Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave him alone — but above all not make him worse through harmful treatment.
As 2011 ends, we have discovered how to turn a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown. Almost every haphazard, ad hoc attempt by Barack Obama to jumpstart the economy has only further stalled it. The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis. If we have a sick budget, a Byzantine tax code, bankrupting entitlements and long-term debt burden, and a costly imported-oil bill, one would never know all that from the president, who has never offered any sort of plan for addressing these crises.
Advertisement
Borrowing over $4 trillion terrified investors and business owners — especially given campaign promises that Obama would not be so “unpatriotic” as to match in three years the debt that Bush had piled up in eight. After all, no one could accuse the Bush administration of having left the economy moribund by slashing government, running balanced or surplus budgets, reducing the national debt, and in tight-fisted fashion denying federal bailouts to reckless banks and Wall Street firms. Apparently, Barack Obama saw the Bush administration’s economic transgressions not as warnings, but as a green light to borrow and spend even more on a predetermined redistributive agenda (“Never let a crisis go to waste”) — as if once a Republican administration had trespassed, conservatives could hardly throw stones at even greater sinners.
Government’s “shovel-ready” projects proved chimaeras — as if anyone could ever believe that tenured bureaucrats could spend such vast borrowed sums as efficiently as millions of private individuals responsible for their own success or failure. The irony is that drilling for more American gas and oil would, in fact, both be shovel-ready job stimulus and cost the government almost nothing; however, this was unacceptable given the opposition of the green insiders and the likelihood that corporations would profit.
Extending food stamps and unemployment benefits to record levels might in theory have sounded humane, but it eroded incentives, depressed the dependent recipients, and created no new jobs. Such gargantuan new expenditures were about as effective in combatting unemployment as prescribing a third round of antibiotics for a resistant strain of infection. A theme in many of Obama’s vast new spending schemes is that we are all supposed to believe publicly that the new largesse is the right thing to do, even if we privately shrug that it inevitably ensures quite the opposite result, given unchanging human nature.
Blaming sluggish growth on everything from ATM machines, tsunamis, and the Europeans to private-jet owners and the top 1 percent of taxpayers only reminded the general public how little those in charge knew what was going on, and reminded the particular targets why they were smart to hoard cash, not buy, and not hire — in fear of new taxes, new regulations, new costs like Obamacare, and a new antagonism from an accusatory commander-in-chief himself. Blaming the patient — uncompetitive, soft, lazy — is the worst thing a doctor can do.
If one were trying to dream up a way for the Energy Department to ensure fewer jobs, less energy, and higher costs, it would be hard to match the record of Secretary Chu. We have spent billions subsidizing inefficient solar- and wind-power companies with political connections; the results have been little or no new energy, but lots more federal debt. Thanks to Obama, the “alternative energy” industry is now discredited, as “millions of green jobs” have been downgraded to the status of “stimulus” and “investments.” Apparently, when crony capitalists and insider con men put the word “green” in front of their schemes, we are supposed to suspend moral judgment, as if they purchased medieval indulgences exempting them from scrutiny
Excellent discussion of the mess we are in and they way we got here. It is amazing tht half the population still seems to support this nonsense. I guess those are the beneficiaries of this theft.
Excellent summary and analysis, as usual. Obama's oath might also articulated as: First do no harm to those who can help me continue to do harm to the patient whose disease is success.
Your next to last paragraph reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. The petulance of those who would take our money, while berating us for making it, and then wining when we're not making it. Rand's caricatures have been realized.
Don't forget the directive making it a crime to move your business to South Carolina, er, Colorado. Odd side note: why must I enter "Chevrolet Volt," the poster child of Obama Motors, to post my comment?
Where is John Edwards when you need him?
We need to sue this doctor for malpractice along with his current "operating team"!!
