Townhall...
The
President’s Excess Income, and
Ours
By Mona Charen
7/12/2011
It
is becoming a verbal tic -- the
tendency on the part of the president to tell wealthy Americans
(“people like
me” he’s always careful to add) that they have made more than enough
money and
will have to cough up more of it for the government. Speaking for
himself on
July 11, the president offered that he had “hundreds of thousands of
dollars
that I don’t need.”
The
president is of course welcome to
donate as much of his extra money as he likes to the federal treasury.
He knows
Timothy Geithner personally and can probably get a guarantee that his
check
will be cashed without delay. And since the president is so ready to
impute
unpleasant motives (like greed) to those who oppose tax increases,
perhaps we
should impute some sort of moral failing to him for not having thus far
contributed his spare change to the government.
I
can think of many excellent reasons
to oppose higher taxes that have nothing to do with greed.
The
government is a spigot. Just when
you think that spending has passed some sort of gasp-inducing peak, it
blows
right past it. Some of us thought the half-trillion-dollar deficit at
the end
of the Bush administration was vertigo-inducing. In just the past two
years,
President Obama and the Democrats have tripled the deficit and added $3
trillion to the national debt. This added spending, 40 percent of which
was
borrowed, was advertised as required to create thousands of jobs, kick
start an
economic recovery, promote “green” energy, “save” thousands of jobs
that would
otherwise have disappeared and provide long-term unemployment insurance
for
those out of work.
The
stimulus bill succeeded only in
the last goal. (Slogan suggestion to the Republican 2012 presidential
candidate: “If you want an unemployment check, vote for Obama. If you
want a
job, vote for ___.”)
Arguably,
raising taxes to cover this
incredibly brainless and wasteful splurge encourages irresponsibility
on the
part of decision makers. A refusal to raise taxes will force office
holders to
prioritize spending.
The
president may be perfectly
confident that the best use of his excess cash is to pay more taxes.
Those who
live in the real world may consider the government hopelessly wasteful
and
inefficient. If the president really wants to get the most bang for his
charity
buck, he’d be far better advised to donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs
of
America or the Wounded Warriors Fund than to the IRS.
Even
the spending Democrats consider
their greatest achievement, Medicare, is grossly wasted. Writing in the
Weekly
Standard, Jeffrey Anderson recently summarized his Pacific Research
Institute
study on the costs of Medicare and Medicaid. It’s a familiar Democratic
refrain
that government spending keeps increasing because it is attempting to
keep pace
with rising health care costs. But that may be backward. As Anderson
shows, the
costs of these two flagship federal health programs have grown much
faster than
other health care costs in America.
Since
1970, “health costs apart from
Medicare and Medicaid have grown 41 percent per patient in relation to
GDP,
while Medicare’s and Medicaid’s costs have grown 89 percent and 91
percent --
nearly doubling -- as a share of GDP.” Anderson mentions one reason for
the
disparity: “In Medicare, if providers get it right the first time, they
get
paid once. If it takes them four or five times -- at seniors’
inconvenience and
sometimes at their peril -- they get paid four or five times as much.”
Further,
as Merrill Matthews and Mark
Litow argue in The Wall Street Journal, Medicare encourages wasteful
behavior.
Among similarly situated patients, Medicare utilization is 50 percent
higher
than private insurance coverage. “When people are insulated from the
cost of a
desirable product ... they use more.” And then there is fraud, which
according
to GAO estimates, cost taxpayers more than $70 billion in 2010 alone.
Every
time the president demands
higher taxes, he is resisting reform that could transform our
government, our
economy and our fiscal predicament. Even the faculty club set from whom
he
takes advice must realize by now that without substantial new growth,
the
United States is in real trouble. The president himself agreed in 2009
that
“you don’t raise taxes in a recession.”
We
are not technically in a recession.
But we are in the kind of sluggish economy that the heavy boot of
government
creates. Resistance to tax hikes is shorthand for “no to all that.”
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it at Townhall
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