Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
The Huffington Post usually doesn’t usually put forth much that is worth reading, but occasionally that rag does let something entertaining slip out, usually unwittingly. Such is the case for today’s piece by Zach Carter which bemoans Obama’s failure to “fix” “income inequality.” The adorability of the piece is quite breathtaking – it’s a man who doesn’t understand economics at all, lecturing a president who understands it even less in front of a readership that is willfully ignorant of it. So, naturally then, even while correctly criticizing Obama, as it would be incorrect to praise him for anything, Carter still manages to be all wrong.
“A dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility… has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain ― that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead… I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: making sure our economy works for every working American. It’s why I ran for president… It drives everything I do in this office,” Carter quotes the president from a speech in 2013, where he was responding to the idiotic “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Carter then goes on to hilariously bemoan his failing to do anything about said inequality.
“By the time Obama gave his 2013 speech, his legacy on economic inequality had been sealed. All he could do was defend his reputation, and there was not much worth defending,” Carter wrote, going on to cite recent research out of U of C Berkley that suggests “income inequality” is “down slightly from its all-time high in 2012, but only enough to return the United States to where it was at the start of the Great Recession.” This, taken with only modest gains in median household income, leads Carter to conclude that Obama has failed to meet the “defining challenge of our time.”
Hell, I’ll do Carter one better, Obama, being unable to even understand the “problem,” did everything he could to make it worse; a fact he, and Carter still can’t even begin to comprehend, as evidenced by the rest of his piece.
“Most of the action in the Obama years has come from just three pieces of legislation, The Affordable Care Act, at best, lowered health care costs for the poor by modestly increasing taxes on the rich,” Carter wrote a bald-faced lie.
Obummercare didn’t just ratchet up the tax pain on the “rich,” it, as Bill Clinton hilariously pointed out in Michigan earlier this year, put average lower-middle-class earners into the poorhouse by having them pay ten times more for the same plan than someone already living in Section 8 housing and getting food stamps and cash assistance would have to pay. Carter gets even more adorable as his limp-wristed chastising of his god-emperor wears on.
“The 2009 stimulus bill prevented millions of people from falling into poverty, and some Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were eventually allowed to expire. Everything else from the Obama years has been a wash,” Carter wrote, despite not having a clue as to what he was on about. He cites as “evidence” for his first assertion an article by the way-left-leaning “Center for Budget and Policy Priorities,” which sought to make the case that then-new American Recovery and Re-Investment Act of 2009 was “keeping 6 million Americans out of poverty.” It didn’t mention the hundreds of millions of
Americans who were materially harmed by the forces of inflation when the Federal Reserve just switched on the printing presses and had them run full-tilt for years – which is what the ARRA did.
The third big Obama “accomplishment” Carter cited, if you blinked you missed it above, was allowing tax breaks for wealthy Americans to expire – in other words, a tax hike is among Obama’s three crowning achievements.
So, let’s review, Carter says Obama failed to fix “income inequality” because he “only” did the three aforementioned things: pass Obummercare, sit by while the Fed prints Monopoly money thus causing runaway inflation, and steal more money from productive people.
The real question is why Carter thought those three things actually helped anything. It takes not just blinders, but shoving your fingers two knuckles deep into your eye-sockets to not see that Obummercare has been a top-to-bottom disaster and failure. Nothing about it works right or benefits anyone deserving of it. The same blindness to economic reality is needed to pretend that printing more fiat money and giving it away for nothing helped anyone but the big banks that control the Federal Reserve. The same wholesale ignorance of reality is needed to pretend that the government stealing money from the “rich” ever helps the poor.
The fact is that Obama failed to “fix” “income inequality” because income inequality isn’t actually a problem that government “solves,” it’s a problem that government causes. Carter ignored, purposefully, I’m sure, the fact that the Obama regime has increased the size and scope of the federal government’s regulatory apparatus dramatically. So much so, in fact, that in 2015 growth in the government’s regulatory sector outpaced growth in the actual, real, productive economy. In other words, government was busy killing economic growth faster than the market could itself grow. And Carter wonders why we can’t have nice things?
What Carter, and statists in general, fail to understand is that individual economic security, growth and comfort doesn’t come from the government, it in fact cannot come from government. We, the people are the economy. When someone starts a new business, expands an existing one or opens a new location, that is economic growth – value is generated where there was none before, that value is translated into hard currency. This process works better for individuals and small businesses when said currency is stable and backed by something solid; the process we have now only benefits the Federal Reserve and the private banks that are part of it. Even worse than the fact our money is fake, is that simply opening a small business has been made prohibitively expensive due to what? You guessed it, government regulation.
In short, in the real world, nothing government does or can ever do proactively will ever help individuals economically; all government can ever do is cause economic harm to individuals. Carter bemoaning the fact nothing has improved under Obama because Obama “only” did three (monstrously disruptive and unhelpful) things then just becomes hilarious. If Carter actually understood the problem, he’d be haranguing his god-emperor for the awful policies he’s inflicted upon all Americans over the last eight years, most especially the poorest ones he pledged to help; instead of chastising Obama for not causing even more harm.
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