I have to tell you, when President Obama says he doesn’t believe in bigger government, I don’t believe him.
Actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s actions say he doesn’t just believe in bigger government, he believes like a religious fanatic bowing at the altar on the highest holy day.
John Harris and Jonathan Martin have a masterful analysis of Obama’s speech to Congress last night. Headlined “conservative words for a liberal agenda,” their essay begins:
“In his programs and promises, President Barack Obama Tuesday night offered the nation by far the most expansive agenda for the national government in decades.
“In his words and mood, however, Obama presented this breathtakingly ambitious vision in a way intended to convey caution, moderation, sobriety.”
President Obama would have us believe that he really hates the idea of expanding the federal government, and he really, really hates the idea of taking on so much debt that our great, great, great grandchildren will still be paying it off. But gosh darn it, he just has no choice because of this “unprecedented” economic downturn.
“As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets,” the President said. “Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited – I am. I called for action because the failure to do so would have cost more jobs and caused more hardships. In fact, a failure to act would have worsened our long-term deficit by assuring weak economic growth for years.”
Can anyone possibly believe that? Can anyone believe that not borrowing several trillion dollars would make the federal deficit bigger than borrowing several trillion dollars would? To believe that, you have to believe that the federal government’s revenues can be adjusted up or down but federal government spending can go only up, never down. You also have to believe that the only possible way to improve the economy is for the federal government to borrow several trillion dollars and allocate it in exactly the way President Obama and Congress want to allocate it.
I don’t believe him. In fact, I don’t even think he is sincere. I think he is being untruthful. I think he wants bigger government because he believes that only by using the power of government to alter society can he make an indelible mark on history. I think he tipped his hand when he concluded his speech with the words, “someday years from now our children can tell their children that this was the time when we performed, in the words that are carved into this very chamber, ’something worthy to be remembered.’”
What Obama wants is to be remembered. We are spending trillions of borrowed dollars to build a monument to Barack Obama’s ego.
When a Republican governor proposes cutting social services spending or passing a tax increase the left considers regressive, inevitably that governor will be portrayed as uncaring and cruel. But when Democratic Gov. John Lynch proposes closing the Tobey School, raising taxes on low-income Granite Staters or laying off state workers, the left, through clenched teeth, calls him responsible.
If we were to apply the same standards to John Lynch as were applied to Craig Benson, the media would be filled with the following questions and assertions:
Why does John Lynch hate smokers? He treats them like a middle-school bully treats the president of the math club — as his own personal ATM. Every time the state needs money, he grabs smokers by the neck and says, “Hand it over!” Everyone knows smokers are disproportionately lower-income. So Lynch must hate the poor, too.
Why doesn’t Lynch care about people with small bladders? He is closing nine highway rest areas. Such callous indifference to children and small women! Actually, if Benson put this idea in his budget, the Concord Monitor would probably have this headline: Rest areas to close, women and children hit hardest.
Why doesn’t Lynch care about state workers? The governor proposes laying off up to 300 state employees and all he gets is a muted response from the unions, while the Democratic chairman of the House Finance Committee blames the unions for not agreeing to wage concessions last year. A Republican governor would have the brakes on his state car mysteriously fail.
Gov. Lynch wants to raise your property taxes! When Benson appointee John Stephen reformed payments to county nursing homes to get more seniors to be cared for at home, the nursing homes and some county officials claimed (incorrectly) that he was directly responsible for local property taxes going up. Gov. Lynch proposes taking $167 million that legally belongs to local governments and keeping it to balance the state budget, which would certainly cause local governments to raise property taxes if they didn’t receive an equivalent amount from the federal stimulus bill, and he is met mostly with silence, except for the indignant response of Republican Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta.
The double standard is really remarkable. If Lynch were a Republican, his budget would be called Draconian, he would be called the worst tyrant since Vlad the Impaler, and we’d be treated to editorials and op-eds predicting the starvation of laid off state employees and the demise of all that is good and righteous in the world. Instead, Lynch is praised for being responsible and frugal. Such are the benefits of being a Democrat.
President Obama keeps citing America’s “crumbling schools” as a justification for immediately passing the stimulus bill. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter just used the phrase in a press release justifying her vote for the bill. But I wonder, is any school in America really crumbling? I mean, pieces falling off the building? Maybe there are a few. But the phrase seems so much hyperbole to me. Roads crumbling? Sure. Just drive around Manchester and you can see that. Bridges? Maybe, although there is a difference between cracked pavement and bridge supports with pieces falling off. Obama makes it sound as if schools are in danger of falling down on top of our children if we don’t pass this bill. I doubt that is the case anywhere in the country. But it sure does help his case if we all believe we’re saving the kids from collapsing roofs. I wish some White House correspondent would ask him to name a school that’s actually crumbling to pieces.
The stimulus bill is more than 1,400 pages long. Its details are still becoming known. Could anyone have read the compromise version yet? More importantly, has the President read it? I doubt he has. In fact, I doubt he intends to. It didn’t matter what version of this bill was being considered — $819 billion, $838 billion or $789 billion — he pushed all of them with equal urgency. He outsourced the writing of the bill to House Democrats. I don’t think he really cares too much what specific spending is in the bill as long as it spends a lot more than it offers in tax cuts. Because he simply believes that federal spending will, in itself, stimulate the economy — more or less regardless on where the spending is directed.
Judd Gregg announced this afternoon that he has withdrawn as President Obama’s nominee for secretary of commerce. He’s out, which means he stays in the Senate. Which means Rep. Paul Hodes has to either stay in the race or bow out. If he stays in, he has to face Gregg if he gets through a Democratic Primary, which is a big if. If he bows out, he looks like a coward and seriously damages his chances at ever running for Senate or governor.
