BARACK OBAMA'S NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLAN

If you want more than $300 billion yearly in added federal spending for government social and school programs, $80 billion worth of targeted tax cuts for poor and middle class families that make less than $50,000 a year, higher taxes for families that make more than $50,000 a year, more government regulation and taxation of all American businesses, more power and influence by national and state labor union organizations on national government policies, and restoration of the federal estate tax –- called by detractors the “death tax” –- you’ll love Senator Barack Obama’s national economic plan. But even Senator Obama wouldn’t walk the plank and vote for his own plan in the United States Senate. Republicans mischievously took the Obama economic plan, wrote it into precise legislative language, and offered the plan on the Senate floor as an amendment to a pending bill. The plan was voted down unanimously 97-0, with even Obama voting against his own plan. He didn’t even have the courage to be the lone vote in favor of his own economic plan or amend the Republican amendment with his own version if he disagreed with the version offered on the Senate floor. All the national news organizations are focused on the flap involving the inflammatory racist “God damn America” remarks by Obama’s spiritual director and pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, who helped get Obama elected first to the state Senate in Illinois and then to the United States Senate. But what about Obama’s economic plan for America and the world? Thomas Sowell, one of America’s keenest black intellectuals and columnists, has focused on Obama’s economic ideas, calling them “worn out.” Here is Sowell’s searing denunciation, published a year ago in hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers: “Senator Barack Obama recently said, ‘let's allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country's middle class again.’ “Ironically, he said it at a time when Detroit automakers have been laying off unionized workers by the tens of thousands, while Toyota has been hiring tens of thousands of non-union American automobile workers. “Labor unions, like the government, can change prices -- in this case, the price of labor -- but without changing the underlying reality that prices convey. “Neither unions nor minimum wage laws change the productivity of workers. All they can do is forbid the employer from paying less than what the government or the unions want the employer to pay. “When that is more than the labor in question produces, some workers who are perfectly capable become "unemployable" only because of wages set above the level of their productivity. “In the short run -- which is what matters to politicians and to union leaders, who both get elected in the short run -- workers who are already on the payroll may get a windfall gain before the market adjusts. “But, sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost. They have been coming home to roost big time in the automobile industry, where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost over the years. “It is not that people don't want automobiles. Toyota is selling plenty of cars made in its American factories with non-union labor. “Some claim that it is automation, rather than union wages and benefits, that is responsible for declining employment among the Detroit auto workers. “But why are automobile companies buying expensive automated machinery, except that labor has been made expensive enough to make that their next best option? “Senator Obama is being hailed as the newest and freshest face on the American political scene. But he is advocating some of the oldest fallacies, just as if it was the 1960s again, or as if he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since then. “He thinks higher teacher pay is the answer to the abysmal failures of our education system, which is already far more expensive than the education provided in countries whose students have for decades consistently outperformed ours on international tests. “Senator Obama is for making college ‘affordable,’ as” if he has never considered that government subsidies push up tuition, just as government subsidies push up agricultural prices, the price of medical care and other prices. “He is also for ‘alternative fuels,’ without the slightest thought about the prices of those fuels or the implications of those prices. All this is the old liberal agenda from years past, old wine in new bottles, a new face with old ideas that have been tried and failed repeatedly over the past generation. “Senator Obama is not unique among politicians who want to control prices, as if that is controlling the underlying reality behind the prices. There is much current political interest in so-called "predatory lending" -- the charging of high interest rates for loans to poor people or to people with low credit ratings. “Nothing will be easier politically than passing laws to limit interest rates or make it harder for lenders to recover their money -- and nothing will cause credit to dry up faster to low-income people, forcing some of them to have to turn to illegal loan sharks, who have their own methods of collecting. “The underlying reality that politicians do not want to face is that here, too, prices convey a reality that is not subject to political control. That reality is that it is far riskier to lend to some people than to others. “That is why the price of a loan -- the interest rate -- is far higher to some people than to others. Far from making extra profits on riskier loans, many lenders have lost millions of dollars on such loans and some have gone bankrupt. “But politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.” That was Thomas Sowell’s take on Barack Obama –- Sowell being one of the leading black intellectuals and writers in our country, whose widely-applauded books include “A Man of Letters,” an autobiographical compendium of his emails since the 1960s, published in 2007 by Encounter Books, and “Ever Wonder Why and Other Controversial Essays,” published in 2006 by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Sowell’s “Ever Wonder Why” is a tour-de-force, with sixty-five pages of essays on the culture wars, eight-five pages of essays on economic issues, sixty-five pages on legal issues, ninety-nine pages on political issues – including one eloquent essay titled “The Compassion Racket"; sixty-six pages on education issues, fifty-nine pages on racial issues, and eighteen pages on “random thoughts.” Two of Sowell’s random thoughts: “Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.” Then, “If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.” I like Sowell and his ideas better than Obama’s. I wish Obama voiced Sowell’s ideas rather than old, worn-out liberal left failed clap-trap shibboleths. Obama is adept at making people believe his selfish desire to move up the political ladder so quickly is in the national interest. That’s bull. Obama is a typical self-aggrandizing liberal-left socialist political climber who wants to take over the national government to take money out of one hard worker’s pockets and put their money in the the pockets of those with illegitimate children, out of work, and on government welfare at taxpayers’ expense. Obama, I believe, also is a flip-flopping wimp who would fold to “the barbarians,” in Sowell’s dichotomy, as shown by his constantly changing views and Senate votes on the Iraq war and immigration. Obama supprts a “guest worker” program for illegal immigrants, does not believe 12 million illegals should have to go back to their home countries and apply to comje back legally, and says he would not support legislation that did not provide an “earned path to citizenship.” Two sharply, distinctly different views on most issues between Thomas Sowell and Barack Obama, two brilliant blacks – one an intellectual and writer, the other a political climber. My heart and mind are with Sowell’s vision for our country, culture, and the world, not Obama’s. I’d like our country to have a black president for change –- but one with Sowell's views, not Obama's. The dichotomy of values and principles between the two, the direction either man would take our country, is starkly opposite. Sowell is right. Obama is wrong.