Obama's Ultimate Ambition: "Bad Policy, Winning Politics"

[M.D. Rawlings]

Class warfare drives away jobs, but attracts votes.

By Thomas Sowell
May 2, 2012 12:00 A.M.
National Review Online

. . . Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.

. . . Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places.

. . . Unemployment may remain a problem to many Americans, but that only provides another occasion for the Obama administration to show its “compassion” with extended unemployment benefits, more food stamps, and various interventions to save home buyers from mortgage foreclosure. This can easily be a winning political strategy. . . .

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Unfortunately, there are plenty of examples, mostly at the state and local levels, where this sort of strategy has worked on and off for decades:

. . . Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was not worried when affluent whites began moving out of the city in response to his policies, because they were people who were likely to vote against him if they stayed.

Of course they took their taxes, their investment money, and the jobs they created with them. But that was Detroit’s problem, not Coleman Young’s problem. Barack Obama may win reelection by turning the United States into Detroit writ large. . . .

 

[Old Rocks]

In what industrialized nations will these rich people pay less taxes than they do here? They choose to go, good riddance.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

In what industrialized nations will these rich people pay less taxes than they do here? They choose to go, good riddance.

And so it goes with mindless lefties. . . . Might as well be talking to walls.