best system ever found for spreading wealth around.
I just love liberals blaming everything on the Bush years. He was a good wartime president but economically he governed like a spendthrift liberal. But blaming Bush is your panacea. I myself blame him for the Black Death.
Obama is a sterling example of the rewards of human excellence? How would you know? He most likely didn’t write his books; he has no legal publishing record; he served as a US Senator for fewer than 200 days; he has the slimmest resume of any president in history. His excellence is only in running a campaign and posing for the camera. He’s a sonorous nullity.
I freely admit that the Republicans in Congress are mediocre–very mediocre. But at least they’re not a bunch of power-mad statists posturing as egalitarians as they steal money to pay off political cronies, which is precisely the point of the stimulus bill.
And as far as the banks who created the mortgage mess. I have no love for them but bear in mind that ACORN, whom Barry trained in Chicago, hired by Madeline Talbot, was largely responsible for forcing lenders to make those bad loans, and they were aided and abetted by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
If you’re looking to point a finger, that finger largely should be pointed at liberal Democrats.
Hey Daustins,
(1) Where’s my false dichotomy?
(2) Whether capitalism, strictly speaking, is the best system ever found for spreading wealth around is subject to legitimate debate, as I’m sure you know.
(3) I didn’t blame Bush, I said that his policies failed massively. This is to say that the country became worse in nearly every way during his presidency. But your straw man has some relevance. Bush was a tolerable war time president, but the war he concocted is significantly responsible for our current debt and our significant loss of leadership over the hearts and minds of the world. And regardless of whether the democrats are PARTLY responsible for the collapse (encouraging bad lending was bad, but it’s the leveraging of the investment banks that made this more than a backache), it nevertheless appears that deregulation doesn’t work in the real world as well as it does in the ideal one.
(4) Yes, Obama has a thin record. Bush Jr. had a positively bad record. Bush Sr. had a good record. That doesn’t make Obama good, but his’s books, schooling, ambition, 3 campaigns (he was a state rep. first, remember), and focused intelligence in interview and debate should certainly count for something. The only serious argument that he didn’t write the books attributed to him (which seems like an intentionally slanderous claim, investigated with that conclusion in mind), is that his writings and his speeches have different styles. Gee, who’d have ever thought? Would you suppose that Marcus Aurelius spoke publicly in the same style as he wrote in the Meditations? Since the Greeks, we’ve known well that written and spoken language are different forms, best suited to different practices. So drop the spurious doubting.
Overall, I’m not sure how you’re managing to
Obama has proven himself to be precisely what I warned people about: A Marxist pretending to be a centrist. Of course the centrist charade has fallen away now. He promises to “double down” on his destructive agenda if Brown wins. I hope he does. I hope that he does everything in his power to demonstrate to everyone just how evil the ideology he serves really is. Nothing acts as a better refutation of leftist ideology than the implementation of their policies.