Aug 31, 2011
John Ransom

Another guy with nice hair and a good tan is working on the Obama job plan. He’ll be a great addition at Martha’s Vineyard.

This ought to work out as well as Geithner doing his own taxes.  

This week, Obama announced his new econ czar would be Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who figured out that if you gave billions away to the auto industry in price incentives, auto sales would go up.

OK. Sales only went up temporarily.  But he’s the only member of the Obama administration who possesses an understanding of the relationship between price and sales. Maybe that’s progress for an administration that seems to sabotage every economic plan they come up with.

However, count me as skeptical.

Krueger likes taxes.

He likes them a lot.

He likes taxes on the rich, the poor, carpools, employers, employees.

Did I say he likes taxes? He really, really does.

He proposed a national sales tax- he calls it a consumption tax- that would be a hardship on the poorest Americans and be a direct drag on the economy, as even he admits.

“The main downside of this proposal,” he said of his sales tax scheme, “is that taxes reduce economic activity. But the government must make critical trade-offs, and a consumption tax could be the most efficient means to raise revenue to finance essential government functions.”

Taxes reduce economic activity? A startling admission from an Obama administration official, especially one who is an economics professor. I never thought they’d figure that part out.

But then Krueger goes on to strain credibility by claiming we have “essential government functions.” I didn’t know we had a government that functioned at all, yet alone essentially.

They don’t work off a budget; they don’t pass bills that accomplish what they propose to do; they fight more wars even as they condemn the cost of war; they shut down energy production even as they decry our increased dependence on foreign oil; they kill jobs in industries they don’t favor, like oil even while they complain that rich people aren’t doing their fair share to help create jobs.

“That’s our money,” the government’s ketchup-stained court jester Michael Moore told us.  

How about we just stop killing jobs? No?

Read more at: http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/08/31/the_fragile_obama_whackosystem

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment