Obama vows to reduce income inequality (and economy)

The mark of a good work of fiction is one in which you accept one or two untrue things, but everything else has to be believable.  That's a skill the dilettante agitprop writers at the New York Times seem to lack in an article describing how President Obama wants to reduce income inequality.  Nothing in the article even remotely makes sense.

President Obama will propose a 10-year budget on Monday that stabilizes the federal deficit but does not seek balance, instead focusing on policies to address income inequality as he adds nearly $6 trillion to the debt. The budget — $4 trillion in fiscal 2016 — would hit corporations that park profits overseas, raise taxes on the richest of the rich and increase the incomes of the middle class through new spending and tax credits

I simply love that class warfare envy phrase, the richest of the rich!  They're not merely rich; they're the absolute worst of the worst!  The phrase implies that simply by having so much money, they have forfeited the moral authority to their own money!  Good work, Dr. Goebbels!

But just one problem – how does redistributing money reduce income inequality?  Unless you keep doing it year after year after year, there is no permanent change.  Furthermore, although we have learned to hate and despise the rich, they are still too few in number to make everyone wealthy simply through redistribution.

The president’s budget — thicker than a phone book in multiple volumes — will be just the starting point for that discussion

And therein lies the real cause of income inequality.  The founding fathers never envisioned budgets thicker than phone books, that no one person could ever read or understand before voting on them.  They never envisioned a government with monstrous tax and regulatory tentacles that pervaded every aspect of our lives.  It is this spending, and interference, that prevent businesses from creating jobs.  Government is the major cause of income inequality.

“We’re six years into the Obama economic policies, and he’s proposing more of the same, more tax increases that kill investment and jobs, and policies which are hardly aspirational,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,

...and in those six years, Ryan has always voted for every continuing resolution without complaint.  I'm not sure if Ryan is a conscious co-conspirator or is suffering from hostage sympathy syndrome.

Mr. Ryan, in an extended interview, said Republicans are likely to show some caution in their debt-reduction confrontations... Mr. Ryan indicated, they are not likely to force a showdown on entitlements.

He's putting the finishing touches on his white flag even as we speak.

Mr. Obama’s spending-and-taxes plan foresees a $474 billion deficit, which would be 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product, a level most economists see as manageable,

Most economists see this as manageable, with an $18-trillion debt and $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities?  Going back to what I said before, the key to successful fiction writing is not making up too many things.  This is less believable than Game of Thrones.

The debt, while growing every year, would creep down from 75 percent of the gross domestic product this year and next to 73.3 percent in 2025. Those levels are higher than at any time in the nation’s history except for World War II and its immediate aftermath.

I guess the many anonymous economists the Times cites find this manageable, too.  Who are these economists?  Did they use to work for the Soviet Union or Communist China or the state of California?

The president will also propose a one-time low tax rate for companies that bring profits home from overseas,

The reason the profits are overseas is because the taxes here are too high.  Lower the business taxes and you won't need a "holiday."

But that “repatriation holiday” would have to be part of a broader overhaul of the business tax code, the budget will stress.

"[B]roader overhaul" is Democrat-speak for tax hikes.

... with much of the proceeds going to fund infrastructure, like roads, bridges and airports.

For the first time, the budget will lay out in detail the cost of his proposal to make two years of community college free. In the first fiscal year, which begins in October, it would be a modest $41 million, but by 2017 the cost would climb to $951 million, and $2.4 billion by 2018The president's first-time stimulus was also supposed to stimulate "infrastructure."  Most of it ended up being spent to supplement the operating budgets of state and federal governments.

The costs are always modest when the program begins.  And why in the world do we want more people going to community college, when the graduation rate is only 18%?  Yes, only 18% graduate a two-year program within three years!

Mr. Ryan said he also agreed with Mr. Obama that access to the earned income credit — a tax credit to raise the incomes of low-wage workers — should be expanded to childless adults, not just parents

Ridiculous.  There is nothing "earned" about the earned income tax credit.  It's a redistribution of income from people who pay taxes to people who don't.  Since when has redistribution ever helped anybody in the long term?

But even as Mr. Ryan criticized proposals that could be viewed as pitting class against class, he acknowledged a reality many Republicans have long avoided: The rich are getting much richer. “The Obamanomics that we’re practicing now have exacerbated inequality. They’ve exacerbated stagnation. They’re made things worse,” Ryan said. “The wealthy are doing really well. They’re practicing trickle down economics now.”

Great!  Now Paul Ryan is using the language of the left and fostering class welfare against people who are successful in business.

I say that not only is income inequality not a problem, but it's a great thing.  In general, people who work harder and have more ability, make more money.  And when wealthy people get wealthier, guess what!  The people around them get wealthier, too.  Wealthy people invest their money in banks and stocks, which use it to expand and create businesses that employ people.  Government spending never creates wealth.  Only businesses operating in a free-market system can create wealth, a fact that liberals never understood, and now Republicans like Paul Ryan also fail to understand.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/02/obama_vows_to_reduce_income_inequality_and_economy.html#ixzz3QdeVyxGZ