Obama's big 'plan'

Robert Tracinski:

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The danger of Barack Obama's presidency is not that he will act openly on the old dogmas of the left. Indeed, during his transition he has largely attempted to meld into the Washington woodwork by hiring only the most conventional Beltway insiders. Instead, the danger is that he has been so steeped in leftist dogma for his entire life that he will accept the left's attitudes implicitly and automatically, without even realizing it.

Consider just the first paragraph of Thursday's speech.

Throughout America's history, there have been some years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare. Then there are the years that come along once in a generation--the kind that mark a clean break from a troubled past, and set a new course for our nation. This is one of those years. We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime.

Put aside the way in which Obama always turns every issue into an opportunity to talk about his favorite topic: his own great historical importance. What really ought to make you choke over this paragraph is what is missing from Obama's world view. Ask yourself: is there any other year in recent memory that presented us with a shocking event that marked a "clean break" from the past and presented us with a historic crisis?

How about 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks?

The beginning of this speech puts us on notice that September 11 does not register as an important date in Obama's calendar or in his world view. The man who will soon be commander in chief is indifferent to the bloodiest foreign attack on America's soil since the War of 1812.

How is that possible? It is possible from within the world view of the ideological left. There is an old socialist slogan, usually attributed to Lenin, that captures this world view: "a bayonet is a weapon with a worker on both ends." The idea is that wars, with their appeals to patriotism, are merely attempts to distract the international proletariat from banding together to overthrow their real enemies, the capitalists.

(It should be noted that this aversion to war lasts only until the socialists take over, at which point they discover that war can be used to distract the people from the poverty and oppression of life under socialism.)

Having absorbed such socialist bromides at his mother's knee (literally), Obama clearly views September 11 as an event of little significance--compared to the opportunity to overthrow the remaining elements of American capitalism and vastly expand the role of government.

That brings us to the main content of Obama's speech, which is an attempt to sell us a half-trillion-dollar program of government spending. This is, of course, money that the federal government does not have, so Obama has admitted that the budget deficit will explode to more than $1 trillion.

The money will be thrown around to all of the conventional pork-barrel recipients, from roads and bridges to "alternative energy," which is perpetually in need of government subsidies. But that is less important than the overall effect this spending will have. Given the current contraction in private credit--which will be further withdrawn by the government's vastly increased borrowing--an enormous amount of the money flowing through the economy will now be government money. An increasing amount of economic activity will be directed, not by the private marketplace, but by the government.

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We learned from the Great Depression that infrastructure spending is inadequate to the task of increasing employment and spurring economic growth. In fact unemployment grew under the infrastructure phase of the Roosevelt administration. The economy did not begin to grow until we started spending on the military and the war. That spending not only generated employment, but innovation that benefited us decades into the future. It produced atomic energy, jets planes that increased transportation and mobility. Later Eisenhower used his war time experience to add the interstate highway system that also added to our mobility.

The military and space spending in the 60s also added to our economy and spun off more benefits to our lifestyle. The next great military expenditure was under Ronald Reagan who combined it with tax cuts to build even greater prosperity while providing the weapon systems that helped win wars in the 90s and beyond. The growth of the 60s also included a tax cut.

What this tells us is that Obama is adopting the failed economic plan of the 30's and ignoring he one that worked in the 40's, 50's 60's and 80's. I think one of the lessons of the last eight years is that we did not spend enough to maintain our military at the time we were experiencing growth from the tax cuts. Money was instead spent of pork and infrastructure which literally does not give you the bang for the buck that military spending does. With military spending you get the R&D that spurs innovation.