Thoughts on the growing abuse of supplemental spending.

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?