Who is General Wesley Clark?

General Wesley Clark, Democratic candidate for president who is not a registered Democrat, has been criticized for being a keynote speaker at a Republican fundraiser in 2001. There, he said President Ronald Reagan “was truly a great American leader” and praised President George H.W. Bush for his “tremendous leadership and statesmanship” and said he was “very glad we’ve got the great team in office: men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O’Neill— people I know well— our president, George W. Bush.”

Despite this past praise for Republicans presidents by General Clark, the current incarnation of Politician Clark wasted little time in letting the voters know the key difference between himself and the man he may challenge for the presidency. George W. Bush thinks Americans should pay less in taxes, Politician Clark believes we should pay more.

Clark does make it clear that he does not want to increase everyone’s taxes— he just wants to increase taxes on the rich. Here, the veteran general, and author of books on conducting warfare, joins an old and tired battle: class warfare.

Proposing to tax the rich because they don’t need the extra money tells us a lot about the political philosophy of Politician Clark. He believes the government should take money from anyone it believes does not need the money. This is a dangerous and slippery slope. It puts into the hands of government the power to decide who spends the money we earn.

Politician Clark argues that taking this money away from those who earned it and giving it to the government to spend will create jobs. This is not surprising, coming from a man who spent his career in one of the largest centrally planned economies in the world—the U.S. military.

He makes his case in his “Three-Pronged $100 Billion Strategy to Create American Jobs.”

His three-pronged plan has the economy-boosting power of a 3-legged donkey.

Prong 1: Clark proposes spending $40 billion more on homeland security. Protecting our freedom is the constitutionally mandated role of the federal government. However, the general should not surround this discussion with the language of class warfare. A government that protects and secures property and liberty is one that best allows for economic growth. Clark would have himself an acceptable plan if he stopped here, but it would not be politics if there were not any senseless spending plans proposed.

Prong 2: Clark proposes giving $40 billion over two years to wasteful state governments to ease the pain of their self-inflicted spending binges, which has left them with more government than they can afford. Clark says this will, “create jobs and lessen the need for states and local governments to raise taxes.” What it will really do is free state politicians from having to cut the budget fat their government larded on during the spending-happy 1990s—a decade when governments made it clear that more money in the coffers does not keep taxes down, it just means more spending. He also fails to show how raising federal taxes to keep down state and local taxes will create jobs—the money is still being shifted from the private sector to public sector.

Prong 3: He also proposes spending $20 billion over two years on federal subsidies of $5,000 for each new worker a company hires. On the surface, it may seem like this would create new jobs. But a closer look reveals that most of the businesses who would be receiving the subsidy would also be paying higher taxes under Clark’s plan.

In raising the top income tax rate to get more money from “the rich” Clark’s plan will also raise taxes on small businesses. This is because almost all small businesses pay taxes at the income tax rates, rather than the corporate tax rates. Small businesses also provide about 75 percent of the net new jobs added to the economy, they represent 99.7 percent of all employers, and employ over half of the private work force. By damaging the very engine of or economy, Clark’s plan will clearly mean fewer, rather than more jobs.

Studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirms this. They find that tax rate cuts, not increases, lead to job growth. A 10 percent rate cut would increase the likelihood that a firm would hire new workers by 12 percent and the median wages paid by entrepreneurs would increase 3 to 4 percent. A tax hike would have the opposite effect.

Clearly, raising taxes on the 23 million individual-owned businesses in America is not going to create jobs, even with a temporary refund, in the form of a $5,000 subsidy. Clark is right to want to boost the economy and create more jobs, but he makes the mistake of thinking the government creates jobs. It is the private sector that creates jobs, the government enables them to be created by getting out of the way.