San Francisco discovers free enterprise
San Francisco is definitely up in the top five when it comes to “most Progressively governed cities in America.” No surprise, then, that the city’s finances are in a shambles. What is a surprise is the fact that, faced with a looming budget collapse, the City has suddenly discovered capitalist incentives: it’s offering the big employers tax cuts to stay in the City.
This is a smart move on San Francisco’s part. (And I can’t believe I wrote that sentence about the City that doesn’t know how.) The Leftists may call them “the rich people” or “blood sucking corporations,” but I have another name for them: employers. The City has discovered that if you constantly penalize employers, they go away.
As Obama’s vicious, dishonest budget speech shows, he hasn’t yet come to that little realization. Nor, despite his intellectual common ground with Tom Friedman, has he seemed to realize that Friedman is right about one thing: the earth is indeed flat. In the old days, employers had nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide. Now, the corporations can go to all the other socialist countries that have lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., while individuals simply bid a fond adieu to their natal land.
I realized today that what makes Obama’s class warfare even more disgusting is that he makes no attempt to pretend that he’s one of the little people. As I read in Ronald Kessler’s In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect
Obama, however, doesn’t bother. Even as he demagogues about the fat cats, stopping just short of demanding their heads on pikes, he openly revels in the kind of lifestyle only the very rich can afford. While he lectures us about heat and air-c0nditioning, he keeps his White House digs at 75 all year round; while he tells us to trade in our tried and true cars for expensive hybrids, he and his family jet all over the world on exotic vacations, traveling in gas guzzlers everywhere they go; while he “commiserates” with our belt tightening, he and his family dine on lobster, Kobe beef, and foie gras. His arrogance is so overweening that he assumes that he is entitled to these luxuries — at our expense, of course — even as he insists that we cut back, tone done, retrench and, of course, destroy our employer class.
Putz isn’t a strong enough word, but it’s the only one I’ll use on my PG blog.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
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