12-04-2009

It’s A Good Thing the President Isn’t “Living Here In Allentown”

I spent the first twenty-one years of my life as Billy Joel put it, “living here in Allentown”.  I have a pretty good idea of what the really terrific people of the Lehigh Valley are like.  The Wall Street Journal reported today on the starting point of the President’s White House to Main Street tour.  The main point of the article is that the Lehigh Valley swing voters, who helped deliver Pennsylvania for President Obama in the election, are disillusioned with what they are seeing in Washington. 

Allentown may not be as perfect a litmus test of the acidity of the American population as Columbus, Ohio but it is certainly a prototypical American suburb.  The people there are patriotic and hard working and nice.  It is not a small thing when their temperature rises and the litmus test turns acidic when they focus on how the President is doing. 

I’m not sure that “White House to Main Street” was such a great choice of a name for this tour.  It conjures up the perpetually used and now ubiquitous Wall Street vs. Main Street, and therein lies the rub.  People, in general, don’t understand how we can be spending all this money to bail out Wall Street and yet there is no money being spent to bail out the average citizen.  Please hearken back to our original proposal on how our huge problems should have been addressed:  Beacon Commentary-March 2, 2009 Dr. Obama, Please Treat the Disease, Not the Symptoms.      We suggested that the best way to fix the problems we faced would be to offer all-comers a 4% mortgage.  This would have been expensive, but less expensive than what we ended up doing, and more importantly, the average taxpayer would have known that a fair solution was being proposed.

None of what has been done, or is being proposed, seems particularly fair to the average person.

• Bailing out the banks when companies like Goldman Sachs are already reporting record bonuses certainly doesn’t seem fair. 

• Fixing healthcare on the backs of taxpayers with declines in Medicare and choice, while special interests remain intact certainly doesn’t seem fair.

• Spending stimulus money on EVERYTHING except job creation certainly doesn’t seem fair.

• Cap and Trade that allows polluting companies to buy their way out of their misdeeds certainly doesn’t seem fair. 

• Sending thirty thousand more troops, who happen to represent the lower socio-economic brackets in the country, to put their lives on the line certainly doesn’t seem fair.  It can be convincingly argued that the people of Afghanistan don’t want to live in a democracy and choose not to understand why we are there. 

This administration will receive feedback in Allentown from what is becoming the “not so silent” majority.  There really are baseline perceptions of what is and is not fair.  You can’t delude people into following policies that are cloaked in liberal ideology, but really aren’t fair.

Wake-up call number one will soon be available to the President after he experiences this tour.  The question is whether he will listen, or whether he and his close-knit group of followers will blow off the input and just talk among themselves to set the forward agenda.  

Fred S. Fraenkel
Vice Chairman and
Chairman of Investment Policy
Beacon Trust Company

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