The FDR one hundred day playbook remains in operation as Obama shifts the big guns to a new target - health care. As if the banking crisis and the economy imploding where not enough, the guns are being moved off the mark before the target has been achieved. That target, our economic survival and our future should be the focus right now. Instead we will embark on a new voyage with no clear means to pay for it. If the playbook is to be followed we will see a slam dunk health care package rammed through and then onward to energy policy.
While all these things are all worthy of attention, the battle at hand is not "Mission Accomplished". Far from it. The shifting of guns analogy reminds me of a famous WWII naval battle between the pocket battleship, the Admiral Graf von Spee and the a British battle group of three cruisers. The German captain kept switching his guns between the Exeter and the other two ships which were closing in on him. Every time he thought he finished off the Exeter, he would target the other ships only to change his mind and switch back, wasting time. In the end he made smoke and escaped only to be forced to scuttle his ship a few days later.
Obama has shifted the guns away from the imploding banks on to things he would rather accomplish in his first hundred days. Mission Accomplished! Soon we will no doubt be treated to a surreal debate about how to pump more money into our bloated health care system to fund more free benefits. While millions are losing their jobs and about to have their belongings dumped on the front yard of their foreclosed homes, we will listen intently the merits of single payer or multi-payer health care systems. Many of these people may have to visit an electronics store to watch the debate on a TV that is actually plugging into a wall and not sitting out in the rain.
It is an interesting fact that current health care disaster is another unintended consequence of past government action; action by none other than Franklin D Roosevelt. During WWII they imposed strict wage and price controls so that companies that were in need of labor had to find an incentive to attract them that did not similarly attract government attention. They chose to offer health benefits, the result of which is after over half a century our companies are no longer competitive with foreign ones because they have to shoulder these height costs plus our higher corporate taxes while foreign companies do not. The democrats have never liked Team Business USA, they prefer employees to the people that would actually give them jobs.
Government is unlikely to find a solution the health care problem. Instead the plan is to hike taxes on the rich to pay for these new benefits. Since they still don't have enough money, I guess Hillary will be dispatched back to China to again beg the Chinese to buy more Tresury Bills and ignore their own suffering population. The additional shifting of taxes will most likely impede recovery, just as FDR's then new social security payroll tax doomed the economy in 1937 when the government raised taxes 2% wiping out a modest recovery and returning the country the worst depths of the depression.
I had enough of George Bush walking away from unfinished business and leading us to an even bigger problems. Switching from fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan into taking our Saddam was clearly a bait and switch. Now, Obama hopes to achieve a bait and switch tri-fecta, first huge new spending on pet projects, then health care and then energy policy. Where will he get the energy? Where we he get the money? The next time Hillary lands in Beijing the Chinese Prime Minister should make sure he is somewhere else - a world away. Our kids could only be so lucky.
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