A Lesson in Fairness For Obama

Of course, Obama’s idea of fair doesn’t exactly jib with what that word actually means.

Again, via the Investor’s Business Daily:

President Obama this week started testing his new campaign theme, replacing “hope and change” with the equally vacant promise of “fairness.” Apparently he hopes Americans can be fooled twice.

In a talk Tuesday at the site of Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech, Obama repeatedly invoked the notion of fairness. “We are greater together,” he said, “when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.”

The problem is that fairness, just like hope and change, can mean anything anyone wants it to.

For Obama, fairness obviously means more taxes on the rich, more regulations heaped on private industry, and more government spending to give people “a fair shot.”

As he put it, “there’s been a certain crowd in Washington,” who say “if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger (and) jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. … It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

Obama apparently slept through the 1980s, when Reagan’s tax-cutting, free-market policies unleashed an economic powerhouse that drove two decades of growth, produced record low unemployment and improved prosperity for everyone.

But by Obama’s own measure, the country has gotten more “fair.” The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels.

What’s unfair is what these policies have produced — a woeful economic recovery that’s hurt the middle class the most.