…that Obama can’t ideologically deliver:
Liberals are clearly getting nervous. Their Keynesian religious-like faith rests on the notion that government spending “creates” economic activity and wealth. So the answer must be: more stimulus!
Meanwhile, there is chaos on the Hill:
Commerce committee Chairman Henry Waxman has delayed the health care markup he had planned for this week, giving the administration and House leaders a chance to win over balky Blue Dog Democrats. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel is also stymied, and says all he knows about agreements that the White House has struck with various health groups (pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health maintenance organizations) is what he reads in the papers.
All this sounds like muddling by incompetents, but in fact these Democratic legislators are (mostly) highly competent and they are trying to do very hard things: restructure government regulation of — or establish government control over — one-sixth (health care) and one-tenth (energy) of the economy. And they’re dealing with a president who has shown a striking lack of interest in details and whose single legislative achievement so far — the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February — has visibly failed in its asserted goal of holding unemployment down to 8 percent.
This is all good news, of course, since most or all of what they want to do would be ruinous for the nation.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel is also stymied, and says all he knows about agreements that the White House has struck with various health groups (pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health maintenance organizations) is what he reads in the papers.
In other words, Rangel doesn’t know if their are promises from the healthcare providers that they won’t opt out of the government healthcare plan at the levels they opt out of medicare. If they opt out, then that small percentage of people, who don’t have healthcare today that actually want government provided healthcare, will find that nothing has changed. They will still have long wait times at the small number of providers. The difference is they won’t have to pay when they finally get to see a doctor… well supposedly not have to pay… except for that deductable… and the higher taxes… but it sounded good when phrased “hope and change”.
What will it sound like to them in 2010 if their are no promises, or if the healthcare providers keep their promises like Obama does?
In a (very) small way I’m glad the Dems have the White House and both Houses of Congress. There is absolutely no one else they can blame for the disasters that are their policies. There’s nothing better for discrediting poor ideas than actually experiencing their failures first-hand.
One does wish though for stronger Federalism, so that the thick-witted who insist on this sort of stupidity could at least refrain by inflicting it on the rest of us by keeping it to certain States.
There is nothing difficult about doing the restructuring. The difficulty is getting the populace to blame *the other guy* when it doesn’t work out — or when it DOES fulfill the misanthropic goals of its originators.
People way outside the Beltway might find an article in today’s Washington Post interesting. In West Wing: Grueling Schedules, Bleary Eyes describes the DC political culture as workaholic in the extreme.
Whether Republican or Democratic, I don’t think this style of working is to anyone’s benefit. Yes, the Republicans under Bush seemed to be as bad.
People way outside the Beltway might find an article in today’s Washington Post interesting. In West Wing: Grueling Schedules, Bleary Eyes describes the DC political culture as workaholic in the extreme.
What’s worse, it seems to adopt the Marxist standard of the labor theory of value. I remember when Bill Clinton would whine about how he’d worked harder on such and such than anything he’d ever done in his life, as though that was supposed to somehow make us think that it was a worthwhile effort.
I suspect Mr. Clinton’s whine (and I remember it well) was more a child supplicating a displeased parent than a claim of fact or assertion of worthwhile activity.
This business about how hard everyone is working started under President Reagan, I tell you.
Back in the day, the people who worked hard were people who had to, the peons as it were. If you were rich, or had an education, or had medical training, you didn’t work quite as hard. Even if you did work hard, you created the appearance of just chillin’ ’cause its cool. Remember Wednesdays Doctors’ Day Off? The jokes about MDs on the golf course.
Is there a (non-retired) medical doctor these days who even heard about golf let alone know which end of the putter to grasp? Is there anyone in the professions or among the entreprenurial class or leadership class who isn’t telling you about their 16-hour days and 70-hour work week?
Part of it is that Mr. Reagan gave tax incentives, or rather, let people keep more of their earnings, making it worth the while of the rich, educated, near-famous to be productive. I think also what happened is that incomes in this group started rising faster than those of the working class. Remember the Waterloo of trade unionism? It was the day the highly-stressed but also highly-paid and highly-unionized Air Traffic Controllers were fired for striking — apart from collecting member dues and supporting Democrats, unions haven’t done much since.
So the educated and wealthier started working harder and earning more, and to stave off the inevitable class envy and class warfare, the pose was, “Yes I am making gobs more money than you, but oh, you have no idea as a doctor what kind of long hours you put in.” All this is true, about the long hours, but it became the fashion to put in the hours and to make a big deal about it.
I remember when Bill Clinton would whine about how he’d worked harder on such and such than anything he’d ever done in his life, as though that was supposed to somehow make us think that it was a worthwhile effort.
Bush said something similar about his agonizing over the stem cell decision. But when historians look at his presidency, I doubt that decision will rank in the top five in terms of their importance or impact. The things that seem critical in the moment are often later overshadowed by decisions that were made effortlessly or by default.
Bush said something similar about his agonizing over the stem cell decision.
Agonizing over something isn’t the same thing as laboring over it. Words mean things.
Are you kidding Brock? Obama and the “Progressives” will be blaming anything and everything on
the wreckers and KulaksBush and the Republicans until the sun burns out, and the media will dutifully repeat it thenarodpeople.Jim,
The operative difference was delivery and actual language.
Mr. Bush didn’t try a whiny delivery, and emphasized that he was thoughtfully restricting the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.
Mr. Clinton’s delivery *was* whiny. And delivered on multiple occasions.
Given the first linked story, I’d like to kick the dead horse of extreme Keynesian spending one more time. As many might recall, there has been voiced the theory that government spending is similarly beneficial even if it’s spent on some arbitrary thing like kronies or special interests. Namely, that there isn’t much in the way of opportunity costs from Keynesian spending.
However, we see in the first link the main problem with this idea. Namely, that we may not be able to spend more money on Keynesian spending. In which case, Obama has used up what little Keynesian spending power he had in an ineffective (or even counterproductive) way.
>== Namely, that we may not be able to spend more
> money on Keynesian spending. In which case, Obama
> has used up what little Keynesian spending power he
> had in an ineffective (or even counterproductive) way. ==
That’s a real possibility. The stimulus package was so huge, and so obvious a failure, the political support is gone — and theirs a limit to how much pork China with extend us credit for. Our economic screw ups are starting to threaten them.
Their Keynesian religious-like faith rests on the notion that government spending “creates” economic activity and wealth.
I have difficultly understanding why the other side of government spending isn’t highlighted more. Even if it does create economic activity it definitely lowers the value of money which is an enormous hidden tax. This should be repeatedly shouted from the rooftops.
That should shoot a huge hole in the amazing lie that government spending creates wealth (a version of the broken window argument.)