President Obama has made a big deal out of corporate jets. Apparently they are a symbol not of success but of greed. Yet even as the private jet marked has lagged with the ongoing recession, President Obama’s own employees in his administration have significantly increased the number of limousines available for their travel.

The private jet market has historically risen in line with corporate profits, but started a steep downturn in 2008. The result was the loss of literally thousands of jobs in the factories that make private jets, with Cessna laying off almost 9000 workers alone, mostly in that notorious haunt of millionaires in Wichita, Kansas. Meanwhile, federal government departments increased the numbers of limousines bought in the first two years of the Obama administration by 73 percent, spending $1.9 billion on new cars in 2009 alone. These aren’t cheap autos, either. The most popular model is the Cadillac DTS, with the government paying about $60,000 per vehicle. Cadillac, of course, is part of the bailed-out General Motors.

This all confirms something I examine in my new book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You. When bureaucrats have taxpayer money to spend, they spend it on themselves. In Chapter Eight (“Municipal Madness”), for example, I detail how two departments (Public Works, and Transportation) of the City of Los Angeles received $111 million between them in stimulus money, and used it to ’save or create’ just 55 jobs, nearly all of them, apparently, in the public sector.

Another example comes in the increasingly risibly-named education sphere. As we all know, vast amounts of taxpayer money have been directed towards global warming research in the past few years. This has led, as we can see from numbers compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to a substantial increase in the salaries of “atmospheric, earth, marine and space science teachers” at public universities. In 2004, before the wave of public funding was unleashed following An Inconvenient Truth, such teachers were paid $53 an hour. Today they earn $70 an hour. On top of that, of course, they have tenure and enviable benefits, not to mention the shorter hours.

Indeed, government workers have made out like bandits while the rest of us eked out our living in the recession. According to USA Today, “When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.” That was in 2009, before the President announced his much-vaunted “federal pay freeze.”

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We don’t recall when wordsmithing was used so liberally (by both parties) to confuse or mislead the public.  George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” pales next to the complete abandon with which President Obama eloquently manipulates language and information to influence public opinion.

Bush’s“ Mission Accomplished” was just dumb wrong and “Bring ‘Em On” was just plain, well, never mind.  Bush, at least, meant what he said regardless of how wrong he may have been.

Obama, on the other hand, often, really doesn’t mean what he says.  Instead he frequently uses carefully crafted language to convey a message that distorts reality, but which he, or his speechwriters, believes will appeal to voters.  We look at this as a larceny of language. Let us hasten to add that many politicians on the right do the same thing.  Obama isn’t the Socialist those on the right often claim him to be.  We don’t believe President Obama wants the government to own American business, and he certainly doesn’t want to manage American business. We think he knows he would be a lousy manager.  He does, however, want to set the economic agenda and control, through regulation, how American business operates.  Growing government, at the expense of taxpaying businesses and individuals may be disastrous policy, but it isn’t Socialism.  It is, simply, a tried and true path to economic failure.

Saying he wants millionaires and billionaires and private jet owners to pay their “fair share” of taxes isn’t really what his tax agenda is about.  Not by a long shot. He really wants to ensnare the nearly four million taxpayers who earn at the $200,000 level and above ($250,000 for families) by vilifying the less-than-ten-percent of tax filers earning over $200,000 who actually report over a million dollars a year in income.

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“Austerity” is giving “unsustainable” strong competition for becoming the financial buzzword of the year.  However, within the Democratic Party and the political left, we seem still to have an abundance of something.  Unfortunately, that something is hypocrisy.  When we expect serious and mature leadership from our president to state publicly what he knows privately to be true, he ratchets up populist class warfare or chooses solutions aimed at placating the liberal allies on whose financial support his party depends.

Case in point.  Mr. Obama, three years after they were negotiated, finally acknowledges the jobs that would be created by Senate approval of the trade agreements with Korea, Panama and Columbia.  The president is now describing the agreement with South Korea, which will reduce Korean tariffs on U.S. cars and trucks and open what Ford Motor Co. described as “the most closed automotive market in the world” as one which will produce numerous jobs for Americans.  Last year South Korea imported 13,000 American cars while it exported 560,000 vehicles to the U.S.  White House spokesman, Jay Carney, stated “it is time to move forward [with the 3 agreements] which will support tens of thousands of jobs.”  Unfortunately, the president tied the approval of the treaties to spending close to a billion dollars on additional assistance to workers displaced from jobs, a program that has proven completely useless unless subsidizing unions is a national priority.  This at a time when the Administration is supposedly trying to reduce the deficit as a key element in the legislation it knows is vital as a precondition to raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

The president at a pre-July 4 press conference inveighed against millionaires, billionaires and owners of private jets, but intentionally ignored the real facts and distorted reality.  Or as one blogger, paraphrasing Charles Krauthammer stated it:

Never mind that in the grand scheme of things, the amount of tax that corporate jet owners are excused from paying is so minuscule that if the government collected it every year for 5,000 years, they would cover one year of the debt that the Obama administration has run up.  The point the president was trying to make, as he amps up his relentless class warfare argument, is that all over America children go to bed hungry while greedy fat cats get a tax break on the jets they buy.

This is a stunning reversal of reasoning.  The Wall Street Journal noted that the president’s 2009 stimulus plan specifically stated that “the aviation industry, which is cutting jobs as it suffers from declining shipments and cancelled orders, hopes the tax break in the economic stimulus bill . . . will persuade more companies to buy planes and snap a slump in general aviation.”

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