The anesthesiologist -Steven Chu
Head Nurse - Valerie Jarrett
X - Ray technician (the guy who looks at everything and can find nothing) - Eric Holder
The oversight board - (NLRB)
The people that educated him on these ridiculous policies - The NEA
People that have created the stench in the room (EPA)
The reason the patient can't pay the bill -
T. Geitner and his financial programs
But of course Obamacare will take care of everything - they have already begun "rationing care" for this very sick patient (the US economy)
After getting a second opinion (while we still can) - we desperately need a new doctor!!
There is a doctor out there that understands the disease that affects our economy. He has prescribed the correct treatment (which is opposite to Obama's failed policies) and yet no one wants to acknowledge him. The real problem is too many on both sides misunderstand the problem. The economic illiterates are shouting down the one man who not only understands the problems, but saw them coming and tried to warn us. How many times must Ron Paul be correct before he is no longer considered crazy?
I hear what you're saying, but face it. His positions on foreign policy eliminate him from consideration. He is no Commander-in-Chief and will never be elected President.
"The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis."
Dead on! Why haven't more people pointed that out? The stock market is idling at 2000 levels, the number of jobs is still about 2001, per capita income is lagging at 1999 levels and workforce participation has retreated to somewhere in the 1980s. And no one in the administration has any idea why this might be? External Link
Cloward-Piven anyone? Only a disciple of this strategy could burden the citizens with over a trillion dollars of debt per year and insist that the way out of the debt problem is additional taxation.
Is it really the case that NRO cannot find someone who actually knows about economic policy to write these articles? Because as smart as Dr. Hanson is, his articles on economics, which is about as far outside of his field of expertise as you can get, are simply horrid.
Second, does Dr. Hanson really have to be some sort of highly educated propagandist? I know Dr. Hanson is not stupid, so I can only assume his misleading statement about the Obama "lazy" comments is an unreasonable interpretation.
In fact, American leaders have taken the preeminent position of our country in the world for granted. (i.e. Our leaders have been "lazy" in taken it for granted, assuming that we can maintain our position without better strategy.)
Instead, the unemployment rate is much higher, 2.4 percentage points higher. The longest stretch of 9% or worse unemployment since the 1930s.
That's a historical fact.
That has left Obama and his supporters reduced to moving goalposts and making counterfactual claims that are impossible to validate.
And no matter how much the Obama gang keeps trying to wriggle off this particular hook, we conservatives are going to continue to hang them right back on this chart.
You are correct that it is a fact that the Obama administration was far too optimistic about how severe the recession would be in their public projections. It is quite evident that they should have taken a more pessimistic approach to projections, but they were probably concerned about spooking markets.
That the Obama administration was overly optimistic in its projections of how the economy would do in the absence of stimulus does not undermine the case for stimulus.
It should be pointed out that Paul Krugman, at least, also noted that the White House projections on economic performance in the absence of stimulus were optimistic, to say the least.
So, I am sorry. The fact that what we got was a too small stimulus to satisfy so-called "moderates" does not prove that stimulus did not work. The fact that the Obama administration used much more optimistic forecasts compared to independent forecasts also do not undermine the stimulus.
I will agree that the administration made a series of mistakes. They should have gone with much more pessimistic projections concerning the economy and they should have pushed for a much larger stimulus.
By the way, you want to know what a major drag on the economy is currently? The end of stimulus. Unfortunately, the private sector simply is not yet in a position to pick up the slack.
We ‘got’ too small a stimulus? Exactly how large of a stimulus was needed? Twice, thrice the size of what we got? And, pray tell, where was the money going to come from?
Keynesianism economic stimulus has never worked, is not working and will never work because it is premised that Government monies are ‘free’ and do not require repayment. Such a case requires that Government stimulate out of massive surplus cash reserves – which do not exist.
May I ask you to do what you insist Dr. Hanson do, prove your assertions?
Prove that the Obama Administration was "overly optimistic" in its projections of economic recovery in the absence of stimulus. How do you prove the counterfactual?
Prove that a larger stimulus would have had a positive effect.
Moreover, explain why in the two instances we have tried major stimulus to address deep recessions we have had longer and more restrained recoveries (the Great Depression and the 2008 Recession).
