In some sense, President Obama is fortunate. I predicted a long time ago that he would win re-election if the unemployment rate was under 8 percent.

Well, the new numbers just came out and the unemployment rate is 7.9 percent.

So even though his stimulus failed, and even though his class-warfare tax policy is like a dark cloud over the economy, and even though his plans to further increase the burden of government spending will accelerate America’s descent into a Greek-style fiscal quagmire, he may dodge the proverbial bullet.

You can see my latest election prediction by clicking here, and you can even cast a vote in my reader poll. But let’s set aside the crystal ball nonsense and focus on public policy.

Below are four images that summarize Obama’s dismal performance.

We’ll start with a chart showing what President Obama claimed would happen to unemployment if we enacted his so-called stimulus compared to the actual real-world results.

As you can see, the joblessness rate currently is more than 2.5 percentage points higher than Obama claimed it would be if we implemented his Keynesian plan.

Now let’s look at some updated images of how this “recovery” compares to previous recoveries in the past six decades, based on data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. We’ll start with the unemployment rate. Take a wild guess which president has presided over the red line at the bottom.

Previously, I’ve compared Obamanomics and Reaganomics,but this image may be even better because it shows all business cycles and confirms that the Obama years have been the worst in post-World War II history.

And we see something similar if we look at GDP growth. Once again, go out on a limb and guess who is responsible for the weakest recovery since World War II.

Last but not least, this info-graphic is a bit dated, but Obama’s dismal track record would not change if we added the past few months of data.

Defenders of the White House argue that all these bad numbers are a legacy of the dismal situation that Obama inherited. That’s partially true. Obama should not be blamed for the depth of a recession that began before he took office.

But he should be held at least somewhat accountable for an anemic recovery—particularly since he promised “hope” and “change” and then continued the big-spending, pro-cronyism policies of the Bush years.

The moral of the story, needless to say, is that free markets and small government are the keys to growth and prosperity.

I shared a cartoon last Halloween that made fun of those who support class-warfare tax policy.

Now we have a related cartoon, featuring a stop at the White House.

The next two cartoons are almost identical. We’ll start with this one from Michael Ramirez.

Ramirez is one of my favorite cartoonists, incidentally, and you can see more of his work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s a Gary Varvel cartoon with the exact same message.

Instead of great minds thinking alike, this is a case of great cartoonists thinking alike. Though they probably have great minds as well.

But I don’t want to make too many fawning comments since I would modify both of these cartoons so that the kids were looking at papers that said “Medicare” and “Social Security” instead of “debt.”

It’s always important to focus first and foremost on the disease of spending, after all, and not the symptom of red ink.

Last but not least, I can’t resist linking to this comedian’s video, which includes some very good economic insights about work incentives.

Sort of like this Wizard of Id parody featuring Obama.

The title of a New York Times editorial claims that “A Big Storm Requires Big Government.” The Times implies that when confronted with a major natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy, Americans would be screwed if they didn’t have bureaucrats from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.”

(Gee, I had no idea that it was government planners who directed my local Wegmans to ramp up shipments of bottled water to meet the demand of people rushing to stock up on H2O.)

One would think that the Times might have been more restrained in casting as our savior the same outfit that responded to Hurricane Katrina with trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. Nope. According to the Times, it’s crazy to think that the “financially strapped states” could handle disaster relief. “Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid?” the Times asks. “Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages.”

Why shouldn’t the states be responsible for paying for disaster response? The last time I checked, the federal government was also financially strapped. Regardless of which level of government assumes the responsibility of paying for it, the money ultimately comes from taxpayers. Under the current arrangement, taxpayers in, say, Arizona will pay for disaster recovery in Pennsylvania. Is it really more absurd to expect the citizens of Pennsylvania to pay for their own disaster response than people living in, say, the Rockies? Here’s another crazy thought: maybe Pennsylvanians would have more of an incentive to scrutinize the effectiveness and efficiency of relief efforts in their state if they were footing the bill?

A 2006 Cato study written by economists Russell Sobel and Peter Leeson argues that the federal government’s top-down disaster system is “fundamentally flawed.” Bureaucratic red tape and the inherent inability of federal officials to effectively coordinate the delivery of supplies can stymie relief efforts. State and local officials are naturally closest to those affected and thus better appreciate the needs of their communities. However, federal red tape can impede the ability of those on the frontlines to effectively deliver assistance. Take, for example, FEMA’s interference with the delivery of relief supplies to hospitals during Katrina:

The Red Cross “begged to be allowed to go [into New Orleans]” to distribute essential relief supplies but was prevented by government officials from doing so. FEMA confiscated critical emergency supplies, shipped by the hospital’s out-of-state private owner to assist the hospital’s 137 remaining patients, while the supplies were in transit to Methodist Hospital in New Orleans. “Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital,” one hospital representative remarked. To avoid FEMA’s confiscatory actions, the owner sent a second shipment to Lafayette (130 miles from New Orleans) and had a private helicopter fly it directly to the rooftop of the hospital in New Orleans.

