‘This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address. It was the first of several references — some oblique, some direct — to the Kennedy presidency. He issued a “challenge” to America’s scientists and engineers, offering to fund an “Apollo” project for clean energy. Echoing Kennedy’s iconic 1961 call to put a man on the moon “by the end of this decade,” Obama set the year 2035 as the date by which America should obtain 80 percent of its power from clean-energy sources. By 2015, he proclaimed, America should have a million electric cars on the road. Within 25 years, he declared, 80 percent of Americans should have access to high-speed rail.
“We do big things,” said the president.
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For some Americans, weaned on black-and-white images of John F. Kennedy’s romantic, soaring speeches, the presidency isn’t an executive’s job — it’s a knight-errant’s. President Obama, who was born three months after Kennedy’s moon-shot address, seems to have a particularly bad case of Kennedyitis. Challenges, quests, “winning the future” — all cast the president as the prophet who leads the nation toward a glorious destiny.
But Kennedy’s leadership wasn’t actually as visionary as the popular image suggests. He fumbled badly on the Bay of Pigs, at his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev (which brought on the Cuban Missile Crisis), and in the crisis over the building of the Berlin Wall. He himself described his first year in office as a series of “disasters.”
But beyond all of that, John F. Kennedy — and the nation — could indulge in an adventure like the Apollo program because we could afford it. In 1961, federal spending as a share of GDP was 18.4 percent. The Great Society was just a gleam in Vice-President Lyndon Johnson’s eye. Medicare would not be passed for four years. The economy was at the start of a boom.
Barack Obama has come too late — way too late for the sort of government over which he longs to preside. Federal spending as a share of GDP in 2010 was 43.09 percent. And under President Obama’s budget, the national debt will double by 2020. His address was oddly out of sync with our times — and internally contradictory as well. He sketched his dreams for high-speed rail, electric cars, new highways and infrastructure, better schools, and solar shingles — but then pivoted to propose a five-year freeze on annual domestic spending. (This, from the president who brought us the $862 billion stimulus.)
There are two problems with the president-as-prophet. In the first place, despite President Obama’s welcome nods to the entrepreneurial spirit and ingenuity of the American people, his goals and timetables are ultimately a top-down and government- centric approach. Obama’s aides promised a Reaganesque speech full of optimism. But Reagan’s philosophy was to govern as lightly as possible so as to unleash the creative powers of the American people. Obama’s philosophy is to lead us by the hand to the happy opportunities he perceives for us. He would substitute the wisdom of Obama for the wisdom of the market.
More importantly, President Obama’s chirpy futurism failed utterly to grapple with the central issue facing the government: avoiding bankruptcy. And the president’s freeze proposal is fallacious.
It isn’t programs like NASA or even Synfuels (yes, some of us remember that sinkhole of federal dollars) that threaten our solvency as a nation. It is the open-ended entitlements, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. Fully aware that these programs are growing beyond our ability to pay for them, the president irresponsibly added yet another medical-care entitlement — and now has the gall to insist that Obamacare will reduce costs. This is not “optimism.” This is dishonesty.
President Obama has budgeted $635 billion for Obamacare over the next decade. Even those not given to panic, like the CBO, estimate that $1.2 trillion is closer to the mark. But even that is probably way too low. The bill doesn’t really kick in until 2014. From 2014 to 2024, the more likely costs will be $2.5 to $3 trillion. That added burden, along with the stimulus and other spending during the two years in which he enjoyed a Democratic House, is the inescapable yoke of Barack Obama’s presidency.
We are not facing a Sputnik moment, but a spendthrift moment.
Ms. Charen: In all the thing POTUS promised, the question that always must be asked is, what are the costs and what are the benefits? The cost of clean energy will be more manufacturers fleeing our shores for China or India; the benefits: none. The cost of high-speed rail? What it will cost to build it. The benefits? Slim to none? Electric cars? Costs high, benefits, slim to none. And so it goes. It is as if POTUS' policy is: If it lives, tax it; if it's dead, subsidize it. We will soon become a zombified nation if this continues.
Mrs. Charen, Thank you for saying what a lot of us have been thinking since the SOTU. It seems to me that the state has become "messianic" in its aspirations. Part of believing in the divinity of the state is the conviction that it cannot fail (like God). I wonder if our society largely believes that this is the case. The day of reckoning may be around the corner.
