While a recent new report on President-elect Obama’s plans is pretty high on glittering generality, including the obligatory swipe at George Bush, the former senator shares the single substantive detail (and it isn’t much) about how he will aid the rebuilding of the economy. Here is his plan to create 2.5M new jobs by 2011.
“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” Obama said. He also made a commitment to fuel-efficient cars and alternative energy technologies “that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”
Move over Community Reinvestment Act. We’re about to have a new Works Progress Adminstration, a new Civilian Conservation Corps, a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, etc.
Sure, we got the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge out of the deal (though some might call that a bridge to nowhere).
But does anyone really think that millions of unemployed men and women are going to live in tents next to enormous public works projects for months or years on end? In a time of 25-30% unemployment, only the truly desperate saw that as a good option. No one is quite that desperate, yet, except for Christian aid workers, who will volunteer to live rough for months on end in order to help disaster victims, etc.
By funneling money out of the private sector (where it multiplies itself when not being alternately poisoned and starved by taxes and regulations) into government programs where the money is merely spent (even if some of it goes to the private sector, it still distorts the market place, by leading to decisions based not on productively serving customers, but on pleasing government bureaucrats), we’re supposed to acquiesce in the hope that the Obama Force will somehow create a vibrant new economy based on new realities.
But there ARE no new realities, economic or otherwise, only old ones. Pretending we don’t know them will not have a good end. World War II, though necessary, obscured that fact that FDRs programs had mostly failed to revive the economy, because they did not grow organically IN the economy, but were grafted onto it… a bit like adding artificial muscles with a limited service life and trying to convince yourself you can run faster forever.
This isn’t the 1930s, and programs that “worked” then are likely to be much less successful now. If that happens, let’s pray we don’t need an enormous war to divert ourselves from its failure.
