Divider-in-Chief (8 page)

Obamacare has hurt the economy in myriad ways, including by creating an entirely new entitlement in a nation already suffering from unsustainable entitlements and introducing new levels of uncertainty into the weak economy.

A November 2011 study by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) noted that Obamacare will “impose a cumulative cost of nearly $5,000 per family by 2020” through increased health insurance costs as well as “reduc[ing] private sector employment by 125,000 to 249,000 jobs in 2021, with 59 percent of those losses falling on small business.”
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If these count as “benefits” of the new health care system that Obama wants to see as his legacy, most Americans would demur: this is not the hope and change they voted for.

The incomes of middle class Americans have stagnated over the last ten years, in part because increases in health premiums have absorbed wage growth. While running for president, Obama repeatedly promised that if elected he would reduce premiums by $2,500 a year. But insurance premiums have increased more than $2,000 since Obama became president.
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Obamacare was presented as a way to contain costs. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary says Obamacare will increase, not decrease, health care spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.
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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obamacare will reduce the labor force by 800,000 over the next ten years.
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It also estimates that Obamacare will cost American businesses that do not comply with its dictates $52 billion.
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As businessman Steve Zelnak has written in
U.S. News & World Report
:

America's greatest problem is job creation, and Obamacare, the great legacy for which Obama was willing to sacrifice the economy, only aggravates that problem.

The president began his term by promising in his inaugural address, “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”
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Obama's pledge was characteristically fantastic. But it was one promise Obama has tried very hard to keep, and the economy has suffered for it.

As was the case with Obamacare, the president has pursued an environmental agenda that places the priorities of a leftwing constituency (in this case, the “green” lobby) ahead of the interests of America's middle class. The president began his term pursuing “cap and trade” legislation—aptly named “cap and tax” by conservatives—to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The point of cap and trade was to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans would use less.

Who would have paid for Obama's ambitious legislation, which came to be known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act? Consumers, of course, in the form of higher prices for a variety of goods and services. As
Peter Orszag, Obama's former budget director, told Congress in 2008, “Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap and trade program.”
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Cap and trade would have hurt low and middle income Americans most, because those households spend more of their income on gas, groceries, and home heating. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the price increases resulting from the cap and trade scheme would have cost the average household 3.3 percent of their after-tax income every year; middle class workers could have lost up to $1,500 of income annually.
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Similar analyses came from the Heritage Foundation and Obama's own Treasury Department. Heritage predicted that cap and trade would have cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four.
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That number would rise to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035 when further cap and trade restrictions kicked in. Obama's Treasury Department estimated a yearly cost of up to $1,761 per household.
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Besides driving up prices, cap and trade promised to drive down jobs. The
Wall Street Journal
explained how the bill would have affected employment: “These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.”
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The
Wall Street Journal
called cap and trade “likely to be the biggest tax in American history.”
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Even some Democrats conceded the same. Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a hearing, “Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax, and it's a great big one.”
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Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation predicted that the bill would usher in a permanent recession. “We might never really have a full recovery if we have to live with these tremendous constraints on affordable energy use,” he wrote, adding, “so we would be talking about exactly the kind of thing that we are worried about now—job losses, high energy
costs—these things being exacerbated and staying that way for years and years.”
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Obama's pursuit of cap and trade belied his campaign promise not to increase taxes on the middle class. “I pledge to you that under my plan, no one making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not income tax, not capital gains taxes, not any kind of tax,” Candidate Obama said in 2008.
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It didn't take long for President Obama to break that promise.

Democrats made clear that they weren't concerned with the legislation's impact on working Americans by voting down three amendments offered by Republicans—one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10 percent over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15 percent.

High energy prices weren't simply a negative byproduct of cap and trade; they were the main goal of the scheme. As Obama told the
San Francisco Chronicle
in 2008, “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.... That will cost money... the [utilities] will pass that money on to the consumers.”
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To Obama, higher energy prices were a good thing, because it would discourage energy use. Congressional Democrats agreed with him, but it is fairly certain that middle income Americans, already wincing at their energy bills, did not.

Cap and tax passed the Democratic-controlled House in June 2009 but failed to garner enough support to pass in the Senate.

When cap and trade failed in Congress, Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce many of its provisions by bureaucratic fiat—part of an alarming trend of ignoring Congress when it would not do his bidding.

