CAN MR. OBAMA SAY ANYTHING THAT ISN’T UNTRUE?

President Barack Hussein Obama visited the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio last Friday (6/03) to tout the alleged economic benefits of his bailout of Chrysler.

The bailout kept the Jeep plan open, the president told workers there.   Not only that, "This plant indirectly supports hundreds of other jobs right here in Toledo," he added. "After all, without you, who’d eat at Chet’s or Inky’s or Rudy’s?"

This week Richard Lawrence, co-owner of New Chet’s restaurant, announced it was closing its doors after 90 years. So much for indirect benefits. 

What Mr. Obama said at the Jeep plant  "is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have found in a short presidential speech," wrote the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler.  "Virtually every claim made by the president concerning the auto industry deserves an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan."

On the day the president spoke in Toledo, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the unemployment rate for May rose to 9.1 percent, the highest level so far this year.  Only 54,000 net new jobs were created, barely a third of what had been forecast – of which over half (30,000) was due to one single company, McDonald’s, hiring hamburger-flippers.  

The median length of time for people to be between jobs is now at an all time high.

Mr. Obama is spinning mightily to try to distract attention from two damning facts:  The unemployment rate today is much higher than it was when he took office (in January of 2009, it was 7.6 percent), and is higher than what his chief economic adviser at the time said it might be if his stimulus package were not passed.

The stimulus bill, the auto bailouts and schemes to prop up housing  have taken great gobs of money from taxpayers and transferred it to the president’s political cronies.  But the massive debt they’ve incurred is crippling the economy rather than helping it.  Our national debt was $10.7 trillion when Mr. Obama took office.  It’s $14.29 trillion now.

But the president is still intent upon heaping additional burdens on the private sector.  He held a meeting with House Republicans June 1 to discuss raising the ceiling on the national debt, so the government can borrow more money.

Republicans insist federal spending be cut by $1 for each dollar the debt ceiling is raised.  Mr. Obama wants to reduce the deficit in part by raising taxes.

Republican Congressmen who attended the "frosty" meeting  rolled their eyes when Mr. Obama told them federal income tax rates now are the lowest they’ve ever been, lower even than during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

This was less untrue than, say, Mr. Obama’s claims for the Chrysler bailout.  For most of the Reagan presidency income tax rates were higher than they are now, because he inherited very high rates from Jimmy Carter.

Yet Mr. Obama’s assertion was still untrue.  When Ronald Reagan left office, there were just two income tax rates, 15 percent for those making less than $17,850, 28 percent for those earning more than that.  Today there are six rates, with the highest bracket paying 35 percent on income more than $379,150.

It’s a poor idea to raise taxes during a recession.  But what’s really killing the economy is an orgy of new federal regulations which saddle private sector employers with enormous costs and great uncertainty. 

The worst is Obamacare, but there are many others, such as new Dodd-Frank banking regulations which punish small banks for what the big banks did to contribute to the financial meltdown in 2008, plus new fishing regulations which may wipe out the commercial fishing industry.

Businesses must spend more than $1.75 trillion each year to comply with federal regulations, according to a report issued in April by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  But it’s the uncertainty they cause that contributes more to unemployment.

Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale, sat next to a corporate CEO on a flight to Minneapolis.  Demand for his product was up despite the recession, the executive told Mr. Carter, but he refuses to hire new workers.  Mr. Carter asked him why.

"Because I don’t know how much it will cost," he explains.  "How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?"

Any deal the Republicans offer to make on the debt ceiling had better slash both federal spending and the thicket of federal regulations.  Watch Mr. Obama squeal and completely demagogue the Republican position.  His capacity for disingenuousness may seem bottomless.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.