President Obama's demagoguery and fear-mongering on his sequester cuts are breathtaking, even for him. Lest you think I am engaging in hyperbole, let me give you the dictionary definition of a demagogue.
One definition is "a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument."
Obama's ordinary MO is to stir people against one another, to stoke the flames of envy among some against others in lieu of rational argument to rally support for his causes.
Obama has had four years to try his ideas. They have all failed, in every category. His stimulus plan to spend nearly $1 trillion of borrowed money to jump-start the economy was a colossal, unconscionable waste of money we didn't have and not only didn't work as promised but probably stalled the private sector's efforts to recover. He remains defiantly unrepentant in the face of his repeated reckless green policy failures.
Liberal economists and ideologues -- in some cases, there's little difference -- cling fast to the myth that Obama's gutting of the private sector to chase public money after projects for which there was no demand actually helped the economy. But they can't prove their assertion that the economy would have been worse but for the stimulus any more than one can prove a negative. But objective evidence says otherwise: Obama has presided over the worst recovery in 50 years.
But those who control the writing of history (and the other disciplines, such as economics, that have been thoroughly politicized in modern academia) have an advantage in controlling the present. Liberal academic revisionists have firmly planted in our history and economic texts the myth that FDR's big-government policies brought us out of the Great Depression. Only recently have a number of modern historians and authors set the record straight: His policies exacerbated and prolonged the Depression. Yet Obama persists in touting his own big-government prescriptions, demanding we ignore history and his own record.
Obama has had four years to get the economy moving, and our extraordinarily high level of unemployment is just as high as it was when he took office and, when you consider the record numbers of people leaving the workforce, is much worse than the numbers indicate. Yet he still refuses to accept any responsibility for his own failures.
Obama will not offer any plan to reduce spending, especially entitlements. He just keeps going back to his crusade against the rich, from whom he's already extracted a higher tax rate and eliminated personal exemptions and deductions. He promised he wanted a balanced approach, but he refuses to balance his punitive tax hikes with spending cuts and entitlement reform. Even former Sen. Alan Simpson said that unless Obama gets serious about entitlements, he will have a failed presidency.
But Obama and his Democratic senators will not pass a budget, and they will not participate in entitlement reform. Instead, Obama is back railing against the Republicans for their alleged unwillingness to further tax the rich, whom they have already reluctantly agreed to discriminatorily tax.
Obama tells us that Republicans are insisting on keeping his brainchild -- the sequestration -- in place to avoid further taxing the rich. This is the same sequestration he promised to support; he even threatened to veto efforts to remove it. Now he complains about its draconian cuts -- not about cuts to the military but about cuts to his sacred domestic programs. But in fact, even with the sequester cuts, we will be spending more in fiscal year 2013 than we have in any other fiscal year in American history, save 2011. He is simply misleading the public because he wants to further punish the rich -- even if it means holding hostage our military and accelerating the nation's imminent bankruptcy.
Obama is dreadfully wrong on both sides of the fiscal equation. Economic growth does not depend on government spending, which has the opposite effect because it sucks the wind out of the private sector; and you balance the budget not by taxing the rich but by drastically cutting spending and reforming entitlements.
Obama and his ilk mock Republicans for their "trickledown" economics, but Obama is the quintessential proponent of his own trickledown economics. As to the private sector and entrepreneurship, he is an atheist. He believes that only he and his central planners in the omniscient federal government can cause economic growth and that from that high mountain of government largesse will trickle down economic activity for the ignorant, impotent private sector and the economy at large.
The sequestration, as House Speaker John Boehner has said, is an ugly way to cut spending and is not good for our national defense. But if we don't start cutting fast (and the sequester is more a reduction in the rate of spending increases than it is a cut), we won't have the money to support a military at all, much less anything else. Time to stop playing games with the nation's very viability and our children's future. The Republicans must hold to their guns this time.