Tax and Spend - Doom and Gloom

In discussing the social liberal tendencies of Jack Kemp with our friends in another post, we seemed to be moving to an area of disagreement.

Ronald Reagan used a simple analogy to describe a tax and spend liberal - he compared them to the alimentary canal of an infant - a happy appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. He did not say that liberals did not like children nor did he deny the needs of a child for food.  

I would not disagree with President Obama that there are legitimate needs and social imbalances that should be addressed in our society.  But we have different views of the role of government and the priority of those needs and in the manner that they should be addressed.  These are questions about which reasonable men may disagree.  

Under the current administration, our government is, in my view, writing checks that, again in my view, we cannot pay.  And President Obama is not backing away from or delaying any of his agenda items which suggests that he will continue to write these checks in the near term without having a plan to pay for them.  As China and the Middle East stop buying our government debt, and while the President continues to run the printing presses at Treasury and at the Federal Reserve, the impact on our economy and our currency is likely to be unpleasant for generations to come.  

Further, the President has, in my view, used the pressing nature of our economic difficulties to pass into law a number of, shall we say, unrelated programs which relate more to the far left political agenda than to the emergency - which suggests a level of intellectual dishonesty that I find disquieting.  

I fear that the time will come in the short term that many, liberal or not, including the Jack Kemps, if any remain, will stand with me to condemn the lack of fiscal responsibility of this President and will seek to unwind the actions of this administration without regard for the “good” intentions that drove him.  We are less than 10% into the term of this administration.  I hope that I am wrong in my assessment.  But my concern is that the light at the end of the tunnel, in the words of the cliche, is an oncoming train and we do not have long to wait to begin to evaluate the actions that have been put in place in terms of their social and economic cost in addition to their claim of benefit.

We’ll see said the zen master.