A thinking man must wonder how this backward, racist, soda-swilling country of ours ever got anything done without shoving every four-year-old in America into a “high quality preschool” presided over by the fired public school teachers of Detroit. Incredibly enough we managed to get to the moon, which was a lot closer to tomorrow than we have ever gotten from an Obama speech. 
Is America’s competitiveness really impeded by the lack of universal preschools? Or is it something bigger that’s in the way? Could we have saved Detroit with more preschools and Green Energy?
About the only thing in Obama’s entire 5,000 word speech that was at all interesting was in its opening as he pivoted from discussing the loss of middle class jobs to inveighing against the income inequality of the 1 percent. It was a convenient dodge that his average supporter was incapable of noticing, but it’s at the heart of what’s wrong with Obama’s economic logic.
Income inequality is not at all the same thing as lost jobs. It’s not that the two aren’t connected. One reason for income inequality is because many wealthier Americans are profiting from offshore labor. The natural internal economic growth that would be happening here has instead been outsourced to China where the middle class is growing at an impressive rate.
Obama’s speech however stayed in familiar class warfare territory. Its implication was that if the wealthy were made to pay their fair share, the lost manufacturing jobs would somehow come back. The economic logic of that is absurd. Even if we assume that the wealthy are the villains of the piece, taxing them at Hollandaise rates seems as likely to bring back the jobs as constructing cardboard factories in a cargo cult ceremony to summon the spirits of the lost jobs would.
But Obama, like most of his Socialist brethren, isn’t really interested in repairing the broken relationships of the economy. The logic running through his Bolivarian speech is that forcing the rich, or at least those of their class who haven’t written their timely checks to Organizing for America, to pay more will allow the government to create more jobs.
The only thing wrong with that notion is that trying to create more jobs through higher taxes is like trying to save the Titanic by drilling more holes in its hull. It doesn’t work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don’t work. Any process that promises to create more energy than is put into it is doomed.
But Obama’s perpetual motion tax machine isn’t even close to being sensible. If other liberals at least made an effort at spray painting the shoebox black and making “vroom, vroom” noises while it spins, there isn’t even any serious effort at deception here.
Obama isn’t even bothering to promise to create jobs by creating more jobs. Instead all he’s offering are the same empty social welfare promises that more social services, more preschools, more free internet, more Green Energy, more ObamaCare, will turn the economy around, while shamelessly claiming that it has already done as much.
There are still the occasional nods to all the nation’s broken bridges that are just about to fall down, but mostly it’s the same empty Socialism that proposes to tax a country to death because it’s right and just to do so.
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French correspondent around the time that the United States Constitution took effect. Some two centuries later, government has combined death and taxes into one by taxing the economy to death.
Taxing economies to death is one thing that we have in common with the French. President Hollande began his disastrous term in office with a proposed 75% tax rate. The move sent some of the country’s most prominent citizens scrambling for the exits, while the newspapers of the left screamed hysterically for their heads like a pack of cut-rate Robespierres.
France’s move to tax its economy to death hit a snag when its budget minister, a member of the Socialist Party in good standing, who was supposed to lead the crusade to make the rich pay their fair 75 percent share admitted to hiding some $790,000 in a secret Swiss bank account. Then he was caught having tried to move another $19 million into a Swiss bank around the time that he was appointed Vice-President of the Socialist Group in the French National Assembly. The only thing that would have made the scene more ridiculous is if the group had kept its old name of Socialists, Radicals, Citizens and the Assorted Left.