Review and Comment

There's a big price to Obama's Christmas

It was Christmas last week in Fort Myers.

Except Santa came in a black suit, didn't have a white beard and rode in a big plane, not a sleigh.

He had a big bag of gifts for everyone!

Everyone except, of course, you greedy, overpaid CEOs out there. The nerve of you, earning rewards for the risks you take and the wealth you create for others.

Funny thing, though, when Santa handed out his gifts no one asked the two most important questions.

President Barack “Santa” Obama acted out the script line-for-line from one of the oldest manuals in politics when he visited Fort Myers last Tuesday. It goes like this:

Always go to disaster sites and act like you care.

Be empathetic. Give out hugs.

Tell everyone, “Hello, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” (Don't say it exactly like that, but you get the message.)

Make lots of promises how you and the government will fix everything.

Surely the questioners had to be planted at the Harbourside Center town hall meeting with the president. They lobbed these big, fat softballs that made it easy for Obama to look like a homerun king. A hero.

Mr. President, what are you doing about education?

Paraphrasing: We'll be stimulating the economy by spending money on more job training and school construction and giving higher-education tax credits to families so they can spend money on their kids' college educations. We're not just going to paint a few walls in our schools, he said. We're going to build state-of-the art science laboratories. Direct quote: “... That is a gift that keeps on giving.”

Mr. President, what are you doing about foreclosures?

We're going to make it easier for loan servicers to break mortgage contracts with the lenders so the mortgage holders can be forced to lower mortgage payments and outstanding principals.

Mr. President, what are you going to do about health care?

Direct quote: “We will subsidize people's health care if you lose your job. ... We're going to computerize health care. That will create jobs in the short term and make health care more efficient in the long term.”

We're expanding the “S-Chip” health insurance entitlement for children. And “We have a bill to get us on track to get affordable health care for every American.” (Between the lines: socialized medicine.)

Mr. President, what are you doing about energy?

We're going to double our spending on alternative fuels, he said. Direct quote: “We're going to weatherize people's homes.” For free, presumably.

Mr. President, what are you doing for the regular taxpayers?

Our package has $1,000 for working families. You'll get a check. Direct quote: “That's the best way to reinvigorate the economy. Get money in the pockets of the middle class so they can spend it.”

Manna from heaven, baby. Bags and bags of gifts and cash from the North Pole.

“I can tell you with complete confidence,” President Obama told his Fort Myers audience, “that a failure to act in the face of this crisis will bring only deepening disaster.”

And the proof for that? Give us, Mr. President, the other side of the coin.

While handing out his promises and gifts, Obama skirted what everyone should have been asking. Here are the two most important questions that should have been asked:

1. To pay for all of these gifts, from where are we getting all of the money — this $800 billion?

In most households in America, whenever a husband, wife or child suggests a spending spree, inevitably there is one person with a logical head who asks that pragmatic question: Where are you getting the money?

It's like visiting your doctor to find a cure for a sickness. The doctor diagnoses your illness and prescribes a remedy. One of the first questions you ask is: How much will the treatment cost?

And then you ask the second-most important question: What, if any, will be the side effects of the treatment?

The doctor explains the upside first — that eventually you may be cured. And then he describes what is also always true: A cure for the disease comes at a price. The stimulus plan is no different.

Barack Obama will not tell the American people the price. It is not in his interest to tell the truth. In the words of Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute: “Rulers benefit from telling lies.”

But here is the truth — read late philospher/economist Henry Hazlitt's classic “Inflation in One Page” in the accompanying box.

The middle class doesn't know it, but it's already feeling the ill-effects. That $1,000 government check already is buying less. In the months to come, it will buy even less, much less. Inflation, Santa, is the real “deepening disaster.”