In the face of irrelevance, Obama buys attention with other people's money

1/19/2015
BY WASHINGTON EXAMINER

View larger photo

President Barack Obama listens as British Prime Minister David Cameron speaks during their joint news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

With just two years left in the White House, President Obama faces a major challenge — not so much from Republicans as from the public at large. As Democrats look ahead to 2016 and imagine the coming campaign of a yet-to-be-chosen nominee, Obama risks being written off by all parties as irrelevant.

Having now lost both houses of Congress, Obama has lost the platform from which he can set the agenda. Soon, his party will choose a new leader to move forward, and he will be a thing of the past. This means Obama must now go to greater lengths than before in order to assert his relevance and keep the attention of a weary public.

To that end, his proposals are now beginning to match the worst stereotype of liberal policymaking — a stereotype often unfairly applied, but which certainly fits now. Obama's ideas are getting more expensive and more generous with other people's money, because that's what he believes it will take to keep the public's attention.

Obama's two most recent policy proposals — federally funded community college and paid sick and maternity leave — fit this populist model well. Each offers something that appears to be free, while attempting to hide the very real costs from the public.

Obama's college plan is not as promising politically — it is too hard to hide its $60 billion price tag. But his plan for maternity leave should have Republicans losing sleep at night. Unlike the Democrats' previous pitch to women, which mostly aimed to mobilize single women by obsessing over contraception and abortion, this plan is is designed to appeal to married women, a Republican voting bloc.

Nine in ten American businesses provide paid sick leave, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. But only 12 percent currently offer paid maternity leave, beyond the benefits available through state and employer short-term disability programs. The basic economic case against mandated paid leave is that businesses are ultimately concerned with the total cost of compensation for their employees. If the government forces them to offer benefits, then they'll just reduce salaries to keep the cost of compensation constant.

The lack of a federal requirement to pay those not working is one thing that has allowed American employers to pay better wages to those actually working. As the Heritage Foundation's James Sherk put it, “The popularity of Obama’s paid sick leave proposal depends on workers not realizing it ultimately comes out of their paychecks.” He notes with some amusement that the best academic work demonstrating the relationship between higher benefits and lower pay comes from economist Jonathan Gruber — the same architect of Obamacare whose excessive straightforwardness has proven such an embarrassment to the Obama White House.

Legally binding paid maternity leave would also likely harm the job prospects of younger women. This would, in the long run, help widen the gap between what men and women earn.

Conservatives may still find these sound arguments insufficient to turn back the emotional populism Obama is offering. As with the minimum wage, this may be the bad policy that cannot lose at the ballot box. But the arguments must be made. Far bigger than this individual issue is the need to fight the perception that irresponsible and unpopular politicians can rehabilitate themselves by simply promising to make the federal government boss employers around so that hiring and economic growth suffer.

source