Opinion column in today's Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins Jr:
Put away childish things, President Obama said during his inauguration. He couldn't have found a theme more suited to the moment. The preoccupations that he and most politicians are used to running on, and that still characterize too many of his administration's utterances, are being exposed in the global economic disaster as the soppy indulgences they always were.......
Put away Ponzi welfarism. The day is gone when politicians could have hoped to have begun and ended their careers before the public ever faced the implosion of redistribution programs that depend on the workforce growing faster than the retired population......
Put away class warfare tax politics: Only a flatter, less distorting tax code is compatible with the kind of growth needed to get us out of the debt mess without inflation.
We already levy punitive tax rates on bank deposits, at a time when households need to build up savings and banks need deposits. Now Mr. Obama wants to raise taxes on small business, on investment, and on the incomes of the most productive job creators. Is he crazy?......
His will be a fascinating presidency to watch, not least because of his inexperience, his intellectual agility, and the crisis in which he finds himself. But his presidency will get really interesting in a year or two, or six months -- whenever he finally realizes that everything he thought he wanted to do is irrelevant. He'll then have to adapt an agenda for the world as it is, in which many childish things no longer have a place.
And, by the way, he kids himself if he believes he will be allowed, like FDR, to preside over a depression without being politically blamed for it. The public is different now -- the world is different -- and he will own the "Obama depression" sooner than he thinks.
Click on the title for a link to read the entire column.
