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Obama Change Is Unchanged Policy
Obama announces a big infrastructure program:
With the worsening economic turmoil certain to mark Mr. Obama’s first year in office, his advisers say they are intent on trying to use the crisis as an opportunity to act on many of the issues he emphasized in his campaign, including tax cuts for lower- and middle-class workers, addressing neglected public infrastructure projects like roads and schools and creating new “green jobs” through federal business incentives for energy alternatives and environmentally friendly technologies.
That is a pretty standard Keynesian reaction in a recession.
But the program lacks real initiatives. Why spend on roads when better public transport would be much more effective in reducing dependency on hydrocarbons?
The best policy for energy alternatives is to make carbon-energy more expensive by introducing a gas tax and to guarantee an (over time decreasing) extra amount per kilowatt for wind energy.
These are recipes known to work. Federal business incentives will simply end up as pork.
So far I have yet to see any change from standard U.S. policy approches.
As Jereme Scahill points out (h/t r’giap), the Obama team looks more and more like a Clinton team sprinkled with some CIA torture advocates and arch-republicans like Gates in important position.
Why was there such a long primary at all when the people who lost that ride end up in the front seats of the presidency?
b 18) “A gas tax would enable that.”
Puleez! The only way to advance a liberal agenda is to avoid the purple koolaid!
We’ve had gas taxes on top of gas taxes for a decade now, but with income tax exemptions for small businesses to buy large displacement trucks and SUV’s countering any incentive, and gas tax revenues which were spent on more roads and bridges anyway, for a decade, when the only “effect” that gas taxes “enabled” is massive exurban construction out beyond the suburbs, in the hinterlands, whole mountaintops bulldozed into “field of dreams” with hundreds of acres of raw land, stub-ups and cute little cul-de-sac narrow gauge roads, dotted with faux historic streetlights, (their copper wiring already ripped out by meth heads), and a frontage lined by glorious party-favor banners and huge “coming soon” billboards.
The hinterland governments loved it! Their employment doubled! Tripled! Gone were the days of Andy and Barney, now the police force has it’s own SWAT team, it’s own helicopter gunship, it’s own high-speed search and rescue boat! City Hall was expanded out into entire city blocks of leased office space, whole new planning departments, expanded engineering departments (with the engineering done by outsourced consultants at 20% of the gross), 1,000’s of environmental employees, oh, what an public works gravey train since the Reaganaut Pilgrims landed!
FACTOID: Gas taxes DO NOT achieve any liberal social engineering goals!!
None of it pencils! None of the public transit projects are running surpluses, they are all massively in debt, massively cost overrun, massively operating expense and future entitlemented, perpetually Ch 11, laid onto the tax, fee and surcharge payer.
I watched a public hearing last week for a simple community park, as it degenerated into cost overruns of 300%, nearly $1M just in outsourced consultant fees, the public works engineer shaking his head, ‘wow, this sure turned out more than we thought’, (bonehead!), city council shaking their heads, ‘wow, we warned costs were gonna skyrocket’, (incompetents!), then without any push-back whatsoever, without firing staff and re-organizing, without freezing the project, and moving on to more cost-effective use of rate-payer’s monies, the Council approved the 300% overrun! One council member shrugged his shoulders and sighed soto voce, to remind voters he was “backed into a corner” and “what’r ya’ gonna do?”
Now comes Obama, pledging bazillions in deficits to underwrite more public works construction, by the same NASA moon-shot cost-overrun public works agencies who brought us the Boston Big Dig and 1,000’s of similar hog troughs all across the US, with well-intentioned but totally koolaid drinking liberals all nodding their heads like it’s the queen’s coronation, ‘oh, yes, gas taxes will insure everyone moves back into the cities’, cities where existing urban development buildout is completely upside down, entire condo developments are completely empty, zero occupancy office buildings in every town across America, as caravans, as legions of commuters move even farther out into the exurbs seeking whatever tiny bungalow they can still afford, jobs lost, credit frozen, sitting on underwater assets.
Even Huffington understands the math! Social engineering does not work, not without a coherent and overweening social-ist government fabric from Federal to local, that declares you can’t pave over farmland, that declares public transit a requisite, that lays on gas and truck transport taxes regardless of the regressive crushing impact that has on lower wage earners, but then, in the end, what do you get?
