Hypocrisy not Leadership on America’s 235th Birthday

“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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