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up residence in the White House. But such a reading of Obama is absurd.=20
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First, the "soak-the-rich" aspect of the proposed tax changes is vastly ove=
rstated. Obama wants to reduce the deduction that top earners take on their=
 charitable giving, but he timidly declines to raise the highest marginal-i=
ncome-tax rate immediately, preferring to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2=
011. Not until 2012 would the president's rich Wall Street and corporate-ex=
ecutive campaign donors be forced to pay 39.6 percent on part of their inco=
me - hardly confiscatory when one recalls that the top marginal rate remain=
ed above 90 percent through both Eisenhower administrations and part of Ken=
nedy's. Similarly, the top rate on capital gains was as high as 36.5 percen=
t during the Nixon/Ford era; Obama aims to raise it to just 20 percent from=
 the current 15.=20
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Fiddling with the tax code (not reforming it) is supposed to help pay for b=
etter health care. Already, Obama's health plan doesn't cover everyone, but=
 it does ensure that insurance companies and HMOs will continue reaping pro=
fits off illness and bad luck. President Truman, hardly a radical left-wing=
er, proposed authentic national health insurance in 1945 in the form of an =
optional, federally administered fund to which anyone could pay a modest mo=
nthly fee and be guaranteed payment of all their medical bills. Participati=
ng doctors would have been reimbursed by the government, but such participa=
tion was to be voluntary. Such a common-sense "single-payer" program is not=
 even being considered by Obama and Democratic leaders.=20
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Even so, left and right persist in the fantasy that the president is a Mr. =
Smith Goes to Washington character prepared to "take on" the powers that be=
. It's one thing to rationalize the vast sums that Obama raised for his cam=
paign from commercial and investment banks ("Well, you have to get elected,=
" etc.). But rationalizing the laissez-faire beliefs of Lawrence Summers an=
d Timothy Geithner - exhibited most notably in their scandalous opposition =
to derivatives regulation in the Clinton administration - borders on the id=
iotic. The left pretends that Summers isn't really Obama's chief economic a=
dviser, while the right pretends the former Treasury secretary has converte=
d to left-wing Gaullism. In reality, Summers and Geithner are in place prec=
isely to prevent real reform of a banking system that helped put Obama in t=
he White House.=20
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On budget matters, so far, Obama's economic "brain trust" is brain-dead. Co=
mparisons with FDR are spurious, given that the administration so far won't=
 even discuss restoring some form of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal law that =
separated investment banks and commercial banks. Meanwhile, Obama seems to =
have forgotten his proposed "reform" of NAFTA or of our cheap-labor investm=
ent agreement with China (so-called Permanent Normal Trading Relations). An=
d he's certainly not calling for higher tariffs to protect American industr=
y and wages, or for bank nationalizations.=20
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The Wall Street Journal's Big Brother socialist bogeyman is a canard. There=
's no authentic national economic planning in the Obama budget, just the us=
ual hodge-podge of programs that sound good to this or that constituency, c=
ongressman or columnist.=20
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Here's one little bit of central planning that could have helped, but isn't=
 seriously addressed: rebuilding the nation's passenger- and freight-railro=
ad network, badly weakened by deregulation and mismanagement. The stimulus =
bill has $8 billion for high-speed rail lines and the proposed budget adds =
another $5 billion over five years. This is chump change compared with the =
cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and paltry next to the typical cost=
-plus Pentagon boondoggle.=20
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Why not spend $50 billion on railroads? It would make the country more ener=
gy-efficient, put lots of people to work installing and upgrading track, an=
d encourage General Electric to rehire the 1,200 people it just laid off at=
 its locomotive plant in Erie, Pa. With faster, better trains (including ur=
ban rapid-transit lines), American companies could get back into the passen=
ger-train-car building business, now lost to Canada and Europe, and America=
n steel mills could profitably use some of its excess capacity.=20
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Obama, a moderate with far too much respect for the globalized financial cl=
ass, is surely the unleft, unradical president. Which makes you wonder why =
left and right find common cause in saying otherwise.=20
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John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine. Among other books, he is=
 the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.