Obama In Canada

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009

The headline over the span style="color: black;">editorial< in yesterdays Los Angeles Times: "Obama to Canada: Sorry." President Obama traveled to Canada this morning in part to soothe tensions tightened by his protectionist nomination campaign. Some selections from an advance transcript of span style="color: black;">CNN's interview< with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

[W]e have a stimulus package ourselves. We didn't impose "buy Canada" provisions. In fact, on the contrary, we actually removed duties on some important imports, partly for our own interests, and partly to stimulate trade.

I do think ... this is a huge risk to the world right now. If there is one thing that could turn a recession into a depression, it is protectionist measures across the world.

And here's my advance comment on the trip from this past weekend's National Post:

Barack Obama’s presidency is already going seriously wrong. His own administration concedes that their trillion-dollar stimulus plan will create few new jobs in the next 18 months. Public support for the huge plan is plummeting. And meanwhile Obama has neglected the single most urgent and important challenge facing the United States and the world: fixing the broken American banking system.

The contrast between Obama’s ideology-first, results-last leadership and the cautious pragmatism of Stephen Harper’s government shows strongly now, and will look only more impressive in the months ahead. As span style="color: black;">David Gratzer< wrote on the FrumForum.com Web site, no Western government has responded to the financial crisis more responsibly than Harper’s.

Here’s a simple checklist:

• Agree with spending money now, but in a more restrained manner.

• No to massive spending commitments years into the future.

• No to any new entitlements.

• Cut taxes across the board.

• Try to keep the GDP-debt ratio relatively constant over the next half decade.

By contrast, Obama is spending money lavishly Ñ but most of the money will not reach its destination until fall at the earliest. He and his advisors rejected the one idea that could have delivered money faster: temporary suspension of the Social Security payroll tax, a measure that could have put up to $120 per week extra spending money into the hands of every U.S. worker. This measure could literally have been put into effect by this coming Monday.

Instead, Obama has committed the United States to a series of major obligations that will be very difficult to rescind when the crisis is over, including a huge increase in federal responsibility for the troubled Medicaid program.

Obama’s plans envision a huge expansion in the burden of debt upon the U.S. economy over the next four years: at least $3-trillion more atop the existing $10-billion-plus

As the U.S. economy stumbles forward from today’s crisis, the Obama administration will have to raise taxes to finance permanently higher spending and crushingly higher debt.

Category: News