Smoke and Mirrors (A Rube Awakening)

Mark Steyn sizes up Barack Obama:

In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does our President often seem to reason like an antagonist straight out of Atlas Shrugged? Maybe it has something to do with the fact his advisers have less private sector experience than any President… well, ever, apparently. The chart only goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, but given that the growth in government is fairly recent I think we can safely assume past Presidents and their staff had some familiarity with not living off the taxpayer (Honest Abe famously did some honest work as a railsplitter and Jefferson was a farmer; the American Brahmin class itself is a recent result of the state’s increasingly voracious appetite for taxpayer dollars). And Obama’s staff have a lot less than any other President: the next least appears to have three times as many staffers with exposure to the private sector.
Maybe that explains why the Obama coterie also engages in the kind of fantasy bookkeeping that would get you thrown out of any boardroom in America (and probably in jail as well):

Only a fifth of respondents believed that Obama cut taxes for 95% of Americans, and even Democrats couldn’t believe the “two million jobs saved or created” fantasy