Middle Class Follies

In his re-election campaing, president Obama is running against Wall Street plutocrats as the villains who have caused all the damage to the American economy. It's that damn one percent who have somehow kept the other 99% down in Obama's world. Obama is going to stick it to the super-rich so that they do their "fair share".

The strange thing is that Obama and his advisers actually think this will work. Undoubtedly, there are folks out there in the middle class who are hurting and who envy the wealthy. That is a certainty. There may even be millions of these folks. Obama's problem is that ultimately these folks care about what can be done to better their own situations; bringing down the super-rich is a side show at best. Other than committed Marxists, most Americans do not care whether or not there are rich people who are doing better than others. Our society is used to the NFL player who makes millions of dollars per game. We are all aware of the movie stars who get $20 million to do one picture. We know that people like Bill Gates who found companies end up sometimes with billions and billions of dollars. It is the way our society works, and (again, except for the Marxists) no one is really all that concerned about the existence of great wealth. Americans are concerned about making the next mortgage or car payment. They want to be able to meet their credit card obligations. They want to pay the utilities. They want to have enough to live a decent life. And today, they want to have jobs and not to live in fear of possible unemployment. Even extremely high taxes on the richest Americans accomplishes none of these things.

In the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus quotes William A. Galston, who served as President Clinton's chief domestic policy adviser: "I think [the Obama campaign is] taking Occupy Wall Street a little too literally. The American middle class is much more interested in its own circumstances than in how the wealthy are doing. The reason people are concerned is not because the 1% are doing so well; it's because the middle class is doing so badly — and it's not clear that socking it to the 1% will solve that problem."

In a nutshell, this is Obama's problem. He has no program for his second term (or even his first) to improve the economy and generate jobs. sure, he has continuing a payroll tax cut that did not work as a job creator. That will not take us very far. He also wants to send more money to green energy producers like Solyndra (oops) or others. Again, there have been few jobs produced and billions lost. Obama also talks about promoting exports, but then he does nothing to achieve this goal. Ultimately, Obama tells America that its people are lazy or not as hungry as we used to be. It is all our fault, so how could he possibly fix that? To sume it up in five words: OBAMA HAS NO ECONOMIC PROGRAM!!

It may not happen today or even next week or next month, but long before election day, America will realize just how bankrupt the Obama economic plans are.