By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, April 04, 2013
We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the
result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential contest.
There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10
trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration,
on top of the more than $4 trillion from the eight-year George W. Bush
administration. That staggering sum will force the next president to be a
deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.
In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending
programs — no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is
so large and voters are so tired of massive borrowing that the next president
will talk not of “investments” but of balancing the budget. In 2017, President
Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and
living within our means is the new cool.
If eight years of borrowing, printing, spending, and
lending vast sums of money at zero interest did not lead to economic recovery,
then the antithesis of all that will be the explicit platform of Republicans
and the implicit one of Democrats.
Obamacare may remain in name, but in fact most of its
provisions will be discarded or amended. Its full implementation next year will
result in almost everything that was not supposed to happen: higher health-care
premiums, rationed care, scarcer doctors, and fewer jobs. Obamacare will mostly
go the way of the Defense of Marriage Act — officially the law of the land, but
its enforcement simply ignored by the powers that be.
Despite an increase in carbon emissions since 2000, the
planet did not heat up in the last 15 years. Scientists will continue to argue
over global warming, but politicians will not talk much more of implementing
costly cap-and-trade policies. They will still praise green energy as the way
of the future, but they will not continue the massive subsidies needed to
substitute it for far cheaper fossil fuels.
Instead, expect a renewal of federal oil and natural-gas
leases on public lands. There is too much newly discovered recoverable energy
on federal property to continue to delay its full production — and too much of
an upside in cheaper gas at the pump, more independence from Middle East
autocracies, more jobs, more money, and more economic growth.
Do not expect the same level of increases in disability
and unemployment insurance and food stamps. The trajectories of all those
programs since 2009 are not sustainable. For all the talk that Social Security
and Medicare are not in bad shape, Democrats and Republicans after Obama will
be forced to save both programs by either upping the eligibility age, curbing
some benefits, or hiking payroll taxes — or all that and more.
The next president will jettison the sort of class
warfare that has led only to short-term political gain and long-term
polarization. Obama’s “fat cats” and “one percenters” will disappear from the
presidential vocabulary. We will hear no more accusations that the successful
really did not build their own businesses, or that they should have known when
it was time not to profit because they had made quite enough money. Expect just
the opposite: a Bill Clinton-like schmoozing of small businesses, asking them
to please start buying, hiring, and expanding again.
Aside from the partisan furor over whether the Obama
policies have worked — Democrats will say that things would have been worse
without them; Republicans will insist that a natural recovery was turned into
long-term doldrums — we will not see them continued.
We are institutionalizing, in European style, huge
government, high unemployment, sluggish GDP growth, serial annual deficits,
ballooning aggregate national debt, and massive dependency, along with
near-zero interest rates. The two parties will disagree over the contours of
this chronically weak economy, but not over the fact of its weakness — or,
soon, even its causes. Most Americans will not wish to continue down the road
to Italy or Spain.
Barack Obama is a landmark figure: young, charismatic,
seemingly post-national, and supposedly post-racial. For those reasons alone,
he enjoys a level of unshakeable political support not predicated on the actual
record of his tenure as president (just as most remember fondly that he won the
Nobel Prize but don’t quite know what he did to earn it).
Obama’s economic record will be dispassionately
acknowledged to be similar to that of Jimmy Carter. But, unlike Carter, Obama
will remain a mythical figure in liberal circles.
To borrow a line from a classic Western, “When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend.” And so we will do just that.
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