Terence Corcoran at National Post sees four crises which will result from the implementation of President Obama's economic vision. The four are these: Fiscal, Investment, Financial, and Energy.
Here's what Corcoran says about the first two:
Fiscal crisis: Mr. Obama is clearly using the current economic mess as cover for scores of leftist programs and projects. Americans don't like to be called leftists or socialists, especially American leftists and socialists. They're liberals. Whatever they call themselves, they will drive the United States into a succession of trillion-dollar increases in the national debt, on bailouts, stimulus and health care. Nothing wrong with debt in principle, but it's a recipe for a fiscal nightmare if the debt and interventions undermine growth. No growth, no tax revenue to pay down the debt, equals debt spiral.
Investment crisis: The stock markets have already pronounced on the Obama economic strategy. If a live market ticker had been running through his Tuesday night speech, viewers could have watched confidence drain out of investors in real time. The Dow Jones average plunged almost 200 points in opening trading yesterday.
While claiming to support enterprise and entrepreneurship, Mr. Obama promised to continue waging ideological war on capitalism, on bankers, high income earners, Wall Street, the financial system, investors and free trade.
He warped concepts, dishonestly calling tax cuts to high-income earners "an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy." Cuts actually mean not taking wealth from the wealthy. He promised to raise taxes on the top 2% of American income earners, as if trillions were sitting in the pockets of Bernie Madoff's clients.
No one, not even Paul Krugman, Obama's most enthusiastic cheerleader at the New York Times, thinks Obama will be able to limit tax hikes to just the wealthy. Krugman, in one of the most self-contradictory editorials I've read in a while, doesn't see how the administration can refrain from imposing a middle class tax hike down the road.
I know, Obama promised he wouldn't do that, but he also promised transparency in government, an end to lobbyists in his administration, and an end to earmarks in appropriations bills. So much for promises.
RLC