Barack Obama has been trying to stimulate the economy with record-high government spending funded by higher tax rates and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s low interest rates.
But as Stanford economist Michael Boskin points out in the Wall Street Journal, “Japan tried that, to little effect, in the 1990s.” Slow growth has become the new normal there.
There are alternative policies. One is to cut government spending, or cut it more than you raise taxes. As Boskin points out, the Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s “stabilized their budgets without recession [with] $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes.”
And he notes that Canada reduced government spending in the mid-1990s and early 2000s by an amount equal to 8 percent of gross domestic product.
Those cuts weren’t painless, but they put Canada on a trajectory different from ours. Canadian voters value budget surpluses, and Canada managed to avoid almost all the bad effects of the 2007-09 recession.
I think that Keynes himself would be appalled to see the things being done in his name.
I love this country. I love the American idea. I have profound disappointments in my country. I feel we ought to be in space … because it meant so much to us … technologically. It moved us along.”
We are “in space.” We have a space station, we have at least two, maybe three manned spacecraft in development, to fly in two or three years (not even counting NASA’s wasteful efforts that won’t fly with humans until the end of the decade at best), we just got an announcement of a serious plan to send two people to Mars within five years. What more does he want?
For some reason the sleazy Democrat pols around here have always had the hots for these Latin American Reds. Like his late boss Joe Moakley, Jim McGovern’s always had a crush on Fidel Castro. Maybe he’s jealous of all the hair. Joe K was always Chavez’s kept Kennedy, although Bill Delahunt gushed over him like a teenage girl infatuated with a mutant, pineapple-faced Justin Bieber.
The local solons are all going to have to find some new rear ends to kiss.
It was a sad day for the moonbat community. The People’s Republics of Cambridge and Amherst rushed to lower their flags to half staff first. A spontaneous candlelight vigil erupted in Muddy River. Funeral dirges played endlessly on the NPR stations, like Radio Moscow when Uncle Joe passed. Someone dimmed the lights at the Globe, causing an immediate panic in the newsroom, where the fops assumed the newspaper was finally being shut down.
Yes, the media fell all over itself lionizing the Mussolini of South America. The AP hagiography was slightly longer than “War and Peace.” Talk about gushing:
“Fiery populist … socialist ideals … outsmarted his rivals … electrified … folksy … larger-than-life … master communicator and savvy political strategist … championing his country’s poor.”
The only thing the AP forgot to say about El Comandante was that he kept the drugs out of Southie.
By saying “I’m not a dictator,” then, Obama is admitting that he is ineffectual: that he lacks the political skill either to strike a compromise or to bend his opponents to his will. He concluded his press conference in an even more passive vein, hoping that “Congress comes to its senses a week from now, a month from now, three months from now.”
The Hill tries to put a brave face on all this, reporting that “the first months of President Obama’s second term are being built around a simple premise: No caving.” The legislative trade publication also reports that Democrats “argue that Obama is–finally–using the power of the bully pulpit to advance his agenda” and “becoming more adept at using public pressure to accomplish his political goals.”
As best we can tell, no evidence is adduced in support of this proposition. Another Hill piece, this one an op-ed by Republican consultant John Feehery, takes the opposite tack: “The tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama. The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue.”
Despite the supposed inspiration of his first campaign, hope is not a strategy.