"This house believes that Barack Obama is failing."
The moderator's opening remarks
Few politicians, in my lifetime, have raised such hopes. When I covered his presidential campaign, I met legions of supporters who told me that Barack Obama would remake America and solve a surprising number of their personal problems.
Measured against the expectations of his most ardent fans—the kind of people who bought pictures of him riding a unicorn—Mr Obama's presidency has been a failure. But in this debate we will use a more reasonable yardstick.
Have his actions revived the economy or hobbled it? Has he made America safer? Will he ever succeed in pushing through his big domestic reforms, such as health-care and energy? And if so, will they do more good than harm?...
Defending the motion David Boaz Executive vice-president of the Cato Institute
In many ways, Obama has just doubled down on George W. Bush's policies of bailouts, takeovers, expanded Fed powers and nationalisations. In a recession he is adding debt, taxes and regulation to the burdens already felt by business...
Against the motion Elaine Kamarck Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Decades of data from the American public show a severe and persistent lack of trust in the federal government. This lack of trust is an especially difficult problem for a Democratic president with an activist and progressive agenda....
The proposer's opening remarks David Boaz
The editors make it too easy when they remind us that in claiming the Democratic nomination in June 2008 Barack Obama declared that "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless … when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth." It truly would take a Messiah to fulfil such soaring promises.
But part of President Obama's problem may be that he tried to fulfil too many of them, with no sense of the limits of the state's efficacy or the public's tolerance for expanded government. The claims of some of his advocates in 2008 that no one could spend 12 years at the University of Chicago without absorbing some sense of the benefits of markets, the limits of government and the hard lessons of the 20th century now seem as off-base as Ben Stein's buy recommendation on Merrill Lynch in late 2007.
On 20 January 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration, the Washington Post wrote, "The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before." President Obama has never quite thanked President Bush for the new powers he inherited, but he has certainly used them.
Bush raised the federal budget by more than $1.5 trillion. He bequeathed to Obama a FY2009 deficit of about $1.3 trillion, which Obama proceeded to increase with his "stimulus" bill, an earmark-heavy omnibus appropriations bill, Cash for Clunkers and more. But more than spending, he seemed bent on using a crisis atmosphere ("You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Rahm Emanuel) to amass more money and power in Washington. He proposed to bring the key health-care and energy industries under the direction of the federal government. He sought to tell financial companies how they could invest and what they could pay. I don't think he really wanted to nationalise the automobile companies; it's just that, as Uncle Duke said of the pension fund, the automobile industry was just sitting there. So he snatched it up, and he and Congress started imposing political rules: build "clean cars" rather than cars that consumers want to buy, don't build them in China, don't buy palladium from the cheapest overseas sources, use unionised trucking companies, keep inefficient dealerships open—and make enough profits to pay the taxpayers back.
His Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would use previously unknown powers to regulate greenhouse gases. His Labor Department plans to push through 90 rules and regulations in 2010 that would strengthen unions and add costs to employers. He sought to give more regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve, as a reward for causing the bubble and financial collapse. He has proposed various schemes to encourage more lending to homebuyers with insufficient credit, which were just those that combined with easy money to create the housing collapse in the first place. His top advisers "flipped through the tax code, looking for ideas" on taxes to raise, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Read the rest of this debate: http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/457
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