Yesterday President Obama delivered a much-heralded (by himself and his minions) speech on the economy.<\/p>\n
It was a transparent attempt to change the Washington topic from, as he put it, \u201cphony scandals\u201d.<\/p>\n
Phony scandals?\u00a0 Let\u2019s see.\u00a0 Could he have been referring to the White House-ordered IRS audits of the Administration\u2019s political opponents, precisely the same kind of abuse that helped win Richard Nixon one of his three articles of impeachment?\u00a0 Or the secret seizing of the phone records of Associated Press journalists, a \u201cmassive and unprecedented intrusion,\u201d as AP\u2019s CEO put it, on freedom of the press?\u00a0 Or Justice Department attorneys, acting almost certainly with the knowledge of Attorney General Eric Holder, lying to a court to obtain a warrant against Fox News reporter James Rosen?\u00a0 Or, oh, yes, failing to send a rescue mission for besieged U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and his party, and lying about it for months?<\/p>\n
Are those the \u201cphony scandals\u201d to which the President was referring?\u00a0 It does raise the question, if abuse of power and dereliction of duty are \u201cphony scandals,\u201d what scandals would be real?<\/p>\n
But actually, it was not the patently premeditated political ploy that was truly interesting about the speech.\u00a0 It was the, hold onto your chair now, economics and what those economics said, not just about the administration, but about the president.<\/p>\n
Like so many of Mr. Obama\u2019s economic pronouncements, this speech presented a list of contradictions.<\/p>\n
The president congratulated himself and his administration on making banks safer.\u00a0 But then he pledged to lower mortgage lending standards even further (the Administration\u2019s push in this direction has been going on for months), the very policy that was the predicate for the financial crisis and onset of the Great Recession.<\/p>\n
He took credit for the oil and gas boom.\u00a0 But earlier this year he announced that the Administration would reinterpret an old federal statute in a way that would allow it to squash fracking (http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/llnwy77)<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and the Keystone pipeline that would carry Canadian oil to U.S. refineries is still not approved.<\/p>\n He boasted of increasing U.S. exports.\u00a0 But then he pledged, as he has before, to seek tax law changes that would strongly encourage (effectively compel?) American companies to close down their foreign factories.\u00a0 This would be a direct violation of global trade agreements, sure to set off rounds of retaliation that would jeopardize all those exports.<\/p>\n He bemoaned the disappearance of the middle class (ignoring recent scholarship that talk of a rising spread in American standards of living is wrong:http:\/\/www.econtalk.org\/archives\/2012\/04\/burkhauser_on_t.html).<\/a>\u00a0 But then he pledged more of the kinds of taxes and regulations that would squash the new business creation and expansion that future middle class jobs depend on.<\/p>\n