By David Limbaugh
Friday, April 25, 2014
One of the many ironies surrounding President Obama is
that for all his harping on income inequality -- his most recent obsession
designed to stir Americans against one another -- his policies have exacerbated
it.
Obama, the self-professed bipartisan uniter, is never
content to seek remedies to improve opportunity for all Americans. He has to
have villains. His community organizing training and his disposition compel him
to pit us against one another.
No matter what the stated reason for his latest policy
craze, almost everything he does is in service to his quest to fundamentally
transform America from a society of freedom, opportunity and industriousness to
one of government-mandated outcomes and dependency.
Obama's usual pattern for advancing his policy agenda is
to agitate us through rhetoric by portraying a certain "innocent"
group as victimized by an exploitive group and then demanding a policy fix for
the "injustice."
He has slandered the oil and coal industries as
villainous in his push for green energy alternatives. He mercilessly demonized
big banks as a prelude to passing the financial overhaul bill known as
Dodd-Frank -- and also as a predicate to shaking down banks on behalf of
upside-down homeowners. He bludgeoned insurance companies to soften their
opposition to Obamacare and to make the public believe that it was a necessary
reform.
Obama has trashed those with traditional values in his
urgent push to promote same-sex marriage. He is forever defaming Second
Amendment defenders as selfish extremists unconcerned with gun violence. He has
depicted Republicans, the tea party and conservative radio hosts as enemies of
the middle class, the poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, blacks,
Hispanics, homosexuals and women to grease the skids for all aspects of his
statist agenda.
Perhaps the most recurring theme we've witnessed from
Obama is his smearing of the rich. He used it to pass his stimulus bill, to
justify much of his wasteful spending and during his endless proposals for
higher taxes on the "wealthy," his crusade to expand the welfare
rolls, his campaign for Obamacare and his obstruction of entitlement reform.
Most recently, he's adopted his destructive class-warfare rhetoric to tout his
war against "income inequality."
Though he has railed against income inequality
incessantly for some time now, one might wonder why he hasn't done more to
correct the imbalances he sees. He has been in office for a painful five years
and has largely had his way with his stimulus package, taxes, spending,
entitlements and Obamacare, and he's not satisfied with his results. Well,
neither are we. But it would be nice if he quit blaming everyone but himself
for the economic malaise he is causing.
Obama can't stand that capitalism and freedom result in
some people prospering more than others economically, even though far more
people prosper overall and the poor and middle classes do better than under any
other system.
America was built on the ideas of freedom and equal
opportunity for all. Every day, Obama is taking a sledgehammer to those
principles and, in the process, is hurting the middle class and the poor.
Should leaders of a supposedly free society be focusing on how much each person
has relative to the next person or on policies designed to give everyone a
better chance at prosperity, as only capitalism and free markets do?
Instead of inciting everyone to envy, covetousness and
resentment over whether the next guy has more, Obama ought to be trying to
inspire all people to prosper. His policies have not only swallowed our
individual liberties but also harmed people he pretends to help. In the long
run, it hurts people to be wards of the state. Policies that discourage work
and incentivize welfare impoverish society as a whole and impede growth.
But for all Obama's hype against income inequality in
this country, people move in and out of income groups with surprising
frequency. National Review's Kevin Williamson observes that more than half of
adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line sometime in their lives.
Seventy-three percent of the people will at some point be in the top 20 percent;
39 percent will achieve the top 5 percent for at least a year; and 12 percent
will make the top 1 percent for at least a year.
Are you grasping all this? The upshot is that Obama is
shooting at a moving target. These income groups are not fixed; the middle
class and poor are not forever consigned to their respective income levels.
The next time Obama rails against income inequality, just
remember that he's misleading us in an effort to keep us at one another's
throats to facilitate passage of the next agenda item on his mission to
fundamentally change America from a land of freedom and opportunity to a
socialist state.
If Obama would just quit officiously intermeddling with
our free market, we would see not only vastly more economic growth but also
less poverty and greater upward mobility. Isn't that what we should aspire to
rather than a government that controls all economic results and, in the
process, spreads economic misery?
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