Pres. Barack Obama hopes to be saved by a euphemism.
He is wagering on the power of the word “investment.” It sounds so market-oriented and cutting-edge in contrast to its more pedestrian, politically fraught synonym, “spending,” especially the toxic “deficit spending” that, to this point, has defined Obama’s presidency.
Advertisement
The focus on “investment” is nothing new. Obama already had leaned heavily on one of the hoariest Democratic tropes. When he signed the stimulus bill in February 2009, he used the word “invest” or “investment” 15 times in a 2,000-word speech. A casual listener might have been hard-pressed to understand that any new government spending was involved at all, what with all the “critical investments,” including “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower” and “the largest investment in education in our nation’s history.”
In a June 2010 speech at Carnegie Mellon University on his vision of a “new foundation” for the economy, Obama uttered the word “invest” or “investment” about two dozen times. If he weren’t president, he might be working in a boiler room somewhere, touting a dubious stock. Former Bush official and Hoover Institution fellow Keith Hennessey substituted “government spending” for “investment,” getting this Obama paragraph:
It’s a foundation based on government spending on our people and their future; government spending on the skills and education we need to compete; government spending on a 21st-century infrastructure for America, from high-speed railroads to high-speed Internet; government spending on research and technology, like clean energy, that can lead to new jobs and new exports and new industries.
Going back at least 20 years, “investment” has been what Democrats say when they want to spend. In his 1993 State of the Union address, Pres. Bill Clinton used the word about two dozen times, right before a liberal bender that ended the Democrats’ 40-year grip on the House.
Obama isn’t changing his economic philosophy. He’s not even dressing it up with a new word. It’s the same old spending, although presumably not quite as reckless as the first bout. His administration is perpetually stuck on stimulus.
The New York Times Magazine ran a long “what went wrong?” report on Obama’s first, mostly departed economic team. The regret of former top adviser Christina Romer is that the administration wasn’t “bolder” in getting more stimulus money from Congress after the initial package. If the experience of the stimulus bill hasn’t chastened the Obamaites, nothing will.
What has the return been on all those investments we were told would “bring real and lasting change for generations to come”? In an article in Commentary magazine, John F. Cogan and John B. Taylor detail how the slow-moving infrastructure spending in the package barely made a ripple in the economy. As for the rest of it, “the borrowed [federal] funds were mainly used by households and state and local governments to reduce their own borrowing.”
The government is not Warren Buffett. An ungainly, politically driven behemoth, it is not a good judge of value, and it almost never cuts its losses. We have “invested” untold billions in federal dollars in education since the 1970s, and test scores have barely budged. We have been subsidizing alternative energy for just as long, and have only created a hideously inefficient green-energy sector. We have allowed transportation spending to be warped by gross congressional politics (earmarks and logrolling) and silly fads (light and high-speed rail).
Modesty is in order. The federal government can invest at the margins, in basic research and the like, and can hope that some of its activities — the space program and defense, for instance — spin off useful technologies. Otherwise, its role is setting the predicate for the private investment that drives innovation and ultimately job growth. That means cutting spending and regulation, reforming the tax code, embracing free trade, and providing a reliable environment for commerce.
In other words, controlling government “investment” and other Washington excesses.
The problem is much larger. The entire country has come to think of the POTUS as CEO of the economy and to think of the federal government as being responsible for job creation. We hear is constantly, and not just from Democrats. I see almost no chance of this mindset ever being changed.
Invest is to put capitol into something that has an economic return. 2 years ago I was partailly supportive when the Porkulus was going to be for projects that have an economic life - roads, bridges, ports, etc. in particular if they improve economic performance. God knows we have enough of a backlog.
Instead we invested to todays paychecks, bailing out the states, basically invested at the Casino and we came up snake eyes. In 2 years we have nearly tossed 2 Trillion overboard on stuff that had a multiplier of less than 1.0 With such investments, PLEASE STOP IT
Let us not get sucked into the decades-old progressive trick of referring to the government of this country as if it actually was somehow an owner of wealth in any way. "Government spending" is, in itself, somewhat of a euphemism since the government really has no money of it's own to spend. Let's try writing that paragraph again using the REALLY correct terms:
It’s a foundation based on spending taxpayers' hard-earned dollars on our people and their future; spending the hard-earned dollars of working Americans on the skills and education we need to compete; spending taxpayers' hard-earned dollars on a 21st-century infrastructure for America, from high-speed railroads to high-speed Internet; spending money confiscated from working people on research and technology, like clean energy, that can lead to new jobs and new exports and new industries.
Government spending can be investment at times. Can't we all agree that the National Defense Highways Act spurred a massive growth in America and led to the rise of new industries, reinvigorated the American spirit, and allowed us to dominate the second half of the twentieth century? Didn't DARPA produce countless projects that continue to have value in the civillian world? The forerunner to the internet, ARPANET was a government project. What about spending that comes in the form of competitive grants for private sector companies? Isn't that effective government spending?
Follow
