Michael Ledeen summarizes it this way: “Obama told us he was going to use Congress to redistribute the wealth—explicitly. And he thinks it’s in the Constitution.”As a lolcat might put it:
“It” is the message Barack Obama delivered in a radio interview several years back, which is now embodied in his administration’s economic policy. The audio of that interview is below; as Wizbang blogger Steve Schippert summarized it last fall,
Obama laments in the interview that the Warren Supreme Court failed to reinterpret the Constitution to read into it what was not there: Redistribution of wealth for “political and economic justice in this society.” . . .For Obama, the redistribution of wealth is a civil right that the civil rights movement failed to attain. To Barack Obama, the redistribution of wealth is basic “political and economic justice,” and one segment of society has the basic right to the money of other segments of society. He’s very straight forward about this.And while in the interview he did not think wealth redistribution could be affected through the courts, he was confident that it could be attained “legislatively.”
President Obama’s intellectual foundation on this issue is the work of two liberal French economists (if that isn’t a redundancy) named Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Daniel Henninger describes their work and its influence on the Obama administration’s economic strategy here:
Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography—”Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone’s life: “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. The President’s Budget and Fiscal Preview” (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it’s a must read.Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.
Bride of Rove summarizes Piketty-Saez thusly:
From what I gather they have been pulling together tax returns, tracking the rich and have determined that the rich have been getting richer faster than the poor have been getting unpoorer not so fast. Ok. I agree. It does take awhile to build that financial base and it tends to grow exponentially once you put that money to work. So if you have a lot, you make a lot proportionally. If you’ve got squat, you don’t tend to make much on nothing. You have to get a HS diploma, work hard, save and make good decisions. Sometimes you have to take a few risks. Eventually, if you keep at it, you will move up the scale faster and faster—except for now. But, yeah. There are poor people who never get ahead for a myriad of reasons and there are rich people who do better every year.Piketty and Saez believe that this is not fair.
They are making, as Henninger puts it, “a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.” As a consequence of President Obama’s belief in that argument,
Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.The “top 1%” isn’t just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to “pay for” the fact of their wealth—no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of “wealth” from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget’s “Top One Percent of Earners” chart.The White House says its goal is simple “fairness.” That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, “it is our duty to change it.”
In other words, the first thing you need to understand about this administration’s economic policy is that it’s not really about the economy. It’s not about prosperity or economic growth or even helping the poor in absolute terms. It’s about reducing the gap between the poor and the rich. And what’s the fastest way to do that? Make the rich poorer.In my book, this sort of thing boils down to letting the sin of envy drive economic policy—and envy is a deadly sin for a reason. It will probably accomplish its purpose; but it will probably also make everyone worse off in the process. That’s a high price to pay for seeing the proud humbled. It may well be God’s judgment on the proud of this nation, but even if so, I don’t think that justifies those who bring it about.