Here’s a story about Harry Truman that I hadn’t known but am not surprised to learn. Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal that when Truman left office for home in Independence, Missouri in 1953, he had no idea how he would earn a living. He got a big book contract but didn’t really make a lot of money on it for a number of reasons: the cost of staff, writers, and researchers, office rent. But the former president was especially shocked that he had to pay 67 percent federal and state income taxes. Noonan writes, “Truman had supported high tax rates for broad government services pretty much all his political life. There was a sense in his letters this was the first time he personally felt the cost of the policies he’d professed. He called the taxes ‘crushing.’ ’’ I’ve called this the George McGovern syndrome. After being out of office for years, the big government, big spending former senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate bought and ran a 150 room hotel in Stratford, Connecticut. The hotel went bankrupt in less than three years. McGovern later wrote that he wished he’d had that experience before he served in public office; that it would have made him a better senator. Looking back on his experience as a businessman McGovern cited a health insurance package that by 1992 when he wrote about it would have cost $150,000 per employee, “on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonable way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.” It is one thing and inexcusable to not fully realize the costs of the burdens that they impose of the people, but some politicians have taken this indifference to a new and shameful level. In an appearance on the David Letterman show during his re-election campaign in 2012, President Obama was asked by Letterman how big the national debt is. The President didn’t know. When the question was re-posed, Obama tried to deflect it with the old Keynesian talking point that it didn’t really matter, “because we owe it to ourselves.” Huh? Our foreign creditors like China and Japan don’t count? I’m still indignant about a little episode in June when Obama announced an election year vote-buying goody for up to five million student loan borrowers, an executive decision to cap certain repayments. The president didn’t know and couldn’t say how much his initiative cost. “We actually don’t know the costs yet,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan answered for the administration. “We’ll figure that out on the back end.” All of this is a good reason to get rid of pensions and other benefits for the governing classes. Let them return to public life and, like Harry Truman, be forced to live under the conditions they have created for the rest of us. For your Freedom and Prosperity, I’m Charles Goyette.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 23:46:45 +0000
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