‘Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh . . . shovel-ready as we expected,” Barack Obama joked the other day at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Republicans jumped on Obama’s comment as insensitive. “He joked about the wildly mistaken predictions he and others at the White House made a couple of years back about the job-creating potential of the stimulus,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. “Well, I don’t think the 14 million Americans who are looking for jobs right now find any of this very funny.”
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I’m sure they don’t, but the fact that the president laid an egg when he tried to be self-deprecating isn’t the scandal here.
After all, Obama has pretty much said the same thing several times. In a New York Times Magazine profile last October, the president admitted he had to learn the hard way that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
This is a staggering indictment of the president, the team he assembled, and the journalists who accepted this administration’s arrogant assertions that they knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and what would happen as a result. Remember, this is the administration that to this day insists it is “pragmatic” and simply cares about “what works.”
“I think we can get a lot of work done fast,” President-elect Obama said shortly after a gathering of governors in December 2008. “All of them have projects that are shovel-ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door.”
Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden — the White House’s point man on the stimulus — said in a cable-news interview in February 2009: “I think what people need to understand is that this really isn’t rocket science.” Spend a bundle on public works projects and — boom — you get a lot of people working.
They were wrong.
They were wrong not just about the effect of infrastructure spending — even an analysis by the Associated Press found no evidence unemployment was significantly improved by the Recovery Act’s public-works projects — but they were wrong about the existence of shovel-ready jobs in the first place. (They were also misleading, since only a tiny, tiny fraction of the stimulus went to any infrastructure at all. The bulk went to social programs.)
Back in October, when Obama admitted that he had to learn on the job that shovel-ready jobs don’t exist, then-governor Ed Rendell (D., Penn.) — a leader in the push for the stimulus — told the New York Times it was all a terrible misunderstanding. “When we said ‘shovel ready’ we meant ‘shovel ready’ in the way we do things.” He added, “I don’t think we meant to be deceptive.”
You’ve got to love the “I don’t think” there.
The “way we do things” involves endless paperwork, union regulations, environmental red tape, and the like. That’s why it only took 410 days to build the Empire State building and 16 months to build the Pentagon but nearly 20 years to complete Boston’s Big Dig. Lord knows how long it will be for the government to finish work on Ground Zero.
The point is that the president and his team came into office insisting that they were on top of things and above mere ideological considerations. When confronted with skepticism about the existence of “shovel-ready” projects, they in effect rolled their eyes and scoffed at the backseat drivers.
But they were the ones who were blinded by ideology. One need not be an ideologue to understand that public-works contracting has become bloated and inefficient. Indeed, one must be an ideologue of a certain kind not to understand that. Or one has to be incredibly naive. Or both.
Perhaps that’s why Obama’s real economic agenda never changed to fit the economic crisis. During the campaign he promised to reform health care and fight for a green economy. After the financial crisis, the “pragmatist” stuck to his outdated agenda, saying — surprise! — what the economy needs is the same agenda he promised before. So while he kept saying he was obsessed with job creation, he spent all of his political capital on health-care reform and energy. All the while, the White House tries to spin its agenda as something it’s not.
For instance, you know where this jobs-council meeting took place? At Cree Inc., an LED lightbulb maker. Under the supposedly jobs-boosting stimulus, Cree received $5.2 million. According to Recovery.gov, that $5.2 million created 3.02 jobs. That’s $1,716,171 per job.
There’s a funny joke in there somewhere, but I don’t think Obama wants to tell it.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. (C) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
I'll bet that money "saved" a lot more than 3.02 jobs! Those of us out here in flyover country are really tiring of Washingtonspeak. While we heap most of the scorn on POTUS, most, if not all the rest of them are just as guilty. They all speak legalese so when they are caught in a lie, they can go back and tell us - what I really said was..... As someone once told me - there's not much difference between chicken salad and chickensh....
Anyone with an IQ higher than Forrest Gump's knew "shovel ready" was a lie in the first place. Any road construction project drags on forever, and that's just the part we see. Nobdy really thought there were all these projects thathad gone through property acquisition, fair market value hearings, community comment period, environmental impact statements, open bidding, reviewed open bidding, minority and female-owned contractor open bidding, site survey, etc., and were just waiting for a suitcase of cash so that they could rent a bulldozer and start to work on Monday, did they?
The only "ready shovel" belonged to Obama, and we all know what he's shovelling...
Ronald Reagan said that government works projects are examples of eternal life on earth.
It helps when digging yourself into a deeper hole a readily available shovel is nearby.
Good Lord. When will people start to understand this stuff? A basic reading of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" would dispell this stupid idea that the government can create jobs out of thin air.
Basically, although the bridge worker becomes employed, this philosophy puts someone else out of work because money is taken out of taxpayer's hands. This money could have been used in the free market to buy a TV, or a haricut. So, the brige builder gets a job, but the TV assembler or the barber is cut out of a job, so the net effect is a big 'ol ZERO in added jobs to the economy.
