Monday, August 30, 2010

Spend, but spend wisely

Howard Fineman, who usually writes well on the ups and downs of the Obama presidency, drops the ball a bit with his latest Newsweek column, in which he portrays Obama's recent speech in New Orleans as a defense of "big" government and the role it can play in people's lives.

If you rearrange Fineman's column a bit, however, the main problem with Obama's approach is vaguy alluded to:
The last 18 months have seen a hurricane of legislative activity by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. From bank and auto bailouts to health care to financial-services reform, the bill-passing season produced literally thousands of pages of new law.

...

More important, all of that macro-level legislating has done little, so far, to affect the economic lives of Americans as a whole. The unemployment rate is high, home prices and sales are shaky, the job market is bleak, and can-do confidence has gone missing.
And that's just the issue. What is odd is that Fineman doesn't consider Obama's approach to big government as the key problem here.

When the stimulus package was passed, the "Obama is a socialist" idea had not quite taken root. And, by all accounts, the stimulus did help the economy. The problem is that is was not large enough to actually stimulate additional economic growth. Rather, it provided a temporary palliative, as opposed to getting the machine running again.

Yes, the package was pared down in the Senate to appease Republicans. But one also has to wonder if Obama didn't push hard enough for a larger package because he had health care reform on the brain. No doubt he would he hesitant to spend too much knowing he had a trillion dollar policy program on the way.

And, of course, there are the problems with the health care bill, which seems more like a way to force Americans to enrich the coffers of the big insurance companies than it does a method to provide fair and equal access to health services for all. Again, a flawed bill ends up looking like wasteful spending, and the "socialist" moniker sticks even further.

And let's not forget the cap-and-trade climate change bill, which the Democrats simply allowed to die on the Senate floor, their political capital spent.

Obama's problem is not that he prefers big government. It's that he does big government badly, and hesitatingly, and with unfocused priorities.

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