Obama's fiscal suicide: proposed budget would be a kiss of death for the poor--and everyone else.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: Political Landscape

When the economy is in the doldrums, those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder suffer the most. The solution is not a promise of government programs to train a small subset of them or employ an even smaller subset in temporary make-work jobs. Those "solutions" provide momentary relief to a more fraction of the poor who participate in the government programs--as dictated by government planners--and only for as long as the Federal funds keep flowing.

The solution, rather, is an immediate alteration in the relationship between government and the private sector to permit the latter to grow freely, without Federal direction, constraints, or tax burdens and draw down the ranks of the unemployed to meet the demands of the market. The means to achieve that immediate alteration is to reduce substantially the size and scope of the Federal government, cut taxes on business, and eliminate the personal income tax.

Pres. Barack Obama is possessed of that same unfounded confidence which feeds the minds of all intoxicated with elective office who subscribe to the view that government planning can achieve for the market greater results than the market can achieve for itself. Rather than give back to the productive the money the Federal government takes from them so that they may expend their resources as they think fit and employ people with the skill sets they need, the President proposes to raise taxes by more than one trillion dollars and create a series of new Federal initiatives (transportation infrastructure, education, school modernization, new teacher hires, and an $8,000,000,000 Federal job-training program), all designed to placate temporarily a subset of those he must convince to reelect him (including, for example, the unemployed, parents struggling with student loans, and public employees fearing or experiencing job cuts).

With the varnish removed, Obama's government planning initiatives are drawn from the same moribund concept that proved the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, Chinas Mao Zedong, and Cambodia's Pol Pot utter failures. One of the most commonly confirmed historical verifies is that government planned economies fail and fail miserably Government cannot predict the outcome of the ever-fluctuating demand for goods, services, and labor. While Pres. Obama intends to spend billions on job training initiatives, neither government nor academia can predict the precise skill sets that industry will need next year, let alone over the next...