A Shrinking Obama

Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Is that all there is? Watching Obama deliver the State of the Union last night (with precautionary blood pressure medication at my side) I was struck by how diminished the “hope and change” President has become. Long gone is the candidate who told his supporters, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Nowhere to be seen was the man who said his election would result in the “earth healing” and the “oceans stopping their rise.” Instead we got an hour of low expectations, distorted facts, divisive class warfare all wrapped up in the hope that the public has collective amnesia about what actually happened in the last three years while Obama was in charge.

Fact checking the speech would take all day. But we made a short video catching Obama on a few of his misstatements.

My first shoe hit the T.V. set when Obama asserted that our oil imports have fallen under his watch. Indeed they have, but Obama counts on you not knowing why they dropped. Oil imports always drop when the American economy isn’t growing and Obama’s policies have guaranteed slow to no growth. Fewer people employed means less gasoline used. Imports have also dropped because oil industry engineers have developed new drilling techniques that have increased our domestic oil production. Obama has done everything he can to stop that increase in production, including cutting drilling back on federal land and restricting off-shore drilling. The increased production has come on private land by oil companies that Obama regularly demonizes.

Did you notice his intentional distortions on the taxes paid by millionaires compared to average folks? Here is what Obama said: “Now you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as the secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

Yes that would be common sense if it were a factual description of reality. Instead it is an intentional effort to deceive. Obama is counting on Americans confusing tax rate with net taxes. Let’s say you are a worker making approximately $50,000 a year. You would be in the 25% tax bracket and you would pay approximately $8,600 in federal taxes. Now let’s say you are a millionaire and almost all of your income comes from dividends and capital gains. For years the U.S. has taxed that kind of investment income at 15% because we want to encourage the investment that creates jobs. So the $1 million in dividends times 15% would be $150,000 in federal taxes.

Yes the millionaire has a lower rate (15%) than the wage earner (25%), but the millionaire pays $150,000 compared to $8,600 for the worker. This is why, in spite all of Obama’s attempts to claim otherwise, the top 1% in America pay into the federal treasury 38% of all taxes collected. The bottom 50% of all Americans pay less than 3% of all taxes collected.

This is what is so disgusting about what Obama is doing. He wants you to be angry at and despise those who have done well in the hope you won’t notice how his policies are leading us down the road to European socialism and national bankruptcy. The man who campaigned in 2008 saying he would bring us together can only remain in power if he deeply divides us by class. Obama is a Hugo Chavez democrat.

Something else was obvious last night too. It was not only what he said but what he left out. There was no direct mention of Obamacare nor of the 3,000-page stimulus bill, both of which are politically toxic. Both issues should be a central part of the eventual GOP presidential nominee’s campaign. There was very little on job creation, and there were zero proposals to get our horrendous debt under control. This man must not be given a second term.

The GOP Response Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gave the GOP response. It is a tough job to answer any President’s State of the Union, and Daniels did a reasonably good job, even if his passion seemed in short supply. This sentence jumped out at me: Speaking of the Obama Administration, Daniels said, “The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperatures is a pro-poverty policy.”

Eureka! There it is. Obama is a left wing extremist. His policies will promote poverty, not growth. Every conservative in America needs to make that point every day – at work, over the back fence, at church, at school or around the dinner table. The GOP nominee has to drive it home. We can win. We must win!
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Gary Bauer is is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.

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