Barack Obama personifies this opposition to the reforms essential for growth. His express objectives are to protect our existing entitlement system from structural reforms, to increase the tax burden on investment and employment, to further empower and liberate regulators, and to bring more of our economy into the public sector. His economic policy is unimaginative in the extreme—combining early-20th-century social democratic theory with mid-20th-century pork barrel politics. His answer to the government’s fiscal woes is to squeeze the military and the taxpayer to buy a few more years of denial. In every respect, he stands for stagnation and stasis, for defensive consolidation rather than aggressive growth. He thinks the best we can do is to manage decline.
Simply put, President Obama has no interest in a new way of thinking about America’s prospects, and therefore essentially nothing to offer to assuage the public’s growing anxiety. All he can do is try to direct that anxiety away from himself. He is at best irrelevant, at worst a great impediment, to the effort to keep America growing in the new economic order we are entering.
What Romney should do to take advantage regarding fixing health care:
[A broad health care reform] should involve transforming today’s tax exclusion for employer-provided coverage into a fixed tax credit available to anyone (or at least to people not currently covered by a large employer) for the purchase of coverage. The credit would replace the value of the tax exclusion while giving people far greater control over their own insurance. By putting the credit on the table, moreover, such a reform would create an enormous incentive for insurers to offer attractive products to today’s uninsured at roughly the cost of the credit—by adjusting the balance between premiums, co-pays, and deductibles and offering some catastrophic-coverage options rather than only fully comprehensive ones. This would put at least some meaningful insurance within reach for essentially all of the uninsured at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare.
And what he should do on crafting a beneficial energy policy:
While the president has indulged in embarrassing fantasies about solar and wind power and electric cars, America’s domestic energy supply has undergone an utter revolution in the past few years. Advances in technologies for recovering oil and gas from previously inaccessible sources now look increasingly likely to make available astonishing quantities of domestic fossil fuels.
Producers and investors are clearly adjusting to this new reality, but it has barely begun to be noticed in our political system. In a May 10 hearing of the House Science Committee’s energy subcommittee, for instance, Anu Mittal of the Government Accountability Office told a stunned panel of members that oil-shale deposits in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming alone “are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Newly accessible natural-gas reserves around the country could be equally staggering in volume. The United States may be on the verge of becoming the world’s fossil-fuel colossus.
I would argue that even before Mitt tackles the policy changes that are needed to move the U.S. from our current, unsustainable course, he needs to take some time to study the foundations on what those policies should be built upon: the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. One has to have the ends in mind before one can devise the means to attain those ends.
Please take some time to read the whole thing.
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