This isnt Crony Capitalism this is Crony Socialism.
President Barack Obamas scant involvement with the Fiscal Cliff negotiations has been limited to his rigid insistence that the tax rate on the nations job creators be raised from 35 to 39.6.
Tax reform as a general principle and a way to raise revenue is a presidential non-starter.
Now. Last year the president said this:
What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues which could be accomplished without hiking taxes tax rates but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally while broadening the base."
Funny thats what House Speaker John Boehner just proposed. $800 billion over ten years in additional coin for the realm. By loophole-eliminating code-simplifying and thus job creating tax reform. Not via job-killing tax rate increases.
And the Presidents tax hikes will kill jobs 710000 of them. While only raising the same $800 billion over the next decade.
Do not misunderstand this is not a defense of Speaker Boehners revenue raise. The Feds dont have a revenue problem they have a spending one.
2007 Federal Budget: $2.73 trillion. Deficit: $161 billion.
Note: This was the last all Republican budget the House Senate and White House were at the time all run by the Rs.
2012 Federal Budget: $3.796 trillion. Deficit: $1.327 trillion.
If we simply returned to 2007 levels of spending our trillion-plus dollar annual budget deficits would all but vanish.
The fact remains we desperately need tax reform. The president used to agree. The question is what tax code status quo is the president trying to protect?
President Obama and his Democrats in fact love our arcane bizarre totally anti-Reality tens-of-thousands-of-pages tax code. (And our millions-of-pages of laws. And our millions-of-pages regulatory code.)
The harder it is for businesses to do business (and citizens to conduct their lives) the better they like it. And the cryptic dense codified inanity creates tons of room for them to pick their preferred private sector losers at the expense of its winners and slosh them hundreds of billions of Taxpayer dollars while theyre at it.
This isnt Crony Capitalism this is Crony Socialism.
To choose but one example let us look at energy" Crony Socialism.
Energy Subsidies Total $24 Billion Most to Renewables
Renewable energy and energy efficiency accounted for $16 billion of the federal support according to the Congressional Budget Office while the fossil-fuel industry received $2.5 billion in tax breaks….
CBO said the $24 billion total is a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of the governments various annual subsidies which take the form of both grants and tax breaks.
Excerpt emphasis ours.
To one abysmal failure after another.
Since 2008 taxpayers have spent or provided loan guarantees of $6.5 billion for electric vehicles.
(There have been) more-than-$3 billion-in-federal-government-subsidies-alone for the Chevy Volt.
And the 2009 $787 billion Stimulus" bill contained about $60 billion in additional green" energy" cash ostensibly for green" gigs. But as Newsweek then reported (emphasis again ours):
The working definition (of green job") paints a broad stroke: a job thats good for the economy while simultaneously healing the earth. But that leaves lots open to interpretation natural gas is technically a cleaner fuel than crude oil but its still unsustainable.
Making it difficult if not impossible to measure whether eco-based jobs are being created and whether as the administration has claimed theyre the saviors of a sagging economy….
In large part the very idea behind a green job ensures there will never be a full definition….
Well it appears the Obama Administration eventually arrived at a delineation.
Labor Dept. Counts Oil Lobbyists Garbage Men Bus Drivers as Green Jobs
This green" energy" government-money investment" experiment has clearly been a multi-decade (ethanol anyone?) trillions-of-dollars uber-failure.
Why would President Obama insist on job-killing tiny-money-raising tax rate increases while protecting such a gi-normous Taxpayer debacle?
80 of DOE Green Energy Loans Went to Obama Backers
Oh yeah.