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March 6th, 2009

REAL CLEAR POLITICS

Forget the pork. 

Forget the waste. 

Forget the 8,570 earmarks 

in a bill supported by a 

president who poses as 

the scourge of earmarks. 

Forget the “$2 trillion dollars 

in savings” that 

“we have already identified,” 

$1.6 trillion of which President 

Obama’s budget director later 

admits is the “savings” of not 

continuing the surge in Iraq

until 2019 — 

11 years after George Bush 

ended it, 

and eight years after even Bush 

would have had us out of 

Iraq completely.

Forget all of this.

This is run-of-the-mill 

budget trickery. 

.

True, 

Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. 

But that’s a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. 

But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan, 

a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama’s address 

to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” 

he averred. 

Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. 

What did we do wrong? 

We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: 

energy, 

health care, and 

education — 

importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy 

(as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), 

not reforming health care, 

and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. 

.

And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” 

Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; 

a cap-and-trade tax on energy; 

and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. 

As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, 

this is total fantasy. 

As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, 

a massive destruction of wealth, 

a deepening worldwide recession, 

this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, 

a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. 

One can come up with a host of causes: 

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, 

corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, 

the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, 

irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) 

highly dubious mortgages, 

greedy house-flippers, 

deceitful homebuyers.

.

The list is long. 

But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, 

let alone of computerized medical records. 

Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. 

Nor the lack of college graduates. 

Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, 

if anything, 

the proliferation of overeducated, 

Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

.

And yet with our financial house on fire, 

Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. 

Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, 

Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? 

“You never want a serious 

crisis to go to waste,” 

said Chief of Staff 

Rahm Emanuel. 

“This crisis provides the 

opportunity for us to do 

things that you could not 

do before.“

Things. 

Now we know what they are. 

The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, 

but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — 

the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — 

for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, 

education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, 

but intellectually 

dishonest to the core. 

Health, 

education and energy — 

worthy and weighty 

as they may be — 

are not the cause of our 

financial collapse. 

And they are not the cure. 

The fraudulent claim that 

they are both cause and cure 

is the rhetorical device by which 

an ambitious president intends

to enact the most radical agenda 

of social transformation seen 

in our lifetime.