OPINION: Robin Hood the rescuer

Barack Obama had best become the messiah, considering this utopia he promises.

His acceptance speech had a shelf life of 10 hours, spent while most Americans slept. They awoke to find a news industry that had moved on to focus on the announcement of John McCain's new running mate, the conservative and popular governor of Alaska.

The burial of Obama's speech is too bad, because the speech was amazing. From a perspective of delivery, it may have been the best speech ever made by one of the greatest orators of all. It was moving, inspiring, full of promises and hope. And great speeches mean something. Part of great leadership is the ability to communicate well-organized ideas. Obama does that better than most, matched in modern America only by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Alan Keyes. His criticisms of the big-spending Bush administration are largely valid.

But the speech has come and gone, brilliantly buried by McCain's masterful timing, and we still don't know much at all about Obama's plans for this country.

Journalism students learn about the six essential elements of a story: who, what, when, where, why and how. Obama's good with the "Ws." Question: Who will he help? Answer: Middle-class Americans and the poor. Question: What will he do for them? Answer: Give them health care like Congress members have, educational opportunities like they've never seen, and all kinds of amenities the rich folks enjoy. Question: When will he do this? Answer: After he's elected president. Question: Where will he do it? Answer: From the White House. Question: Why will he do it? Because he believes it's the right thing to do.

And then there's this nagging little question, seldom asked and never fully answered: How will he do it?

Obama didn't leave the "how" entirely out of his speech. He promised to soak the rich, cutting taxes for the middle class and poor at an expense to the highest producers. At that point, the speech became a promise of an old recycled gift in the prettiest package ever placed under a tree.

Liberal Democrats have pitted the classes against one another since the beginning of our two-party political process. It always sounds like a good populist plan. We'll take from those with the most and give to those with the least. It's the Robin Hood thing; Robin Hood is socialist parable.

Obama can soak corporations and the rich, but he can't create wealth. Government does not, and cannot, produce wealth. Free economies produce wealth. And unless Obama creates wealth, he can't provide health care and education for all. Health care and education are forms of wealth, and there's not enough to go around.

Soak-the-rich taxes merely serve as new overhead for people who set prices and employ the middle class and poor. All taxes are regressive, because wealthy individuals and corporations pass along their overhead. They aren't evil, they're just in business.

Let's say a widget costs one dollar to make, and it sells for $1.10. If the Acme Widget Corporation's taxes go up, the widget costs more to make. If it costs $1.10 to make, the price to the consumer will be more like $1.20. The tax (a cost of doing business) has been passed down to the middle class, negating the hocus-pocus shift in tax burden. No new wealth has resulted from the shift, just an illusion of helping the poor at a cost to the rich.

Robin Hood didn't help the poor, he stole for the poor. If the CEO of Acme is hit with a giant new tax bill at home, he may lay off his gardener and maid - lower-income workers supposedly aided by a tax break. The CEO might dine out and shop less, hurting middle class waiters and sales clerks supposedly aided by a soaking of the rich. Examples could be endless, because tax regression is to economics what gravity is to physics.

The only way to keep taxes low for the middle class and the poor is to keep taxes low for all. Higher taxes for the rich make no more sense than higher fuel prices for the rich. Higher fuel prices for the Safeway Corp., and its owners, would mean proportionally higher food prices - felt more by the middle class and the poor. All tax is regressive.

Obama's soak-the-rich plan to pay for amazing promises simply isn't going to work, because it's merely a redistribution ploy. To give all Americans equal access to health care and education, this country will need additional wealth, not a shell game involving the wealth we already have.

The Federal Reserve can print more money, but that's not prosperity. Money only represents the wealth of an economy, and the more money that's printed, the less a dollar is worth. Ask anyone familiar with the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I.

Wealth and prosperity are in the form of goods and services, such as doctors, nurses and hospitals - aka "health care." Economic health results from humans finding ways to better the common good by trading in intellect and the constructive manipulation of otherwise useless resources.

Innovation, production and supplies of goods and services flourish most when the overall tax burden is low. Shifting the burden produces nothing long term.

Today, we have a health care shortage that politicians refer to as a health care "crisis." It's presented as a crisis of the haves and the have-nots. The haves are insured, and the have-nots aren't. The haves visit doctors' offices or clinics when they're ill, the have-nots visit emergency rooms. Even the haves sometimes receive inadequate health care, because of the shortage of health care workers. Some can't find doctors taking new patients. Others wait weeks for appointments. Patients are released from hospitals much sooner than is safe.

Most Americans already consume health care, and we have more demand than supply. There's not enough wealth to go around, and costs are through the roof for the patients who pay.

Big fat books could be written about the causes of the health care shortage, but it mostly involves a climate of over-regulation by government and a third-party-payer system (employee health insurance) encouraged by the tax code. Government has made the business of providing health care less rewarding and profitable than it used to be, and that's one reason it's in diminishing supply.

Considering the genuine nature of the health care dilemma - a shortage - where does Obama get off promising equal access to health care for every American who lives? Just where is Obama going to come up with enough doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics to give congressional-style health benefits to every American? And who's going to pay for this? The rich, Obama says. The rich, who will pass along the new tax burden as overhead, or lay off workers, or hunker down rather than invest in new ventures and more employees. Bad plan.

We must demand to know how Obama will do it, and soaking the rich doesn't count. He can soak the rich all he wants, and it's not going to magically mean health care for all because it won't produce wealth. It is smoke and mirrors, and a promise that defies economic reality.

A more realistic explanation would be something like this: "I'm the Messiah, and I can make it so." More realistic yet, Obama could promise to lower taxes, deregulate health care, and generally remove barriers that prevent the health care industry from creating more wealth in the form of doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics. New taxes won't do a thing.