You get a huge bureaucracy, with horribly, unbelievably low productivity in terms of public $’s spent per public employee (Fed Bureau of Indian Affairs, as example, burns through 92% of Indian nations’ entitlements in administrative overhead!) That’s US! We are those Indian nations! We’re all on “the rez” now!
It’s a taxpayer bailout to bailout government employees, all who have good medical, all who have fat pensions! It’s a “what’s mine is mine, and what’s your’s is mine” taking, on a massive Federal level, $750B giveaway to keep the bureaucrats in their custom-padded orthopedic office chairs with their orthopedic arm supports so they can click at their orthopedic split keyboards, hunched over their 24″ LCD monitors, jerking off with the other public employees, writing white papers, sending crude jokes, planning their after-work get together’s, before they have their afternoon 1/2-hour coffee breaks and sneak out an hour later at 4:30 to beat the commute.
I’m not making this up. Everybody knows this! That’s the joke! Get a state job! That’s ‘makin’ bacon’! That’s “I don’t have to work this hard, you’re stressing me out, I’m going for a herbal massage” entitlements, that’s the “I didn’t read the documents before the meeting, is there anything to decide?” Now with Obama’s public deficit funds for bailout of public general funds, every public-funded “Tiddleywinks Museum,” or “Farm Animal Science Exhibit” and “Six Holer Outhouse in Space” is going to get funded, while the common workers starve.
The real solution is public monies granted to the most efficient private enterprises. You can hire three WalMart employees and put them to work sweeping the parking lots, with three times the economic stimulus of hiring one more bloated public servant wallowing in their padded cubicle, crippling private growth with more reg’s. You can hire ten Sears employees and put them to work selling lifetime appliances out on the sidewalk, with ten times the economic stimulus of hiring one more white-lab coat welfare NASA tech jerking off on their Mission to Mars fantasy.
America could put $750B into building legions of Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum factories, retooled to churn out UNESCO peanut butter and powdered milk nutrition bars by the bazillions, so that every kid in school in every town in America can have at least a nutritious breakfast, so that someday America can return to full employment with a fully-educated workforce.
b, the only thing that works to restore a shattered and made-bankrupt economy is “bubble up” private spending, not “casino capitalism” and not more “socialist government”. Helicopter Ben was right … too bad he was just practicing his standup routine.
“Mr. Obama, tear down that wall!” Doesn’t anyone see the Obama-Gorbachev parallel to today?
Didn’t anyone watch the Argentinian Chronicles?
America is about to “change” from a bankrupt oiligarchy to a busted kleptocracy!
Posted by: Peris Troika | Nov 23 2008 19:20 utc | 27
antifa wrote: One is to prevent universal health care at every possible turn. It would be the establishment of a socially caring American spirit, and the end of the conservative political movement.
At present, one guesses, in the US, there are only a few sectors where employment is stable or could rise: Gvmt jobs (see Obama and Bush before him), includes the military; Education (marginally) and Health.
Still some room for profit in the health-care sector. Some dollars to squeeze out. New treatments, better and more expensive pills, more charges for consults, emergency care, etc. Families will deprive themselves of ice-cream and new shoes to save a loved one. The lemon is desperately dry, a few drops of acid juice are left.
Obama won’t be able to do anything about health care. Meaning the task is impossible, contrary to energy, where he could act.
The Health industry – sells miracle pills and varied products, the surgeon’s knives, expensive equipment, high tech, infrastructure, transport, advice, the caring services of highly qualified professionals, and the middlemen take *at least* 10%, etc. It has been the biggest growth industry and money-maker for years, 5%, say, growth y on y, stellar, a wonder! Never mind it impoverishes, bankrupts, destroys, large sections of the population who can then no longer go to college, train, work. Growth!
The poor with no cash or savings are not interesting clients, they have to be kicked away, excluded (better the tax payer do it under other rubrics – crime and prisons.) They also don’t buy golf clubs, row boats, or lacy underwear.
The US has no mechanisms, no procedures, no administrative lines, no politics, nothing, to deal with this kind internal redistribution/balancing, or even, ultimately, the moral issues involved.
Posted by: Tangerine | Nov 23 2008 19:22 utc | 28
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