Obama's Forgotten Triumphs

I was intrigued this morning to see an article on Real Clear Politics that bore the headline "Obama's Forgotten Triumphs". Since I certainly had forgotten about any triumphs achieved by Obama other than his being president when Osama bin Laden was killed, I decided to read the article and find out about my memory lapses. The article was written by Suzanne Mettler, a professor at Cornell, and it appeared on Salon.com. Mettler makes two basic points. First, she says that most people do not recognize the truth about what Obama has accomplished. Mettler first mentions that in the stimulus package, there were over 200 billion dollars in short term tax reductions, but when Americans were polled a year and a half later, only 12% said Obama had cut taxes overall, while 24% believed that taxes had increased under Obama. Mettler reports about those who say that taxes increased as if they were completely wrong and just misinformed. Just the opposite is true. Here is a list of just some of the tax increases passed by that point in the Obama term: the individual mandate excise tax, the employer mandate tax, the surtax on investment income, the excise tax on comprehensive health insurance plans, the Medicare payroll tax hike, the so-called medicine cabinet tax, the HSA withdrawal tax, the so-called special needs kids tax, the tax on medical device manufacturers, the tanning salon excise tax, the raise on the exemption from the medical deduction, the elimination of the deduction for employers for prescription plans that tie into medicare, the blue cross/blue shield tax, the tax on charity hospitals, the tax on health insurers, the tax on drug innovation companies, and the reporting of medical insurance paid for an individual worker on the W-2. This is just a partial list, and, of course, the last item is not really a tax. Nevertheless, when the government tells private businesses that they need to report money spent on health insurance for an employee on that employee's W-2, we all know that the next step is the imposition of tax on that amount. So the total of these tax increases that were in place as of the time of the poll that Mettler mentions is over 700 billion dollars while the tax cuts she mentions are in the range of 200 billion dollars, a net tax increase of half a trillion dollars. Yet, Mettler claims surprise that anyone could think that taxes had gone up. Indeed, those folks had to be misinformed, but it is Mettler who is misinformed.

Mettler's second triumph for Obama after the phony claim of tax reduction is that he improved the student loan process. Mettler points to no reduction in cost for the government or for those obtaining the loans. Mettler points to no greater availability for those loans. Indeed, the only change that Mettler mentions is that the government is now totally in charge of student loans rather than having private companies handle that process. Mettler never points out why this is a "triumph"; she just proclaims it one. I guess Mettler thinks that driving a private industry group out of business is a great victory. I doubt that most Americans would agree, however. So much for triumph number 2.

Mettler's third triumph is, of course, Obamacare. Here too, Mettler does not explain why this is supposedly a triumph rather than a disaster. She does not address the recent decision by Obama to abandon a big chunk of Obamacare that was to have provided long term care insurance; even Obama's Secretary of HHS could not figure out a way to make that program financially viable, so she dropped it. No, Mettler focuses instead on a theoretical reason why Obama's great triumph is not perceived that way. A true academic, Mettler spins a nice theory and when the facts do not support her, she just makes up new ones. Mettler says that Obama was taking on the structures of the submerged government, rules that promote behavior through tax preferences and other hidden promotional expenditure from Washington. In explaining history, Mettler then points out that Reagan never took on these submerged items but attacked only visible government programs. Mettler apparently does not know that it was Reagan who got passed the most comprehensive restructuring of the American tax system in many decades. The basic change achieved by Reagan was to get rid of a great many of these tax preferences and subsidies in exchange for lowering and simplifying the rate structure. In other words, Reagan did exactly what Mettler says he did not do.

The truth is that I often wonder when I read a piece like Mettler's which is both academic and dense but totally inaccurate if the author understands where he or she has gone wrong. Does Mettler actually believe what she has written? Is her scholarship so shoddy that she did not bother to do research so as to back up the assertions that she makes? I just do not know. I must say, however, that articles like this serve no good purpose in American discourse.