Sobel and Leeson recount numerous examples of FEMA’s inability to coordinate the delivery of relief assistance. Here’s another:

Perhaps the most stunning example of how a centralized federal bureaucracy is inherently ill-equipped to coordinate the direction of relief resources is what has become known as the “odyssey of the ice.” FEMA ordered 182 million pounds of ice to be delivered to stranded families and aid workers. Yet some of the ice ended up in Portland, Maine, more than 1,500 miles away from the disaster area. The cost of shipping and storing the 200-plus truckloads of the Portland-bound ice was $275,000…

A truckload of ice even ended up at the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Arizona. The driver of the ice truck got so many conflicting commands from government relief officials that he ended up traveling through 22 states without ever delivering a single bag of ice to a hurricane victim. Instead, he ended up donating it to the Tucson zoo to be enjoyed by the polar bears.

Of course, anytime federal policymakers have the green light to spend other people’s money, politics invariably come into play. The President is responsible for declaring that a disaster qualifies for federal aid. According to Sobel and Leeson, recent presidents issue the most “major disaster” declarations when it is reelection time:

After examining all disasters from 1991 to 1999, a comprehensive study by Garrett and Sobel found that states politically important to the president in his reelection bid have a significantly higher rate of disaster declaration. Recent data confirm the continuation of this political manipulation. In 1996, when Bill Clinton was up for reelection, he set a record by declaring the largest number of major disasters in history: 75. Unsurprisingly, the second-highest year for disasters in history was 2004, George W. Bush’s reelection year, when he declared 68. Ninety percent of the increase in disasters declared between 2003 (a nonelection year) and 2004 were in the 12 battleground states where the election was decided by 5 percent or less.

The year with the largest number of disasters declared during George H. W. Bush’s administration was also the year he was up for reelection, and this holds true for Ronald Reagan as well. Other striking individual examples abound, including a two-foot snowstorm in Ohio (a state that went for Bush), which netted that state disaster relief during the 2004 election year, while Wisconsin (a state that went for Kerry) was denied disaster relief in 2005 in the aftermath of a major tornado.

The authors also note that “For every representative a state has on the House disaster relief oversight committee, it receives about $30 million in additional funding when a disaster is declared. All told, the [Garret and Sobel] study found that nearly half of all disaster relief is motivated by politics rather than by need.”

Finally, Sobel and Leeson point out that “The vast majority of disasters declared are for rain, snow, and other mundane weather events.” Indeed, the following chart shows that the total number of federal disaster declarations has substantially increased since the mid-1990s.

What has happened is that disaster assistance has become effectively nationalized. So for all of the Times’ whimpering about cutting FEMA’s budget, the real problem is that the federal government has (once again) overstepped its boundaries. But just as is the case with all federal aid to lower levels of government, the receiving state and local politicians are only too happy to take the “free” federal money instead of having to ask their constituents to come up with it.

The folks at the Center for Freedom and Prosperity have been on a roll in the past few months, putting out an excellent series of videos on Obama’s economic policies.

• A look at the President’s failure to control government spending.
• A review of the Obama’s dismal track record on jobs and growth.
• A video showing how the auto bailout has been a costly mistake.

Now we have a new addition to the list. Here’s Mattie Duppler of Americans for Tax Reform, narrating a video that eviscerates the President’s tax agenda.

I like the entire video, as you can imagine, but certain insights and observations are particularly appealing.

1. The rich already pay a disproportionate share of the total tax burden — The video explains that the top-20 percent of income earners pay more than 67 percent of all federal taxes even though they earn only about 50 percent of total income. And, as I’ve explained, it would be very difficult to squeeze that much more money from them.

2. There aren’t enough rich people to fund big government — The video explains that stealing every penny from every millionaire would run the federal government for only three months. And it also makes the very wise observation that this would be a one-time bit of pillaging since rich people would quickly learn not to earn and report so much income. We learned in the 1980s that the best way to soak the rich is by putting a stop to confiscatory tax rates.

3. The high cost of the death tax — I don’t like double taxation, but the death tax is usually triple taxation and that makes a bad tax even worse.

Especially since the tax causes the liquidation of private capital, thus putting downward pressure on wages. And even though the tax doesn’t collect much revenue, it probably does result in some upward pressure on government spending, thus augmenting the damage.

4. High taxes on the rich are a precursor to higher taxes on everyone else — This is a point I have made on several occasions, including just yesterday. I’m particularly concerned that the politicians in Washington will boost income tax rates for everybody, then decide that even more money is needed and impose a value-added tax.

The video also makes good points about double taxation, class warfare, and the Laffer Curve.

Please share widely.

President Obama repeatedly assures us that he only wants higher taxes on the rich as part of his class-warfare agenda.

But I don’t trust him. In part because he’s a politician, but also because there aren’t enough rich people to finance big government (not to mention that the rich easily can alter their financial affairs to avoid higher tax rates).

Honest leftists are beginning to admit that their real target is the middle class. Here are a few examples.

• The New York Times endorsed higher taxes on the middle class in 2010.
• The then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also gave a green light that year to higher taxes on the middle class.
• Earlier this year, MIT professor and former IMF official Simon Johnson argued that the middle class should pay more tax.
• The Washington Post also called for higher taxes on the middle class this year, as did Vice President Joe Biden’s former economist.

