Obamanomics has spurred increasing distrust of government — and that was before the tax scandal.
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The expanding Internal Revenue Service
scandal could hardly be any more Drudgeriffic. Well, maybe if in addition to
singling out groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, the agency
had purchased a few billions rounds of hollow-point ammo. Maybe then. But even
as is, the scandal is looking pretty bad and getting worse. The Wall Street Journal is now
reporting that the IRS also “scrutinized conservative groups for raising
political concerns over government spending, debt and taxes or even for
advocating making America a better place to live.”
We’ll see where this eventually goes.
Maybe the whole story really is just about a few bad apples in the IRS
Cincinnati office — or maybe as more details emerge, the mainstream media will
start tagging it “IRS-gate.” Either way, it probably represents the last
shovelful of dirt on the central mission of Barack Obama’s presidency:
rehabilitating Big Government’s reputation as a necessary first step toward a
new Progressive Era. In his first inaugural address, Obama tried to reframe in
technocratic terms the issue of government’s proper size and scope: “The
question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small,
but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage,
care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
In essence, Obama was reopening an issue
many hoped had closed after President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of
big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. Then, at his
second inaugural, Obama answered the question posed back in his first, saying
that although “we have never relinquished our skepticism of central
authority, . . . we have always understood that when times
change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires that
preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Big
Government was back, baby.
But those bold words were out of sync
with the results of the Obama agenda. Indeed, they were barely out the
president’s mouth when Pew Research put out a damning survey with this
conclusion: “As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in federal
government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government
remains high.”
And why wouldn’t it? Little about Obamanomics
has built confidence that government led by the Left’s best and brightest can
actually solve problems — or at least solve them without creating even worse,
unintended consequences. Take Obama’s three major policy achievements: the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The $800 billion stimulus was supposed to
kick-start the economic recovery. Instead of the unemployment rate’s dropping back
to 5 percent, as Team Obama predicted for 2013, the collapse in labor-force
participation, notes a new Goldman Sachs report, means the real jobless rate is
more like 9 percent.
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family
Foundation found that only 35 percent of Americans viewed Obamacare “very” or
“somewhat” favorably, statistically tied with the lowest level of support since
it passed in March 2010. And that was before a landmark study cast into doubt
whether the heart of Obamacare, the vast Medicaid expansion, will do much of
anything to improve health-care outcomes.
And last week, Federal Reserve chairman
Ben Bernanke reiterated that Dodd-Frank has yet to end “too big to fail.”
Instead, the megabanks have become only bigger and the financial sector even
more concentrated.
If you are keeping score at home, Obama
is zero for three. And now Americans have been reminded that not only is big
and intrusive government inefficient, it is also often corrupt. The Obama
administration and its all-star cast were supposed to be progressivism’s
21st-century proof of concept. Instead, they may have set progressivism back
for another generation.
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