re “Obamanomics Isn’t About Big Government", WSJ, Robert Reich, 3/28/09
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819895769662043.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

To the Editors:

Mass murder was not the “animating idea” behind Stalin or Mao or Che Guevara, but it was the inevitable result of a system which can only be implemented by eliminating the millions who will oppose it. Similarly, although I disagree with Robert Reich that big government is not Barack Obama’s “animating idea”, big government is part and parcel of almost everything President Obama believes.

Mr. Reich makes ridiculous claims about Barack Obama’s budget plans being “conservative”, including the red herring that federal government spending of 22.5% of GDP is somehow reasonable because the last time it happened was under Ronald Reagan. In fact, federal spending under Reagan reached the highest share of GDP since FDR; total federal spending as a share of GDP has averaged under 20% since 1950. And Reich wants us to be happy that Obama’s budget will have it eventually drop to 22.5% from some much higher number, while Obama more than doubles the national debt in a decade?

From Mr. Reich’s class-warfare rhetoric to his misstatements about the role of deregulation to his essentially socialist “trickle up” economics, everything he says screams “big government” whether or not he’ll admit it is the animating idea of Obamanomics. I’m sure that leftist dictators of the past all would have made the same claim…and all with the same tyrannical outcome.

Ross Kaminsky is a fellow of the Heartland Institute