It reminds me of Jay Buckey running for Senate. He stayed in after the Shaheens tried to force him out. Showed he had guts. But it made him some serious enemies. If Hodes stays in he could get into a nasty primary fight and never recover, and he could lose to Gregg and be out a House seat and a congressional pension. If he gets out, he could be branded a coward and never recover. But I think he needs to stay in and show that he’s not afraid of Judd Gregg or Carol Shea-Porter.
Politico.com’s Jonathan Martin will be speaking at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics tonight at 7. The topic is “The Republicans are changing, too — the GOP response.” Martin covered the 2008 presidential race and now covers the White House for Politico. I’m very much looking forward to this talk. And also to its being over before the UNC-dook game at 9.
Supposedly we need this massive economic stimulus package because it will spend billions on infrastructure improvements, which will create so many jobs that the economy will revive like an asthmatic stuck with an Epipen. President Obama says it will “Create or save” 3 million to 4 million jobs. How will that claim be verified? It can’t be. That’s what’s so great about it. But let’s think about this whole infrastructure jobs claim.
Forget for a moment that only a small fraction of the stimulus package will be spent on infrastructure. Even if all of the $800 billion (give or take a few dozen billion) would be spent to create construction and renovation jobs, what would that do for the economy?
We have some past experience with this. In the United States in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s, the government threw a lot of money at make-work infrastructure projects for the purpose of providing employment and boosting the economy. How did that work? Not too well.
And that makes sense. If repairing roads, bridges and schools, renovating government buildings and building and upgrading trails and buildings at national parks really were THAT economically stimulative, wouldn’t it then make sense for the government to spend vast sums doing that all the time?
Roads do provide economic stimulus in the long run, provided they go somewhere useful. Bridges and roads to nowhere are a drag on the economy. And that’s the point. If the government could turn the economy around simply by paying people to build things, then it wouldn’t much matter what people built or where. We could just take money from the private economy and give it to developers and let them build whatever they want. Condos under the sea? Sure! It’s all about the construction jobs.
But the economy doesn’t work that way. In real life, that would be a monumental (literally) waste of resources. It would take money away from potentially productive investments and squander it on make-work projects. That is exactly what a great chunk of this stimulus bill does. It taxes or borrows money away from potentially productive uses and throws it at unproductive ones that will not be useful in getting the economy back in gear. They will provide temporary construction or other jobs, but then what?
As the Congressional Budget Office noted (pdf), then the economy begins to contract because Washington borrowed so much money that there will be less available for productive private-sector spending. That is exactly where we’re headed.
When House Republicans voted against the $819 billion “stimulus” bill last week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested Republicans would pay the price politically.
“There will be people in districts all over the country who will wonder why, when there’s a good bill to get the economy moving, why we still are playing gotcha,” he said.
The AP ran this slanted story suggesting the same thing: GOP gambles in opposing Obama stimulus.
But the people are already turning against the stimulus bill. A new Rasmussen poll shows that a little more than a third of Americans now support the Democrats’ $819 billion stimulus package.
Obama had better start listening to Judd Gregg right away.
As Gov. John Lynch is expected to name J. Bonnie Newman to fill Judd Gregg’s Senate seat today, here is a trivia question for you political junkies. What is Newman’s first name? First one to answer gets a glorious prize from my jumbo prize stack. (And by the way, the comments should be working now, so either email me or post a comment.)
Also, is Newman pro-life or pro-choice? We’ll find out for sure soon enough. Lots of people have told me she is pro-choice, and I suspect that is the case. She supported pro-choice Pete Wilson for President in the mid-1990s, and the only members of Congress not from New Hampshire to whom she has donated money are pro-choice Republicans Olympia Snowe and Greg Walden. However, she did donate to pro-life Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush and John McCain. Interestingly, she did not donate to Sen. John Sununu’s re-election campaign last year.
Second District Rep. Paul Hodes is running for the U.S. Senate seat Sen. Judd Gregg is vacating. But that is not necessarily deterring 1st District Rep. Carol Shea-Porter from running for it, too. I asked Shea-Porter Spokesman Jamie Radice today if Shea-Porter would rule out challenging Paul Hodes in a Democratic primary for U.S. Senate next year. She returned this statement from Rep. Shea-Porter:
“It is still very early and I am focused on my work for New Hampshire and the country.”
I think Shea-Porter would very much like that seat. And I think she believes she can beat Paul Hodes in a primary to get it. The drama is just getting better all the time. I suppose Hodes thought he could keep Shea-Porter from running if he announced early. But that didn’t work so well for Jim Craig. I suspect it will work just as well for Hodes.
I talked to a lot of people this weekend, and here is what I’m hearing is most likely on Monday or Tuesday if Judd Gregg accepts the Commerce Dept. job.
A lot of people are mentioning Walter Peterson, but I don’t think that’s likely because of his age. There are two other names I’ve heard mentioned a lot: Liz Hager and Bonnie Newman. Both are liberal Republicans whom Democrats love. I haven’t talked to a Democrat who would be upset if either of them were appointed. Hager was primaried out of her sate rep. job last fall by four conservatives who teamed up to split the vote and give her the boot. She endorsed Obama before the election. Newman is a former UNH administrator who endorsed John Lynch over Craig Benson. Either of these picks would allow Lynch and Obama to replace Gregg with a Republican while not angering fellow Democrats.
