Obama: More Class Warfare, More Corporate Welfare, More Unemployment and Political Division

President Obama has implied that his critics don’t understand math, which is odd given his inability to balance a budget (he’s run up the biggest budget deficits in history, after falsely promising a “net spending cut“). But it all depends on how you look at it.  As one commenter puts it, “Obama is great at math. He divides the country, subtracts jobs, adds debt and multiplies misery.”

Economically, though, the president’s class warfare doesn’t add up. Even plundering the rich of all their income wouldn’t be enough to plug Obama’s skyrocketing deficits. As David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner notes, “In 2009, the earners Obama is targeting had only $1.5 trillion in income after paying their federal income taxes and before paying taxes to states and municipalities. Were Obama to seize every dime of that money, it would just barely cover the $1.3 trillion deficit he just ran in the fiscal year that ends next week.”

This is not the only kind of class warfare Obama engages in. He also forces middle-class taxpayers to foot the bill for corporate welfare for politically-connected cronies like the owners of Solyndra. Solyndra is the bankrupt solar manufacturer that recently went under, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, after it received preferential treatment in the form of $535 million in federal loan guarantees under the stimulus package.

The Obama administration hastily approved the subsidy for Solyndra despite obvious danger signs and warnings from accountants about the company’s likely collapse, the misgivings of agency officials, and the company’s mismanagement and lousy-quality products. (Solyndra executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment to avoid disclosing incriminating information.) The Obama administration was determined to shovel taxpayer money to its cronies as fast as it could. As an Obama fundraiser and Solyndra stakeholder exulted,  “there’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history and probably never will be again than in the last few months and the next 18 months. And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much of it . . . as we possibly can. “At the time Solyndra received its grant, Vice President Joe Biden declared that the Solyndra investment is ‘exactly what the [the stimulus package] is all about.’”

So President Obama’s class warfare is generally likely to harm, rather than help, people of modest means, as Will Wilkinson, a disillusioned one-time Obama supporter, notes at The Economist:

Mr Obama is a class warrior. The trouble is he’s on the wrong side.

During Mr Obama’s reign, the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street has been replaced with an open garage door you can drive a hybrid truck through.

Wilkinson cites the recent case of Obama bailout captain Jim Millstein cashing out, before turning his attention to the Solyndra scandal, and observing that liberals should “give up any illusions we may have about which side of the class war our favourite major political party is fighting on: probably not yours.”