In The Wall Street Journal, Michael Boskin writes:

Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

What emerges from such a blueprint will not be America. The United States will survive as a geographical designation, a collection of zip codes, but what goes on within them will be a Euro-Canadian form of societal arrangement (I write more on this in the new NR, out today, I do believe).

If you’re David Brooks or Christopher Buckley, you’re baffled at what your sensible moderate bipartisan economic centrist president is doing. If your objective is to “stimulate” the economy, why would you do this stuff?

But, if your objective is fundamentally to transform the relationship between the citizen and the state, it all makes perfect sense. On the radio yesterday, Mark Larson asked me about all this and I replied:

As Rahm Emanuel says, he has essentially to use the crisis as an opportunity. And that’s what it’s about. I think that the plummeting Dow actually serves his purpose… My worry is, though, that when you look at the riots that have been happening in Bulgaria and Greece and Iceland and other places, is that when people turn against the government, it’s usually because they’re banging on the door of parliament saying why don’t you guys do more for me? In other words, they’re saying a $3.7 trillion dollar package isn’t enough, we need a $20 trillion dollar package. So I’m a bit worried that when this public dissatisfaction with Obama starts, a big chunk of it will be from people who are actually demanding even bigger and even more Europeanized solutions to these things.

Obama’s priority is not the restoration of the economy but, as he says, the “remaking of America.” If you take him at his word, his indifference to the Dow makes perfect sense.