President Obama did a town hall this afternoon with questions from Twitter. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you see it.): The president claims "collective bargaining is why workers enjoy...weekends." I've seen the bumper sticker about labor unions...the folks who brought you the weekend, as has, apparently, the president. But when you get right down to it, isn't the reason there are weekends that the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments, says that the seventh day is a sabbath and not to work on it?
Mr. Obama spoke of dealing with the problem of underwater home mortgages by "putting some pressure" on banks, prompting a Twitter user to ask, "Is free-market an option?" Mr. Obama replied, "most of this is free market."
He gave an account of the 1990s as a time in which taxes were raised on upper-income earners and the economy boomed, while the 2000s were a time in which taxes were cut on upper-income earners and the economy did not boom. This gets it wrong in two ways — first, by ignoring the capital gains tax cuts of the Gingrich congress and the tariff reductions that were part of Nafta, tax cuts of the 1990s, and second, by ignoring the boom of the mid-2000s.
