Solyndra spent about two million on lobbying for a half a billion in loan guarantees. And the money went to Democrats. Your money. Your involuntary campaign donation.

This is a perfect example of why the government shouldn’t be in the business of helping business. It’s an inherently corrupting process.

[Update a few minutes later]

Solyndra, the logical end point of Obamanomics:

No wonder many Democratic strategists predicted their party’s 2008 landslide win would usher in a generation of political dominance. Obamanomics, essentially, would divert taxpayer dollars to the Green Lobby – and then into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party. This is what crony capitalism is really all about: politicians enriching favored businesses, who then return the favor. Or maybe it’s the other way around, Who cares, really. It’s an endless, profitable loop for both.

Note how Goldman Sachs is always involved, as well. I would hope that Obamanomics has been thoroughly discredited by now. But based on the continuing defense of some commenters here, probably not.

[Update a couple minutes later]

A doomed quest:

President Obama’s campaign tour for another half-trillion-dollar stimulus will not work for a number of reasons, and one of them is terrible timing. As he tries once again to assure the public that government agencies can take borrowed money and translate it into shovel-ready jobs, four facts drown out the effort. The Solyndra bankruptcy disaster is a sort of open-sore advertisement not to do these things. The special elections in New York and Nevada suggest that the voters are not receptive to the idea that more federal debt means more private sector jobs. The European meltdown daily shows the world the terrible wages of massive public debt. And the current Republican primary campaigning is reminding the public that nearly $5 trillion in borrowed money between 2009 and 2011 was an abject failure. Consequently, the vocabulary of that misguided effort — euphemisms like “stimulus,” “shovel-ready,” “investments,” and “infrastructure” — now provokes laughter rather than applause.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s going to take many painful years to undo the damage that all of these big spenders, Republicans and Democrats alike, have done to the economy.

[Update early afternoon]

The myth of nonpartisan civil service:

…this career civil servant is concerned that a default coinciding “with the 2012 campaign season” could hurt the president’s reelection effort. That is his biggest worry, not what is in the best financial interests of the American people. As Lachlan Markay writes over at the Heritage Foundation, “The Administration was essentially letting the 2012 campaign dictate decisions on the federal government’s financial involvement with Solyndra. They were not responding to normal profit-and-loss signals.”

Which is why the government shouldn’t be making these decisions.

…on its last legs:

If Bernanke tries to bail out the Eurocrats by printing money, expect a revolt that made previous Tea Party rallies look like Sunday picnics.

[Update a few minutes later]

Don’t even think about it:

In the days leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, then French Finance Minister (now IMF Managing Director) Chistine Lagarde told then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that he could not allow Lehman to fail. The ramifications would be catastrophic, she said. She was mostly right.

Three years later, it will be Angela Merkel talking to President Obama,Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke with exactly the same message. The United States government and the Federal Reserve must come to the rescue of the Eurozone or the ramifications will be catastrophic. And she will say that she needs roughly $1 trillion in financial guarantees and liquidity support. That’s the number that will calm the markets.

She will do this publicly (it will be leaked to the FT or the NYT) because (a) she wants to maximize the pressure on the US to ride to the rescue and (b) she wants the blame to fall elsewhere in the event that the “situation” goes haywire.

And there will follow perhaps the defining moment of the Obama Presidency. If Obama goes forward and provides all or part of the $1 trillion guarantee, he will likely cut his own political throat in so doing. If Obama declines to go forward and provide all or part of the $1 trillion guarantee, he will likely preside over the second massively destabilizing financial panic in four years, thus insuring a second Great Recession, thus cutting his own political throat.

It’s not like he has the unilateral power to do it anyway. Bernanke is nominally independent (particularly since he just got reappointed) and there’s no way he’d get it through Congress. I wonder if Merkel doesn’t understand what powers an American president does and doesn’t have?

…is floundering:

It is a wonder, this faith-based (and often campus-based) conviction that the government that brought us the ethanol program can be trusted to precisely execute wise policies that will render the world predictable and progressive.

For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, the administration has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that, even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.

And research by Garett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center indicates that just 42.1 percent of workers hired by entities receiving stimulus funds were unemployed at the time. More (47.3 percent) were poached from other organizations, and 10.6 percent came directly from school or outside the labor force.

Obama’s administration, which is largely innocent of business experience, knew its experts would be wizards at investing taxpayers’ dollars. Oops.

“Floundering” is too kind a word, I think. Can I be emancipated from this “family,” please?

…they will have to rein in ObamaCare.

[Update a few minutes later]

You don’t say: “Report: Administration ignored high costs in healthcare bill.”

…on unemployment. Even Robert Reich thinks the president isn’t serious:

Reich is still confused, though:

If the president was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place–if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch–why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?

Let’s accept for the sake of argument the creationist premise that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent government can create all the jobs it wants simply by borrowing and spending enough money. Let’s also assume Reich’s premise that “enough,” in this case, is some figure considerably in excess of $447 billion.

Why didn’t Obama ask for enough? That seems obvious. If the answer is “no,” and the point of asking the question is to elicit a negative response, then the practical difference between what you get if you ask for $447 billion and, say, $5 trillion is not $4.553 trillion but zero. If Obama is asking for the money only for appearance’ sake, as Reich concedes he is, then it’s more important that $447 billion appears more reasonable than $5 trillion.

Either way, Megan McArdle wishes “that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.” Most of those viewers–those of us who write about this stuff for a living being obvious exceptions–didn’t actually have to watch the speech, so we’re not able to work up much sympathy for those who didn’t have the good sense to change the channel or go out and live a little.

But let’s take this by the numbers. Obama’s speech lasted about 42 minutes. Multiply that by 31 million viewers and, say, $20 an hour, and you end up with the man-hour equivalent of about $434 million. It’s a shameful waste, but much less of one than if Stimulus Jr. actually became law.

No danger of that, fortunately. The neo-Keynesians have finally completely destroyed whatever credibility they ever had.

The Keynesian one: