Crimes Against Liberty (13 page)

• Obama claimed his administration had “excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” As discussed earlier, with his numerous exemptions to his own ethics rules, this is hardly the case.

• Obama claimed he had saved two million jobs through his “stimulus” bill and was “on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.” The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl suggests we keep in mind an “important number” relevant to this discussion: 6.3 million, which represents the “Obama jobs gap—the difference between 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the nearly 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.”

The administration’s argument that “it would have been worse” without the stimulus is, says Riedl, “completely unprovable”—it is “faith-based economics.” He notes the president’s SOTU claim that millions of jobs had been saved is not based on any actual numbers, but on Obama’s “unshakable belief that deficit spending must create jobs and growth”—in other words, Obama has blind faith that the stimulus must have created jobs, because an economic theory predicted it would.

Indeed, there is further proof that Obama has an “unshakable belief” that government money will stimulate the economy, even if that money has been taken from the private sector: his refusal to allow firms to pay back TARP money because he believed the money needed to keep circulating in the economy. As Riedl explains, “The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.... Yet the White House continues to wave the magic wand of ‘stimulus.’ All evidence that it failed be damned.”
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Investors Business Daily
is equally dismissive of the administration’s bogus claim to have saved or created millions of jobs, saying it has “moved the yard markers” to distort the data.
IBD
editors recall the administration’s warning that without the stimulus there would be 133.9 million U.S. jobs in the fourth quarter of 2010 (“that’s the baseline”), and with the stimulus we would have almost 3.7 million more that that: 137.6 million. Instead, they wrote, we have 129.7 million jobs—8 million less than the administration predicted—and yet the administration claims it saved or created 2.8 million jobs. This means they “had to lower the baseline by 7 million jobs to only 126.9 million.”
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The administration’s counting gimmicks make your head spin, and they’re hoping the confusion helps prevent their accountability.

• Obama claims he inherited overwhelming deficits from his predecessor. But as we detail in the next chapter, Congressman Jeb Hensarling refuted this claim to Obama’s face at the Republican congressional retreat in Baltimore, showing that average deficits during the twelve years when Republicans controlled the House were $104 billion, contrasted with average deficits under the three years of Democratic control of $1.1 trillion.

• Obama announced, “Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped businesses keep more workers.” The Cato Institute rejoined that Obama could hardly cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, since more than 40 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes in the first place—the administration has simply counted increased subsidy checks to members of these groups as tax cuts. But refundable tax credits are unearned subsidies, not tax cuts.
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Put another way, he dishonestly reclassified spending increases as tax cuts.

HEALTHCARE LIES

When Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress on healthcare on September 9, 2009, he said, “Under our plan no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” This was one of the assertions prompting Congressman Joe Wilson to yell, “You lie.” It turns out Wilson was right. Congressman Bart Stupak, who was then at least posturing as an uncompromising advocate for life, claimed Obama told him Obama was not talking about the actual bill then under consideration in the House, but about “his” plan, which hadn’t yet been written .
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The bill that finally went through obviously allowed funding for abortion because Stupak only agreed to vote for it after Obama pledged to sign a meaningless executive order to prohibit such funding.

During that same speech Obama also asserted, “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage,” which was a curious number because he had previously been citing a figure of 46 million. Clearly, he was forced into reducing the number by conscientious conservative critics who had pointed out various inaccuracies in the statistic, including the fact that millions of those uninsured were not U.S. citizens. But his revised claim was still outrageously wrong because millions included in that number could afford insurance but
chose
not to purchase it for their own reasons, and millions more were already eligible for government benefits but did not avail themselves of them. Additionally, the Census Bureau figures underreport insurance coverage because they count many people as uninsured even though they are only without coverage for part of the year.
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Once ObamaCare passed, it proved so unpopular that Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, according a May 30, 2010
Washington Examiner
editorial, “resorted to sending millions of senior Americans a sales brochure that is packed with blatantly false claims about Obamacare.” Among its falsehoods, the report, published by the HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), guaranteed Medicare benefits would remain unchanged, even though CMS experts have testified ObamaCare’s Medicare cuts could “jeopardize access” for millions of seniors. Eight GOP senators sent a letter to Sebelius asking her to explain the report’s misstatements. According to the
Examiner
, they’re still waiting for a reply.

