Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) Read Online Free PDF Page B

auto industry, the coal industry, and the oil industry. In each case the pretext is different—we have to protect the homeowner, we have to save Detroit, we have to widen the availability of health insurance, we have to protect the environment—but the effect is always the same. To a degree that seemed almost inconceivable four years ago, large domains of private industry are now under government control. If you had read Obama Sr.’s paper four years ago, you might have seen it coming.
    So what’s next? If Obama is re-elected, Americans can over the next four years expect to see a sharp increase in a whole host of taxes. The good news for Obama is that he doesn’t have to do anything to achieve this increase. It occurs automatically, with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. So the top tax rate is scheduled to rise in 2013 from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. The top rate on long-term capital gains will rise from 15 to 24 percent, and on dividends it will jump from 15 to 44 percent. The death tax, which is currently 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million, will go up to an astonishing 55 percent, and the tax kicks in at just $1 million.
    Obama’s re-election means that these increases are a done deal. But if we know anything about Obama, they are only a starting point. He will push for much higher rates, and if he has a Democratic Congress, he will probably prevail. Moreover, we can expect Obama to seek increased federal control over industries that are now not under the full control of the federal government. Education at the grade school level is already under government control—and largely for this reason, it is a mess. But higher education, although regulated, remains mostly private, and America has a higher education system that, for all its problems, remains the envy of the world. If the federal government largely takes over higher education, we can expect America’s colleges and universities to go the way of our public schools.
    Doesn’t all this point to a poorer, less efficient America? Isn’t the American standard of living, which has been stagnant at best over the past four years, likely to decline over the next four? Yes, and I believe this is what Obama wants; it is part of his anti-colonial objective. The objective is not to stimulate American business or boost productivity, but to make the rich and the big bad corporations pay for their misdeeds. It is to punish these greedy, selfish exploiters for what they have done to the rest of us, and to the rest of the world. If Obama has to bring down the economy in order to bring down the fat cats he loathes so much, if he has to sap America’s economic vitality to end America’s reign as a global superpower, I believe he will do it.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    DISARMING THE ROGUE NATION
     
    We have met the enemy, and he is us.
    —Pogo
     
     
     
     
     
    T hree decades ago, President Ronald Reagan mobilized America’s defenses to combat what he termed the “evil empire.”
    The term was controversial, but at the same time accurate. The Soviet Union, after all, had an empire that included Poland, the Baltic States, and the rest of Eastern Europe, and the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and had satellites in Cuba, Nicaragua, and a dozen or so other countries. Meanwhile, since the end of the Vietnam War, America had been in retreat across the world. Reagan set out to reverse this trend. He led a massive military buildup to counter the Soviets. He authorized the building of MX missiles and deployed medium-range missiles in Europe. He initiated the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense program, to shoot down missiles fired at America or our allies. Reagan’s goal was not merely containment but rollback—to push the Soviet Union back behind its original borders. Ultimately Reagan got even more than he bargained for. The Communist regime itself disintegrated, and Russia ceased to be a global superpower.
    Now, thirty years later, we have a very different kind of