Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm has yet to start teaching her new Cal-Berkeley course on green governing — but she already has a devoted student in the White House.
President Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night was eerily similar to the failed economic vision that Granholm laid out in her State of the State address exactly five years ago: It even included her rhetorical ruse substituting “investments” for “spending.”
“If the states are the laboratories of democracy,” Granholm wrote in the Huffington Post last December, “Washington can take a lesson from what is happening in Michigan.” Sadly for the nation, Obama listened to his teacher.
“We need a moon shot,” said Granholm in the Huffington Post. “This is our Sputnik moment,” echoed the president on Tuesday. Granholm envisioned a transformation of Michigan from “Rust Belt to Green Belt” with massive, European-style public investments in infrastructure and alternative energy. “In five years, you’ll be blown away,” she predicted, in what would become her signature line.
It was, in fact, thousands of state jobs that were blown away, as Granholm’s vision diverted pols’ attention from much-needed reforms to the state’s budget and business climate. Since her speech in 2006, the state’s unemployment rate has exploded from 7.4 percent to 11.4.
Now Obama wants to take the Granholm model national. “The 21st Century Jobs Fund [is] the largest investment in diversifying our economy this state has ever seen,” said Granholm in her 2006 SOS. “It’ll create tens of thousands of new jobs. We’ll invest more than $2 billion in public and private funds to develop new sectors of our economy: Advanced manufacturing. Homeland security and defense. Life sciences. Alternative energy.”
“We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean-energy technology — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people,” mimicked Obama in this year’s SOTU.
Like Granholmnomics, Obamanomics is not only unsustainable — it diverts important investment dollars from the private sector. Welcome to Michigan, America.
Ah, recently I commented that the "sputnik" response of the 60s was a misallocation of resources. My complaint was that first, the diversion into STEM fields of youths (particularly males, back then) who otherwise ought to have been doing something else, weakened those other endeavors.
What I had in mind is that the diversion of rational people away from sociology and humanities to STEM only served to create opportunities for irrational people in those disciplines. Also, the focus on using Americans in military-related STEM projects opened the path for civilian technology to substitute Asians, then move to Asia, to the long-term detriment of the USA (I claim).
What we do NOT need is another sputnik moment of misallocating resources, this time into "green" endeavors that cannot otherwise be justified economically or in the long term.
Remember that the original sputnik moment was based on a perception, and I believe it was a serious misperception, of national interest in response to threat. Thus, it is no surprise that the current environmental causes are not focused on making things nicer (such as air free of raw gasoline fumes, if you remember that) but rather on the supposed threat of global warming catastrophes. Note that the question is not whether the globe is warming; it is the potential catastrophes, real or imagined, that drive the cause.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs goes Michigan, so goes the Nation...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe best thing I can say about Granholm is that she is Canadian, so can't run for president!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's not like there is any concrete evidence supporting the abject failure of Granholm's policies. I wonder how many working aged taxpayers she lost during her tenure in addition to the unemployment rate?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou wanna see big things happen? Set your sights on a state that's just to the west of there.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@never outraged,
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou are so right and conservatives never mention this. Big gov't projects that cost tons of money represent a brain-drain from the productive parts of the economy. Opportunities are lost.