Charles Brings Out the (Kraut)hammer

Last updated on: December 9, 2011 at 12:40 pm by Timothy Dalrymple

Charles Brings Out the (Kraut)hammer 2011-12-09T12:40:31-04:00 Timothy Dalrymple

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Charles Krauthammer continues to make the most forceful case against the Obama administration. Look at what he writes on “Obama’s Campaign for Class Resentment“:

Yes, growing inequality is a problem throughout the Western world. But Obama’s pretense that it is the root cause of this sick economy is ridiculous.

As is his solution, that old perennial: selective abolition of the Bush tax cuts. As if all that ails us, all that keeps the economy from humming and the middle class from advancing, is a 4.6-point hike in marginal tax rates for the rich.

This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.

Krauthammer points to three Obama initiatives that have worsened our circumstances:

A massive stimulus, a gigantic payoff to Democratic interest groups (such as teachers and public-sector unions) that will add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.

A sweeping federally run reorganization of health care that (a) cost Congress a year, (b) created an entirely new entitlement in a nation hemorrhaging from unsustainable entitlements, (c) introduced new levels of uncertainty into an already stagnant economy.High-handed regulation, best exemplified by Obama’s failed cap-and-trade legislation, promptly followed by an EPA trying to impose the same conventional-energy-killing agenda by administrative means.

Moreover, on the one issue that already enjoys a bipartisan consensus — the need for fundamental reform of a corrosive, corrupted tax code that misdirects capital and promotes unfairness — Obama did nothing, ignoring the recommendations of several bipartisan commissions, including his own.

Read the whole thing. Since I am a Christian, I tend to look first to what I and the group to which I belong can do to solve the problem. So I wonder whether Christians might lead the way in making the moral and theological case for refashioning our national entitlements. When the entitlement system is expanding at a gargantuan rate, and sets the nation on a course to financial ruin, the ethical obligation is to reform the entitlement system in a way that protects those who truly cannot provide for themselves while also placing the country on the road to financial health. If Christians wants to make sure that both of those things are accomplished — that the least of these are provided for in the short term, and protected in the long term from suffering the brunt of our nation’s financial collapse — then perhaps they (we) need to articulate the moral case and wade into the debate with creative ideas.

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