The Obama presidency: Here comes socialism By Dick Morris

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)

But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.

Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.

But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.

Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.

In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.

Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).
Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.

But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)

And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).

And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.

Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.

But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.

So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.

But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.


Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage. To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to www.dickmorris.com. To order a signed copy of their new best-selling book, Fleeced, go to dickmorris.com.

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Vi: As much as we agree on politics, Obama is only 1/2 the problem. The McCain's, the Snowe's, Hagel's and Graham's in the Republican party give the democrats 60 votes in the Senate. Not to mention Bush. He traded domestic policy for foreign policy. Medicare entitlements, no border security, ethanol............to name a few. The real problem is the weak republicans.

But, without a doubt.....Healthcare is the lynch-pin. When it goes national, elections will lose whatever little meaning they have now. That will cement the class and generational divisions that will give democrats de facto permanent control over the population. You need look no further than what social security is. It is the swiss-army knife of political scare tactics. Add to their arsenal the health and well being of your children, and choice between political visions will wither to literally nothing. But, I'm not too worried about it though. American's are used to service. They will not stand for what passes in Canada. They will revolt. Especially in the inner cities. They will be the most vocal. So, let em try. But we don't have the infrastructure for a smorgasbord style health-care system.

Geeze, Cheezey ... that was an excellent post, and I couldn't agree with you more. I think you and I are on the same wave length.

The Republicans deserve the trouncing they received in this election. They have completely lost their conservative direction. There is such a parallel between FDR taking over from Hoover and Obama taking over from Bush, its scary. Where are the people of principle?

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

I don't think there is a big parallel between Hoover and Bush. Remember, Hoover had been in office just a little over 6 months when the Crash hit. He had several years to deal with it. Bush, on the other hand, had this plopped on him literally weeks before an election...So, without a doubt, election politics forced his hand in this bailout. But judging from his previous domestic policies - it wasn't a hard push.

People blame Hoover for the depression, but Milton Friedman - who did extensive studies on the depression - makes it clear - it was the federal reserve. They actually withdrew money from the system at a time when people were hoarding what money they had!

But, the bailout is actually working. Its not getting demonstrably worse. Its hard to imagine it getting worse, but it can get a WHOLE LOT worse. Ask Iceland. Imagine no bank of america, citi, JPmorgan, etc.......only a handful of banks would survive, but they wouldn't survive the resulting run on their banks. Only your local community bank and credit unions would survive (think about that when you decide who to give your banking business to in the future - i beg you) after that, our homes would plummet another 50%. So, while yes, the bailout could be going better.....But, that's always the case when no one has experience with this sort of thing. So, I don't see any parallel between bush/hoover and obama/fdr. Bush did what he could in the remaining hours of his term, Hoover did nothing......which may not have been bad - and certainly the federal reserve is acting completely the opposite of what it did in the 30s.

Just like buying low, selling high. Obama's timing is absolutely perfect - through simple dumb luck. America will come back, there's no doubt. Look at our history, we always have, this will be no different. And Obama, just by the timing of all of this is going to have a steady wind at his back. The worst is behind us. What's left is muddling through the mud from the rain. Its just going to take time for everyone to know what's what. And by the time we muddle through all this, guess what, its election time - and guess who gets the credit? Obama's got a second term locked in already. So, just by taking on this crisis after it has passed, he will get the credit for it - that's just the way it is. Sure he'll have some hand in it...........But not what you hear from man on the street reports 3 & 1/2 years from now.

But, the democrats will face their own problems coming up this turn. When you have complete control, your choices are seemingly unlimited. It will be interesting to see how disciplined the democrats are. That will be the real key to them maintaining an edge in the house in 2 years.

Vi why would you have a problem with fairness in talk radio?

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Socialist agenda? No shit, it's about time. Unfortunately it's what is needed to bring about positive change in american policies. Namely Health Care, universal multiple payer insurance. Job creation will require federally funded domestic construction projects. This means road improvements, and greener industry. Good stuff at a cost yes but things this country needs right now.

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Would you agree that Hoover, like Bush, was a Progressive Republican? Or, as Bush would say ... a Compassionate Conservative?

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

It depends upon how you would define the term "fairness."

Talk radio is market driven, and conservative talk radio has proven to be the most successful. What most Progressives define "fairness" in this arena to be is ... "for every opinion expressed by one person on any given program, the opposing opinion MUST be presented as well. Why am I against this? Because the only way to enforce it is through government force. That kills the free market.

If conservative radio is successful (and it is), then the Progressives should compete on their own and try to provide a better product than the conservatives are providing. The winner, as always, is the consumer.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

That one is dead, with the Republican party reorganizing its image and all. Bush was just a bastard how about we just leave it at that.

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The problems with the fairness doctrine are manifold. First off, there is the fact that the aim of the fairness doctrine is clearly aimed at talk radio. Of course, seeing as how the FCC is really just the instrument of the big media companies (who are finding themselves made redundant by the internet) then it is no surprise that the fairness doctrine fails to address television, but is going after Radio.

Then there is the fact that the fairness doctrine is also being examined to see if it can't also be aimed at independent websites. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to listen to an extremist I'd rather it be an extremist on the right, than an extremist on the left. The last thing I want to hear on the radio is talk about how we need to bomb government (as opposed to the foibles of the Democrats.)

So, with the fairness doctrine being aimed at the Radio and the Internet it is clearly an idea that is being influenced by Newspapers (who are getting slaughtered by both forms of Media) and by the television stations (who still haven't figured out that maybe if they give Conservatives some air time they might recapture the audience they are losing to Fox, and Cable.)

Of course, the Cable companies could careless about the Fairness Doctrine, because they are going to be exempt ,because they are a subscriber based service. So just in that, you have a policy that is being aimed at only two industries. One of which is a fledgling industry made up of tons of independents, has low entry costs, and is totally unregulated. The other industry it is aimed at has already had its market dominated by what the market dictated (Conservative Talk Radio), thus any attempts to impose an artificial "Fairness" Doctrine on Radio is an attempt to interfere in an otherwise relatively free market.

So just on principles it is incredibly easy to oppose the (Un)Fairness Doctrine. Add onto the fact that the only reason why it's being considered is because the political powers clearly feel threatened by the existence of an independent outlet. If news radio was not dominated by people that are willing to challenge the government then there would probably be no talk about how the fairness doctrine is needed. So there's the second count, the fairness doctrine is a political tool.

So, it's an attempt to use economic coercion to achieve political goals. Stalinistic control of the Media. Or perhaps a page straight out of 1984.

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