In attacking Mitt Romney’s business record, President Obama has laid claim to the high ground (in typically high-handed Obama style), lecturing that government is about more than “maximizing profits.”
“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about,” he patronized this week from the NATO summit in Chicago. “It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.”
But Obama’s own record directly contradicts his statement.
The One’s first term in office has been an exercise in unfairness — favoring the politically connected few over the majority. A few highlights:
‐ In handing voter 50 percent ownership of Chrysler to his UAW campaign contributors, Obama not only stripped secured bondholders of their legal rights, but gutted — to use just one example — Indiana teachers and firefighters of their pension earnings. Fair?
‐ In handling Delphi pensioners (a UAW subsidiary) in the 2009 UAW bailout, Obama’s Auto Task Force fully funded UAW pensions with taxpayer dollars, but kneecapped salaried employees’ pensions, slashing them by 25-60 percent. Fair?
‐ In spending billions on green-energy projects, Obama transferred wealth to politically connected corporations from GE to Ford to Solyndra to DTE Energy. And unlike the recipients of private-equity investment, these corporations have no financial accountability to their investors — the taxpayers. Fair?
‐ In subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles, Obama has handed $7,500 tax credits to wealthy buyers from Senator Carl Levin and his $40,0000 Chevy Volt to Leo DiCaprio and his $100,000 Fisker Karma. Meanwhile, middle-class buyers of the $17,000 Chevy Cruze, for example, get nothing. Fair?
The MSM, of course, reports Obama’s anti-business campaign strategy from a political tactical perspective — ignoring the fact that his premise is demonstrably wrong. Bain Capital is a highly regarded investment firm precisely because it has benefited investors from rich individuals to public-employee pensioners.
The market socialism of Obama Democrats, by contrast, is not at all merit-based or fair. It is by it nature a transfer of wealth — to adapt the president’s terms — from everybody to just some.