By David Limbaugh
Tuesday, January 07, 2014
It's no mystery what the left intends to make its next
life-or-death issue: income inequality. Liberals are all popping off about it.
It's everywhere, from Obama's speeches to liberal think tanks to liberal
reporters.
It's almost as if they were conspiring to distract us
from Obamacare. Nah!
On "Meet the Press," PBS anchorwoman Judy
Woodruff sounded the alarm, not as a dispassionate reporter but as a
progressive advocate. While acknowledging Obama's problems with Obamacare, she
breathlessly insisted, "At the same time, the argument for doing something
about the economy, the argument for addressing inequality, is such a compelling
argument."
Behold the liberal mindset. It's apparently only of
passing concern to Woodruff that Obamacare caused cancellations of millions of
policies of insurance for people. That is so last year.
The important thing is that liberal icon Barack Obama
forced quasi-socialized health care through Congress, and any harm it causes
people must take a back seat to advancement of the progressive agenda, which is
ostensibly designed (in the progressives' minds) to prevent harm to people.
Ignore the foolish inconsistency. Nor does it matter that Obama lied about the
harm his sacred plan would cause. The progressive agenda is marching forward.
Liberals must now shift our attention to the next issue they
can preen about and showcase their moral superiority.
Notice that Woodward didn't say, "We need to get the
economy moving again and get people back to work." She conflated
"doing something about the economy" with "the argument for
addressing inequality."
News flash: You don't do something about the economy by
obsessing over income redistribution. The two are connected, but not in the
sense that liberals believe they are.
While Obama liberals scoff at conservatives for their
alleged "trickledown" approach to economics, they make the
preposterous counterargument that you grow the economy "from the middle
out," by which they mean you fuel economic growth by redistributing
income.
You don't generate economic activity by punishing
producers and taking their earnings and giving the money to others. How in the
world could that expand the economic pie?
More likely, as history demonstrates, it will shrink the
pie by disincentivizing all groups from producing. The wealthy will produce
less because when you increase taxes on something (in this case, productivity
and success), you get less of it. The recipients will mostly produce less
because they are rewarded for not producing.
So "addressing inequality" is connected to
"doing something about the economy" but in precisely the opposite way
the left implies. Efforts to misuse the tax code to equalize outcomes -- as
opposed to using it for the purpose of securing funds for constitutionally
prescribed federal government functions -- will usually harm the economy.
Some liberals probably don't even believe their own
propaganda that redistribution stimulates economic growth. In 2008, Obama told
ABC's Charlie Gibson he favors increasing capital gains tax rates despite the
fact that such increases had resulted in less revenue for the government.
"It's a matter of fairness, Charlie."
For Obama, it was more important to punish the
"rich" than to help the poor. That's his mindset -- and it's warped.
Don't get me wrong. Obama and his fellow leftists are
fixated on redistributing wealth, but a major component of that, as witnessed
by his attitude on increasing the capital gains rate, is that the wealthy need
to be punished -- even if it means hurting lower-income groups.
The irony of all this is that these liberal policies
often result in exacerbating income inequality. Obama can pretend, once again,
that he's an innocent bystander, but income inequality is getting worse under
his presidency.
A half-century and trillions of dollars in government
transfer payments have not helped the poor. Even The New York Times is
grudgingly conceding that after 50 years, "the war on poverty declared 50
years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson has largely failed."
Whether or not liberals are able to process the reality
that their programs have failed, they will not abandon them, because class
warfare and government dependency programs are their ticket to power. CNN's
Candy Crowley unwittingly admitted as much when she asked Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker why any unemployed American or minimum wage worker would become a
Republican.
It's not that conservatives don't care about the poor.
It's that we do care about the poor -- and everyone else. We believe that our free
market solutions generate economic growth, stimulate upward mobility and
improve the economic lives of far more people, including the poor and middle
class, than any other system. History vindicates us.
The left will always win the "look at how much I
care about you" contest. But it loses in the "actually caring"
department because at some point, people have to be presumed to have intended
the damaging results their policies have consistently caused.
Liberals can posture about how much they care and they
can try desperately to change the channel from Obamacare, but the devastating
harm that program has caused to millions already may finally have punctured
their pretense of caring and their shameless practice of attempting to exempt
themselves from accountability for their policies.
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