"Do Leopards Change Their Spots?"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“Do Leopards Change Their Spots?”

January 19, 2011

Has President Obama experienced an epiphany? Reading his op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal it certainly seemed so. When he spoke of the free market being “the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known,” he could have been speaking for the Heritage Foundation. When he added: “Small firms drive growth and create most new jobs in this country. We need to make sure nothing stands in their way,” he sounded like a disciple of the American Enterprise Institute.

These are the words of a President with less business experience in his cabinet than any previous incumbent and from a man who added more regulation to our nation than any President since Franklin Roosevelt – healthcare and financial reform among them. A failure to pass “Cap and Trade” legislation resulted in the administration strengthening regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder: has the leopard actually exchanged his spots for stripes, or are these the words of a politician who is looking toward 2012, after a disastrous mid-term election?

Signing 4000 pages of legislation, encompassing but two bills (healthcare and financial reform) both of which risk stifling innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs, does not appear to be the actions of the man who wrote in his op-ed that he did not want regulation to place “unreasonable burdens on business.” The healthcare bill of 2010, according to the Center for Health Transformation, will create 159 new federal government programs, bureaucracies and offices. The Dodd-Frank bill created two new agencies, along with hundreds of new rules and regulations. It not only left banks-too-big-to-fail in place, it enhanced them, and it did nothing about the derivative problem, whose nominal value exceeds the world’s GDP by a factor of six to seven. Is it any wonder that a reader (and the people) might be confused?

The world has become a far more competitive place than a few years ago and perhaps that is what the President was addressing. The hegemony that America enjoyed in the decade and a half following the collapse of the Soviet Union will never return. We remain the largest economy, but Asian nations are gaining ground. In 2000, the U.S represented approximately 24% of the world’s GDP. Today, we are closer to 23%. Estimates suggest that we will be about 22% in 2015. China is moving in the opposite direction. Today their GDP represents about 9% of world GDP. In 2015, they should be closer to 12%. While the future is always opaque, this trend appears inexorable; it means we have to be in fighting shape to meet the competition. Words, while they are pleasant to read and exciting to hear, do not substitute for action.

Tony Blair is a politician who has recognized the need and the urgency to re-think the political debate between a Left and a Right that persists as though the world, economically, had stood still for the last two or three decades. He writes (and, of course, he is writing about England, but his words have pertinence to the U.S.) toward the end of his memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, “As the new economies emerge, we have to compete. How? By brains and skill, by moving up the value-added chain. By working harder (my emphasis.) By competing on merit, on ability.” He goes on to add that the education system and the welfare state will have to be reformed not more cautiously, but more boldly.

It isn’t just regulation that must be streamlined and made more efficient. Regulations must be enforced. One of the problems in 2007 and 2008 leading up to the collapse of Lehman and the Bernie Madoff scandal was a failure to enforce existing rules. In my opinion, we individually have a moral responsibility to one another; the state, in that regard, plays an integral, but subordinate, role. Permitting responsibility for each of us to become principally the purview of the state, not the individual, risks an overly dependent constituency, not the characteristics needed in an increasingly competitive world.

Besides encouraging self-reliance, other steps should be taken. The deficits need to be addressed and government and unions must stop promising what they cannot deliver. Taxes should be simplified and lowered – a proposal President Obama put forth on NPR in December. We must engage with the world and avoid turning inward. While Amy Chou does not represent most mothers, our educational system needs improvement.

The headline in today’s USA Today: “Who is Obama?” In the article, retiring senior White House advisor, David Axelrod, describes the President as “consistent,” the one adjective that, in my opinion, does not describe him. While I hope that the President means what he wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, count me as being from Missouri, at least until I see action that matches his words.