Is The Obama Cabinet Working Against America's Interest?

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

We’ve had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations — Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind — but never anything quite like the present bunch.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1% already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90% — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.”

Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children’s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the near impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the U.S. on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them to just about 2% of available offshore lands and 6% of onshore.

Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are now found on private lands despite, not because of, the Interior Department.

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