In a statement posted on its website in late 2010, the EPA announced it would move unilaterally to clamp down on power plant and oil refinery
greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for developing new standards over the next year.
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EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the aim was to better cope with pollution contributing to climate change.
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In 2011, the EPA issued regulations on coal plants, announcing that it was finalizing new rules to curb pollution from coal-fired power plants. Mercury, smog, ozone, greenhouse gases, water intake, and coal ash were all getting regulated.
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The Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric power companies, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative educational organization, dubbed the new rules the “EPA's Regulatory Train Wreck.”
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They estimated that the new regulations would cost utilities as much as $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity.
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Coal provides nearly half of the country's power, so these new rules will mean higher electric bills, more blackouts, and fewer jobs.

Obama decided to bypass Congress to implement cap and trade after the 2010 mid-term election (an election in which more than two dozen members of Congress who voted for cap and trade lost their seats). He made no apologies about his end-run around Congress. “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” he said at a press conference. “I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”
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Obama's “war on coal,” while winning kudos from environmental leftists, has taken a toll on Obama in many coal-producing states, including West Virginia, the country's second-largest coal-producing state. In the state's Democratic presidential primary on May 8, 2012, prison inmate Keith Judd received 41 percent of the vote.
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Two leading West Virginia Democrats, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin
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and Senator Joe Manchin,
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declined to say whether they'd vote for Obama in the general election, and both of them and Democratic Representative Nick Rahal announced in June that they'd be skipping the Democratic National Convention in September. Later, Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Mark Critz announced he wouldn't be attending the convention either.
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All these developments were widely regarded as proof of the depth of resentment in West Virginia and the mining communities of Pennsylvania over the administration's “war on coal.”

“I think you see a lot and you hear a lot about it being a very stressed relationship, and that's real. We should just be honest about the fact that that's real.”
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So said Shell Oil Company President Marvin Odum in an interview with Platts Energy Week TV, broadcast on June 16, 2012. Odum's candor reinforced the conventional wisdom about the oil industry's adversarial relationship with the Obama administration.

Obama has spent his first term railing against oil companies. “Right now, the biggest oil companies are raking in record profits—profits that go up every time folks like these pull up into a gas station,” Obama said during a press conference in March 2012.
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He signaled his contempt for oil by selecting Dr. Steven Chu as his energy secretary. Chu told the
Wall Street Journal
in September 2008, “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
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That remark has dogged Chu (who rides a bicycle to work) during his entire tenure in the Obama administration—and for good reason. Europeans pay about $9 a gallon. Prices haven't gotten that high in America yet, but they have doubled during Obama's term.

Even liberal NBC reporter Chuck Todd conceded about Obama in February 2012, “There is no issue that has been a, I guess, a bigger bust for the president than energy policy in general. There's a lot of, we can come up with a lot of excuses as to why, but boy, it's just like you can't—he's made no progress.”
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Global markets largely determine oil prices, but Obama's assault on oil drilling has not helped matters.

Obama has consistently opposed exploration for gas and oil in Alaska, including in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The federal
government leases only 3 percent of federal lands for energy production. If ANWR were opened, it could become the largest oil-producing field in the United States.

The $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone pipeline would connect the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, with American refineries on the Gulf Coast. In 2011, Obama postponed until 2013 a decision by federal agencies about whether an extension of the pipeline, called Keystone XL, would be built.
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That looked likely until the EPA intervened in 2010 and said that a draft environmental impact study found that Keystone XL was inadequate and that it should be revised. In August 2011, a new impact report was issued that concluded that the pipeline would pose “no significant impacts” to most resources if environmental protection measures were followed.
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But protests by environmental groups convinced Obama to postpone the decision until 2013.

On November 6, 2011, thousands of environmental activists formed a human chain around the White House to try to convince Obama to block the project because the pipeline would transport what they consider “dirty oil.” They claim it would aggravate climate change, lead to oil spills, and pollute air, water, and wildlife. Organizer Bill McKibben said, “This has become not only the biggest environmental flash point in many, many years, but maybe the issue in recent times in the Obama administration when he's been most directly confronted by people in the street. In this case, people willing, hopeful, almost dying for him to be the Barack Obama of 2008.”
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Republicans pressed Obama, and in December 2011 Congress voted to give him a 60-day deadline to make a decision on an application for the construction of the pipeline. They noted that the project would create an estimated 20,000 jobs.
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But in January 2012, Obama rejected the application.