No, the joke is on us. Obama is living large, golfing almost every Sunday, collecting his salary and enjoying the perquisites of the job. We have been betrayed.
Shovel ready is a focus group tested phrase spoon fed to a compliant media for propaganda only.
It's clear the spending, or in the real world, wealth yet uncreated, has been assigned on a strict political basis akin to economic gerrymandering with other people's money. In short, it's graphically tyrannical.
As an aside, the picture used as the header for this piece shows the Irishman supposedly operating a shovel. The picture reminds me of the 56 foot ceremonial first pitch he threw to open the baseball game.
The One and his administration of academics are either naive or liars. The only way they would know a shovel would be when they step on it and it hits them in the face. I'm really surprised that Obama knew how to hold a shovel for the photo-op. He must have taken classes at Harvard to be able to do it.
Can I raise a point about language here? You interject "even an analysis by the Associated Press found no evidence unemployment was significantly improved by the Recovery Act’s public-works projects" in a paragraph up there. The word 'improved' sounds wrong to me; I think 'reduced would be better. When something is improved it's being made better, but this is a rather positive term to be applied to a negative concept.
Also, I'm not a fan of the SolveMedia captcha. I know it's a source of advertising revenue, but I find it annoying.
A large part of the blame lays at the feet of the national media. They have completely abdicated their responsibility to question and challenge our politicians (at least the liberal ones) in favor of promoting favorite causes, ideas and politicians. After all that has transpired over the last 3 years, BO has yet to be seriously challenged on anything he has done. Astonishing.
There has been a mass exodus of high-paying blue-collar jobs from America over the past 50 years because there has been, over that time, a massive increase in the middle class in other countries -- tens of millions of Chinese, Indians, etc. with the skills and infrastructure with which to make the things Americans used to make.
The guy whose father was a machinist has to settle for being the night clerk at the Courtyard by Marriott. If he is like his father and most Americans, he is not equipped to be a doctor, lawyer, or hedge fund manager.
It is not Morning in America. Unless you're the night clerk and it's the end of your shift.
We can solve some of this gargantuan structural problem by inventing more iPads and shifting some income from hedge fund managers to night clerks. But we are unlikely to invent so many new iPads. The market dictates that we are on a trajectory to become a nation consisting of a small class of well-off professionals served by a vast army of low-paid service workers. We need not be ruled by the market if our distaste for market distortions is not too great.
If you will not be ruled by the market, then who will you be ruled by? The political class? No thanks, I'll take the market any day. This administration has amply shown the results of centralized non-market based planning. You simply can not declare wealth and prosperity by governmental fiat. It's been tried so many times I would think the results would be rather obvious by now.
MikeB, nobody expected it to be Morning in America when a man who stated publicly he intended to do things that make living and working here more expensive was elected President.
Under Keynesian deficit spending and increasing regulation, we have Mourning of America.
But your intention was to criticize Reagan, who's supply-side policies sparked economic growth well into the Clinton years. Reagan and his advisers knew things were shifting away from blue collar manufacturing to a tech/service economy.
But there is nothing wrong with U.S. manufacturing. Google "U.S. manufaturing output by year" and look at the hits. Basically, we make more and more stuff each successive year.
Funny you say Reagan's, "...supply-side policies sparked economic growth well into the Clinton years." Most Clinton supporters give Clinton all of the credit for that fake budget surplus business.
But Clinton was just a lucky beneficiary of good timing; if his friend Al Gore hadn't invented the internet, the dot com boom couldn't have happened and pumped up the economy so much, however falsely. Then, his policies would have shown their face earlier, probably during his final term, and less blame could have been heaped on Bush II.
The Prez knew no shovel ready jobs were available. This whole stimulus package was a weiner shot for Democrat voters. It was time to return some favors for campaign contributions and they were returned; to the tune of darn near a trillion bones.
There were actually two things wrong with the term 'shovel ready.' First is the long lead time for projects; as they're now admitting, it takes time to get money into the system and get projects ramped up. And when you start dealing with the gov't bureaucracy (man, I can never spell that word right on the first try) and all the regulatory agencies, then months will easily stretch into years. Or decades.
But second, as Jonah points out, only a tiny fraction of the spending went to infrastructure projects; the bulk of it was spent on social programs and state bailouts. It illustrates the worldview of the leftists that they think that social spending acts as a grand Keynesian multiplier. They really believe that welfare and entitlement spending has a net beneficial effect on the economy. They really equate a welfare program with a bridge replacement.
It's this skewed understanding of the role of government and the nature of the economy that's at the heart of the mischief.
"There has been a mass exodus of high-paying blue-collar jobs from America over the past 50 years because there has been, over that time, a massive increase in the middle class in other countries -- tens of millions of Chinese, Indians, etc. with the skills and infrastructure with which to make the things Americans used to make."
And...how did Obama's stimulus program prevent the mass exodus of jobs to China? What exactly do we have to show for the $800 billion he asked for?
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