Day Of Reaganing

Day Of Reaganing


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, February 25, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Politics: The White House promised Reaganesque rhetoric in President Obama's speech to Congress. We got it all right: a vow that America's greatest days are yet to come — courtesy of policies Reagan strongly opposed.

As Barack Obama spoke Tuesday night, he sounded like the fictional, post-apocalyptic president Morgan Freeman played in the movie "Deep Impact." After an asteroid impact triggers a mega-tsunami destroying the East Coast, Freeman stands before the half-collapsed Capitol dome and declares: "Cities fall, but they are rebuilt . . . So now, let us begin."

According to President Obama, the financial crisis is an "extinction-level event," an impending doomsday. The "day of reckoning has arrived," he told the nation. And like Freeman's science fiction president, he promised, "We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."

Evoking Ronald Reagan, the president assured us the solutions can be found "in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure."

But that's where the similarity to Reagan ends.

A calamity rooted in the federal government for years insisting that banks make bad loans in the name of social justice is diagnosed by the president as being the fault of, among others, the oil and drug industries.

"We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy," Obama said. "Yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform."

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel sure wasn't kidding when he said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." This administration would use the financial crisis to enact the radical green agenda for which liberal Democrats have so long pined — and to pass socialized medicine, so roundly rejected by Americans when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton tried it in the early '90s.

"People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway," Obama contended in his address — neglecting to mention the fact that it was his ideological soul mates in Congress who wanted those loans made. In 1995, Obama himself even took part in suing Citibank on the charge of racially-based mortgage discrimination.

The president falsely blames the financial crisis on "an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity." He claimed "a surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future."

But his determination to reverse the Bush tax cuts (while doling out an insulting 65 bucks a month) will not promote any long-term prosperity. Neither will a trillion dollars of taxpayer wealth commandeered by the federal government "to invest in our future" with "wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit."

The "imaginations of our entrepreneurs" can only continue to make America "the greatest force of progress and prosperity" if the government lets them keep the wealth that powers those imaginations into productivity.

Ronald Reagan knew that; President Obama is using a crisis to undo the Reagan legacy.