Say Anything Blog

In a recent OpEd, CNBC business reporter Charlie Gasparino nails the economic disaster that awaits us if Obama is elected president and his economic policies are enacted by a gleefully fiscal-illiterate Congress.

(I)t’s hard to see how a President Obama would be good for Wall Street. He wants to raise the capital-gains tax to a whopping 28 percent from the current 15 percent. That’d be great for the tax-shelter business, but stocks would tank…

At bottom, Obama is about taxing wealth creation - not the piles of cash these guys have already accumulated.

He won’t have an opposition Congress to restrain him. With Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge there, Obama can and will tax and spend as he wants.

Wall Street traders are a gloomy lot these days given all the writedowns, losses and layoffs, but Obama makes them especially queasy. Many traders I speak to think the markets have yet to fully digest the impact of Obama’s economic plan on stock prices. The guess is that it will hit after Labor Day, when the campaigning picks up and traders stop taking Fridays off to hit the Hamptons.

In others words, the markets could fall further from their already beaten-down levels once the street begins to focus on an Obama presidency.

Wait, you say: Wall Street’s woes don’t necessarily translate into Main Street problems. The markets can go down, but people still go to work.

Sorry, those days are over. Never before have Wall Street and Main Street been so intertwined: Nearly every American has a 401-k plan to save for retirement. Here in New York, city and state budgets rely on Wall Street bonuses for tax revenues like never before - just ask Gov. Patterson, who last week warned of budget disaster, largely thanks to the Wall Street slowdown.

One trader recently reminded me of another president who raised taxes and clamped down on free trade, as Obama seems set to do - just after the stock-market crash of 1929: His name was Herbert Hoover. And you know what happened next.

Raising taxes, as Obama has promised to do, would be an economic disaster for the country… completely counter-productive.

Barack Obama is as clueless about the economy and tax policy as he is about military affairs and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We can not afford the risk of his ignorance and ineptitude in either area of national policy.

H/T: Don Luskin