In other words, politicians often say they want to tax the rich, but the real target is the middle class. Indeed, this is the history of tax policy. In a post earlier this year, warning the folks in the Cayman Islands not to impose an income tax, I noted how the U.S. income tax began small and then swallowed up more and more people.

[T]he U.S. income tax began in 1913 with a top rate of only 7 percent and it affected less than 1 percent of the population. But that supposedly benign tax has since become a monstrous internal revenue code that plagues the nation today.

The same thing is true elsewhere in the world.

Allister Heath explains for London’s City A.M. newspaper.

The introduction of income taxes around the world have tended to follow a very similar pattern over the past couple of centuries. First, we get generally low income tax rates, with most people exempt and with the highest rate only affecting a few people relatively lightly. Eventually, tax rates shoot up for everybody – including to crippling levels for top earners – and millions more are caught by income tax. The next stage is that the ultra-high tax rates for top earners are reduced to manageable levels – but ever more people are brought into the tax system, with the higher brackets also catching vastly more folk.

By the way, you can see that Allister makes a reference to tax rates being reduced for top earners. That’s largely because many politicians learned an important lesson about the Laffer Curve. Sometimes, the best way to “soak the rich” is by lowering their tax rates. Unfortunately, President Obama still needs some remedial education on this topic.

Allister then looks at some specific United Kingdom data revealing how more and more middle class people are now subject to higher tax rates.

The biggest change in the UK has been the number of people paying what is now the 40p tax rate: up six-fold in thirty years, from 674,000 in 1979–80, 2.5m in 1999–2000 to 4.048m in 2011-12. This number will jump again to around 5m in 2014, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, just 2.6 per cent of taxpayers paid the top rate; by the time of the next election, 16.7 per cent will.

If Obama and other statists get their way, we’ll see similar statistic in the United States. Higher income tax rates for the rich will mean higher income tax rates for the rest of us. Though I’m even more worried about a value-added tax, which would be a huge burden on ordinary people and a revenue machine for greedy politicians.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the American tax code actually is more “progressive” than the tax codes of Europe’s welfare states. This is largely because we don’t pillage poor and middle-class taxpayers with a VAT.

P.S.: Since I mentioned the Laffer Curve above, I should emphasize that the goal of good tax policy should be to maximize growth, not to maximize tax revenue.

P.P.S.: And don’t forget that poor and middle-income taxpayers also will be hurt because slower growth is an inevitable consequence when tax rates climb and the burden of government spending increases.

In the Washington Post today, Brian Lee Crowley discusses the still little-known story of Canada’s

tremendous budgetary turnaround achieved in the mid-1990s. Over just a few years, between 1995 and 1998, Canada transformed a $32 billion federal deficit, equivalent to 4 percent of its gross domestic product, into a $2.5 billion surplus. This achievement was followed by a full decade of surplus budgets, with debt, tax and poverty rates all falling as growth, investment and employment rose.

Crowley discusses the reasons the success happened, from bipartisan (actually multipartisan) agreement to rallying public support. He promises six reasons, but lists only five. Maybe that’s part of the cutbacks. It’s an inspiring story: if Canada could cut federal spending from 22 percent of GDP to 15 percent, why can’t we?

And it’s a story you could have read in Cato Policy Report in May. Long-ago Canadian Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax policy studies, wrote:

In just two years, total noninterest spending fell by 10 percent, which would be like the U.S. Congress chopping $340 billion from this year’s noninterest federal spending of $3.4 trillion. When U.S. policymakers talk about “cutting” spending, they usually mean reducing spending growth rates, but the Canadians actually spent less when they reformed their budget in the 1990s.

And he offered this graphic depiction of the diverging fiscal picture in the United States and Canada:

Members of Congress: take note. Washington Post readers: You could have read it here first.

Several Republican congressmen have written to U.S. Export-Import Bank President Fred Hochburg, asking some probing questions about the business plan the bank submitted to Congress last month. They rightly express concern about the bank’s operations and risk management. They also cite the nondiversified portfolio of the bank, with its high reliance on the aircraft sector (which has long been about half of the bank’s exposure) singled out for particular concern. The letter, in short, gives a good indication of where bodies are buried at Ex-Im.

All this is very well, of course, except for one problem: most of the issues the congressmen raise have been a concern for many years, and yet Majority Leader Eric Cantor, one of the letter’s signatories, earlier this year negotiated not only an extention of the bank’s mandate (he agreed to extend it until 2014), but also an increase in its lending ceiling, with a few lily-livered “reforms” tacked on. Now he’s asking questions?

Mr. Cantor isn’t alone, of course; plenty of members from both sides of the aisle (including “tea-party” folks) voted for the reauthorization. But the concerns the letter raises are serious, longstanding, and were ultimately solvable by deauthorizing the bank’s charter altogether. And yet Mr. Cantor balked at that opportunity.

I should point out that one of the other signatories to this letter, Rep. Jim Jordan, and the Republican Study Committee he chairs, were behind a push to wind down the bank.