SINGLE-PAYER PLAN AND THE PUBLIC OPTION

Throughout his presidential campaign and into his presidency, Obama has routinely misrepresented his position on healthcare reform. He repeatedly denied he supported a single-payer healthcare system, for example telling a New Hampshire townhall meeting on August 11, 2009, that he never said he supported a single-payer healthcare system. This came in sharp contrast to his videotaped 2003 assertion that “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan.”
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Obama also obfuscated his position on the so-called public option. On December 22, 2009, he declared, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.”
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But on March 24, 2007, he had told an SEIU healthcare forum, “The public option is your friend.” In fact, his address to the SEIU revealed his true goal was not only to introduce a public option, but eventually to kill off private health insurance altogether: “My commitment is to make sure that we have universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president. . . . But I don’t think we’ll be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.”

Although in other venues, Obama vehemently rejected speculation that the public option would be a Trojan horse for single payer, his Democratic allies were quite open about it. Congressman Barney Frank admitted, “If we get a good public option it could lead to single-payer and that’s the best way to reach single-payer.” Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky similarly confessed, “The public option would put the private insurance industry out of business.”
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Throughout most of the healthcare debate, Obama pressed hard for the public option on his website and in media appearances. He said in his weekly radio address on July 17, 2009, “any plan” he signs “must include . . . a public option.” Three days later he told leftist bloggers he still believed “a robust public option would be the best way to go.” On September 20, 2009, he told NBC’s David Gregory a public option “should be a part of this [health] care bill” and denied it was “dead.”
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The head spins.

Although Obama ultimately failed to get a public option included in ObamaCare, he probably achieved the equivalent of it with all the provisions enabling him to destroy private insurance or turn it into a public utility. The
Washington Examiner’s
editors agree that the “public option is alive and well, but hidden”—“residing in Section 1334, pages 97-100, of the new healthcare law. That section gives the U.S. Office of Personnel Management—which presently manages the federal civil service—new responsibilities: establishing and running two entirely new government health insurance programs to compete directly with private insurance companies in every state with coverage for people outside of government.”
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ALLOWING IMPORTED PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Obama campaigned on a promise to “allow Americans to buy their medicines from other developed countries if the drugs are safe and prices are lower outside the U.S.”
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Thankfully, he caved on this one as part of his bribe to get Big Pharma to support ObamaCare.

GOP HEALTHCARE PROPOSALS

Decrying the GOP as the “Party of No,” Obama denied for months that Republicans had any healthcare solutions. But he quickly changed his tune when he invited them to the televised “healthcare summit” to discuss
their
ideas. He also said his proposal contained many Republican ideas, which is odd, since he’d insisted those ideas didn’t exist. Of course, Republicans in fact put forth many healthcare proposals, including market-based solutions in proposals such as Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future, that were shot dead in their tracks—proposals Obama was aware of and wouldn’t even acknowledge, much less consider.

IRAN AND ISRAEL

During his presidential campaign, Obama denied rumors he was unfriendly to Israel and to Jewish interests. While this whopper is big enough to get its own chapter in this book, we’ll touch on just a few issues here.

While campaigning, candidate Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee his goal would be to eliminate the nuclear threat to Israel from Iran. “I’ll do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything.... I will always leave the threat of military action on the table to defend our security, and that of our ally Israel.” As president, however, Obama has shown more passion for denouncing Israeli settlements than for stopping Iran from getting the bomb. In fact, he supported a resolution by members of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty that singled out Israel for criticism while
not even mentioning
Iran, which has repeatedly vowed to annihilate the Jewish state.

Furthermore, Obama proclaimed the city of “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and must remain undivided.”
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Almost as quickly as he uttered the commitment, he backtracked under heavy Palestinian criticism and later clarified that the status of Jerusalem would need to be negotiated in future peace talks. The Associated Press reported on March 20, 2010, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu all issues between Israel and the Palestinians, including the possibility of a divided Jerusalem, must remain part of the negotiations.
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Moreover, if Obama were strictly committed to an undivided Jerusalem, why did he demand that the Israeli government halt any new settlement construction or expansion in Eastern Jerusalem?

WITHDRAWING TROOPS FROM IRAQ

Candidate Obama was adamant that he would “remove one to two combat brigades each month and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months”—even against the advice of the generals on the ground. The promise delighted many of his supporters and boosted his profile among the antiwar Left at the expense of his Democratic primary rival, Hillary Clinton, who wouldn’t make such a promise. But he didn’t come close to meeting this schedule and even abandoned his insistence on complete withdrawal, saying he would leave behind a residual force of 35,000 to 50,000 until the end of 2011.
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However, Obama obviously derived some satisfaction from formally changing the name of our Iraqi effort from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to “Operation New Dawn,” perhaps to punctuate his disapproval of the effort from the outset, as a “war of choice.”