Aiming for the middle, but they missed

By Jay Ambrose

For smart guys, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were pretty dumb in their speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Either that or they will hop on any misleading irrelevancy to build the case about middle-class misery and how Democrats are on the side of its alleviation while Republicans aren’t.

No better example pops up than Obama’s excoriating John McCain for saying the middle class consisted of people earning less than $5 million. It was a joke, for heaven’s sake — an explicit joke after which McCain said, “I am sure that comment will be distorted.” And it was, on national TV in front of millions by a candidate who says we should never question his character.

Obama had some pandering to do to no less than 95 percent of all working families. This great big bunch of voters will get tax cuts under his administration, he said. He has elsewhere made it clear that the lousy 1 percent at the top of the heap will have the financial stuffing kicked out of them.

The Democratic hero and his pal Bill just hate it that President Bush gave tax cuts to this group. They apparently don’t yet understand that people with low and middle incomes got a significant break, that there are literally millions more low-income taxpayers getting back more money from the government than they paid, and that the total share of taxes paid by the rich shot up.

The hated 1 percent, earning about 22 percent of all income, were supplying close to 40 percent of income-tax revenue in 2006 and a vastly increased number of lower-income workers have been paying nothing at all.

Liberals want you to believe differently and to think that Bush’s growth-inducing tax reduction furthered income inequality in the country. Clinton even came up with the line in his speech that, in the Bush years, we witnessed the biggest increase in inequality since the 1920s. To bad for him there’s a tool called the Gini index used to measure inequality, and that it shows the situation worsening under Clinton and changing scarcely at all under Bush.

In his stadium oration, Obama also made a Clinton vs. Bush comparison, telling us how incomes grew under the Democratic president and went down under the Republican one. He seems to have used a discredited model of calculation, even then got his numbers wrong, goofed in his terminology, left out mention of a recession that began coming our way during Clinton’s last year in office, gave no mention to the dot.com bubble in the Clinton years, did not factor in the way immigration of the undereducated drives income numbers down and neglected income-mobility studies that give a very different picture from his.

In point of fact, most of us have been getting richer — during both the Clinton and Bush years — and this is why the middle class has been shrinking, not because of a tumble to decrepitude. To be sure, the middle class does have problems, but don’t look to Obama for solutions.

He fretted in his speech that home values “continue to plummet,” and yes, we can all regret the unfortunate consequences for some. But the best way to increase the number of homeowners is to bring prices down and make mortgages affordable, not to have people get into deals that smell sweet and taste awful.

He wants to create more jobs through government programs, but that will entail taking money out of the private economy, costing us jobs.

He said John McCain’s health-insurance proposal would “tax people’s benefits,” which is a fabrication; it would shift tax credits from employers to individuals, enabling them to go elsewhere if they don’t like a company plan or their company is minus one.

His answer to high tuition at colleges and universities is to provide more money to students, which will make tuition go still higher.

Taken as a whole, the speech was an anti-corporate, anti-rich, collectivist-inspired maelstrom that proffered not one solution nearly as sure of curing what ails us as recent news delivered by the Department of Commerce. Second quarter growth was a blessed 3.3 percent, largely a consequence of exports facilitated by trade agreements Obama railed against during the primaries.

X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers. is a columnist living in Colorado.