In USA Today, the story is Obama gets tax deal — now needs new jobs.

In selling the agreement with Republicans, Obama stressed the analysis of economics who said it would boost the economy and stimulate jobs — a major concern for a president whose Democratic Party took a beating at the polls last month in the shadow of a high unemployment rate that has now hit 9.8%.

“I am absolutely convinced that this tax cut plan, while not perfect, will help grow our economy and create jobs in the private sector,” the president said this week.

So, two years into his presidency, Barack Obama has allegedly had an epiphany: the Bush tax cuts (which were the epitome of all evil during his 2008 campaign) “will help grow our economy and create jobs in the private sector.” You could say a lot about this, but what burns me most is the fact that I truly believe that Obama has only now started caring about unemployment — which is why he is for the first time pushing a policy that might help alleviate it.

I’m convinced that when Obama took office, he did not see the economic meltdown as a problem he really had to deal with, in order to help actual people who were suffering; he saw it instead as an opportunity to push policies that were on his long-term agenda, by greasing his argument that these policies would actually improve the situation. Rahm Emmanuel’s words from November of 2008 are deservedly famous: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” If Obama had wanted to help “create jobs in the private sector” in January of 2009 he would have pushed policies then that were genuinely stimulative to the private sector, instead of inviting Nancy Pelosi and her crew to construct a near-trillion-dollar monstrosity of a Democratic wish-list and calling it a “Stimulus Bill” when it clearly was going to do nothing except stimulate the debt to its now near-farcical proportions.

I am convinced that Obama was willing to throw that opportunity away to help real people get real jobs because he simply didn’t care, and I emphasize this because I think that it is something very, very strange in an American president. He did not see it as his job to actually deal with the economic hardship in a practical and helpful manner. He instead saw his job as being to implement the kinds of trans-formative policies he’d been dreaming about: first and foremost his plan for remaking the American health care system, and after that the carbon cap and trade (which will now be pursued by EPA fiat) and then on down the line with lesser priorities. He wasn’t interested in what price the U.S. economy and the ordinary people who are its backbone would pay for this lack of focus on the real problems of the day. At best, he believed that those capitalists out there would just take care of themselves, and things would rebound in a cyclical fashion like they usually seem to do.

He has begun to care about unemployment now simply because it is two years later and he knows that if the economy does not improve then his chances of re-election are effectively zilch.

So, he has made a deal to re-up the Bush tax cuts — which he had previously blamed for causing the country’s economic ills — because he now actually cares about facing the reality that tax increases depress economic activity, and tax cuts stimulate it.

What he has added to the mix is his own idea of a cut in the payroll tax, i.e. the Social Security tax, from 6.2% to 4.2%, to be effective for thirteen months. Well … for those who automatically oppose tax cuts all the time (usually known as “Democrats”) this surely ought to be seen as the most craven kind of gimmick that could be conceived, and indeed it is. Is there anyone who thinks that Social Security doesn’t need this money? In fact, everyone is aware that the Social Security system is well on its way to insolvency, due to an aging population (fewer and fewer workers paying for more and more retirees). We’re told that the way to fix this is either to raise the retirement age, reduce benefits, or increase payroll taxes (or a combination of two or three of these approaches). On what planet do you have to be living in order to think that lowering the Social Security tax is a wise step?

Undoubtedly, it will put extra money in just about everybody’s pocket, so it will be stimulative. But it is entirely the wrong way to provide the stimulus. It would be better — much better — to just send everyone a once-off check: “HERE’S YOUR FREE MONEY” – signed, your friend, Barack H. Obama. To package it instead as a cut in the Social Security tax is a fundamentally dishonest and quite pernicious act. Social Security taxes simply can’t be cut. And yet, they just have been.

In thirteen months, they will be due to go up again. That takes us — let me see — right into early 2012. Hmm, a presidential election year. So, there’s going to be a tax “hike” on everyone in a presidential election year?

But “No!” I can hear President Obama and the Democrats saying, in early 2012. We can’t let this tax go up — a tax that affects all working people, even the poor, while the rich still have their tax cuts that they got from that bad, bad man, George W. Bush.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this sets up a class warfare type of argument in an election year. That is the Trojan Horse in all of this.

I am glad that Barack Obama has come around to believing that tax cuts are stimulative, after two years of watching the economy grind painfully, and ordinary people lose their jobs, while he pursued his more holy agenda. I am sorry that the only tax cut he could come up with himself was this fundamentally dishonest one. At a time when America could benefit from a president big enough to begin to suggest tough decisions on Social Security, instead we have one craven enough to turn the issue into a political weapon, even if it means damaging the very thing he supposedly prizes.

…

(The phrase “Age of Light” is a reminder of this night in Minnesota in 2008.)

Related posts:

• Age of Light update
• Actor Alec Baldwin announces: “I am a conservative”!
• Our new president and his first week: an impressionistic miscellany

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