In Japan the bullet trains are competitive with air travel because you can wander in, buy a ticket, and be on your way in minutes. Let's see how popular high-speed rail is once the TSA gets its hands on it (leaving aside the comparative success of Japan and the US with commuter rail in general).
Thank you Ms. Charen for pointing out the contridictions of leftist ideology. One can't change the world if one does not have the funding. Economics sure puts a damper on utopian aspirations.
All that Ms. Charen says is correct but I have something else to add: I've always felt that Obama was speaking robotically but never before have I sensed so strongly that he was nothng more than a remotely controlled mouth in an otherwise empty head. The actual net intellectual content of his speech did not even rise to the level of rubbish. We need to know who's at Obama's control panel before we can make much sense of him.
The goal of the socialist mentality is to instill the population with a high level of nationalistic fervor. So Sputnik threaten us and we all became nationalists to push back against the Soviet space efforts. Socialistic and Nationalistic sounds like I should "Invest" in brown shirts.
Can someone please explain to me the justification of a government welfare plan that is not means tested - Medicare? I am 67 years old, so I receive social security. As a result, I must sign up for medicare. Since I still work, and I have private health insurance, I do not need the governmnt's aid. However, Medicare is primary, and my private insurance is secondary. If I choose not to sign up for a medicare program, my private insurance cannot be primary. Is this nutty, or what. Oh, by the way, even though Medicare is primary, my private insurance premiums are not reduced. Without Medicare, the poor would still be covwered by Medicaide, we who could afford it would still be covered by our private coverage, and the taxpayer would save about a zillian dollars (30% of which is paid out in fraudulent claims) per year. I must have missed something.
Well we were warned about "sizzle and flash". No danger of that from Obama given the quality of the sludge that passes for speeches from Mr. HopeyChangey. Just a few days of marination in the sunshine expose them for what they are.
From WaPo's Ezra Klein, regarding the final paragraph of Ms. Charons column which refers to specifics on health care spending. Sorry this quotation is very long, but it takes a while to examine all the claims that Ms. Charon has made:
"The $635 billion comes from the 2010 budget, which was released in February of 2009, before the Affordable Care Act was written. It is not the amount Obama "has budgeted" for health care. It was a "downpayment" of money he wanted to put towards health-care reform. The idea was that the president was showing his commitment to paying for the bill by identifying more than $600 billion in funding at the beginning of the process. But this was never intended to pay for health-care reform, nor stand as an estimate of the bill's 10-year cost. As the conservative Heritage Foundation noted at the time, "The budget narrative even says that 'additional funding will be needed.'" The budget now, of course, includes about a trillion dollars in funding for health-care reform over the next 10 years.
The $1.2 trillion doesn't come from the Congressional Budget Office, as Charen says it does. Their estimate of the legislation is easy to find, and it's a shade over $950 billion. Check the table here (External Link). The $1.2 trillion is a number made up by opponents of the health-care bill like Cato's Michael Cannon. As he explains, to get to $1.2 trillion, you have to add in "the additional $208 billion that Democrats plan to spend on physicians who participate in Medicare." This, unfortunately, takes us down a whole other rabbit hole: It's not "Democrats" who plan to spend that money. It's "Medicare," with the support of both Democrats and Republicans. That money, in fact, needs to be spent because of something Republicans did in 1997 (the medicare doc fix). It has nothing to do with health-care reform, and it's needed even if the bill is fully repealed.
As for the $2.4-3.5 trillion estimate, that took me a little longer to track down. According to CBO, the law spends about $800 billion between 2014 and 2019. Adding five years onto that estimate seems unlikely to more than triple it. So how did Charen get to $3 trillion or so? It seems to come from an unexplained table attached to the end of a March press release from the minority staff on the House Budget Committee. The table appears to include so-called discretionary costs -- which, as CBO has explained, are not in the legislation because they predate it and are already in the budget (i.e., the Indian Health Service) and/or because Congress hasn't actually decided to spend the money -- and the unrelated Medicare spending that Cannon sunk into the legislation. There might be some other Easter eggs I'm missing."
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