Obama's rosy apocalypse

Rich Lowry:

Barack Obama spent all of 2008 running against the sputtering economy and warned earlier this year of a crisis "we may not be able to reverse." Yet, as the unemployment rate climbs beyond the administration's projections, Vice President Joe Biden informs us that the administration "misread how bad the economy was."

Apparently we were going to experience a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis comparable to the Great Depression without a particularly high unemployment rate. This was the promise of the Obama administration, which indulged in hair-raisingly alarmist economic rhetoric while pumping out unduly hopeful economic projections. If the Reagan administration gave us the rosy scenario, the Obama administration has given us the rosy apocalypse.

The rosy apocalypse is an artifact of both ideological naïveté and knowing cynicism. The administration genuinely believed, against all historical experience, that government spending would boost us out of the recession. And it knew it had to assume an unrealistically rapid, robust economic recovery, because otherwise the already-horrid deficit projections would look worse. So Obama talked up the crisis to get the stimulus passed, and after that . . . happy days again!

...

And this stimulus was touted as timely and targeted? Confronted by the inadequacies of the current program, its advocates have a predictable solution - a new one. Since the worthiest projects were presumably already covered in the first stimulus, a second stimulus would have to fund even more marginal priorities, and it would get into the economy even later. In other words, it would replicate rather than rectify the failures of the first stimulus.

Obama is resisting a second stimulus so far, but was foolish ever to go down this route. Now he's stuck hoping for the advent of his rosy apocalypse - as soon as possible.

If Biden and Obama were being honest, (Don't fall out of your chair laughing.) they would say their miscalculation was not the depths of the economic problem, but their belief in the efficacy of their remedy. But having committed to spending three quarters of a trillion dollars, they are not likely to admit they made that big a mistake. But it does make there attempt to sell another stimulus much more difficult. Spending money on Democrat constituencies are sink hole investments that do not have the economic effect of allowing people to keep more of their money and make their own investment decisions.