Bill Clinton presumably didn\u2019t do much to smooth over his family feud with \u201cupstart\u201d President Barack Obama — running scared from today\u2019s already heavily understated jobless numbers — when the former president came up with a plan, published in last week\u2019s Newsweek, called \u201c14 Ways to Put America Back to Work.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would have been refreshing to see a renewed embrace of the free market. Instead, what\u2019s simultaneously most discouraging and least surprising in these \u201cnew\u201d Democratic proposals is how they continue to focus on precisely what\u2019s been failing now for years — heavy-handed government initiatives to subsidize politically correct \u201cwinners,\u201d paid for by taxing and crushing everyone else in red tape.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpeed the approvals,\u201d is Mr. Clinton\u2019s first proposal.<\/p>\n
Repeal the time-consuming environmental and other reviews that bog down projects for years, multiplying their costs till many won\u2019t pencil out, at all?<\/p>\n
Not quite. Instead, Mr. Clinton wants to \u201ckeep the full review process when there are real environmental concerns, but when there aren\u2019t, the federal government should be able to give a waiver to the states to speed up start times on construction projects.\u201d<\/p>\n
To \u201cthe states\u201d? He isn\u2019t talking only about GOVERNMENT construction projects, isn\u2019t he? And who would decide when there \u201caren\u2019t real environmental concerns\u201d? Have the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity and their ilk all agreed to refrain from suing?<\/p>\n
Mr. Clinton also wants federal cash handouts (from higher government taxes on everything \u201cnot green\u201d) every time someone creates a \u201cgreen job.\u201d And how are we to define a \u201cgreen job\u201d? Why, just send your pricey lobbyists to Washington to get those definitions written to suit your project, of course.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s that? You don\u2019t HAVE a high-priced government lobbyist? Awww. As Mrs. Clinton once said, it\u2019s not her \u201cjob to save every underfunded business\u201d in America.<\/p>\n
Third, Mr. Clinton appears to assert that finally adopting the long discredited Kyoto \u201cglobal warming\u201d accords will \u201clower unemployment\u201d while leading to \u201cmore new business formation and less income inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those not heavily dosed on one of today\u2019s more popular psychoactive drugs probably won\u2019t need to proceed much further to get a sense of the quality of the \u201cflashback\u201d fever dream we have in hand.
\nFor those still following, however, Mr. Clinton does go on to propose that the federal government should back 75 percent of the value of bank loans in order to encourage more lending to businesses. (Surely there\u2019d be no politics involved in deciding which outfits would be designated for these \u201closer loans,\u201d for which banks would need no such incentives if they met standard lending requirements in the first place.)<\/p>\n
The misallocations of the housing bubble have been SUCH fun; let\u2019s create some NEW ones!<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery analysis shows that TARP and the stimulus saved us from a second Great Depression,\u201d says Mr. Clinton, while in fact every analysis by economists of the Austrian school (the only one that successfully predicted the money-printing policies of the Keynesians would bring on this looming Great Depression II) shows it merely stretched out the recession indefinitely, preventing the needed correction by propping up failed enterprises, the largest of these being the big banks and the FDIC.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the GM and Chrysler bailouts, we have something like 75,000 more jobs in the industry,\u201d Mr. Clinton writes. \u201cClosure of the factories and the suppliers with them would have cost a million jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
But allowing GM and Chrysler to go through standard bankruptcies, under which they could have shed their costly white elephant union contracts, would hardly have halted auto production in America. Where did the \u201cstraw man\u201d alternative of ending American auto-making come from?<\/p>\n
(Remember, the Clinton-Gore ticket was sold to America in 1992 as the \u201cnew, moderate, pragmatic Southern wing\u201d of the Democratic party, not beholden to old-line, big-city union bosses like those bad, Humphrey-Mondale \u201cFarm Labor\u201d Democrats.)<\/p>\n
New operators, buying up those factories in a fire sale, would have put most of those workers back to work in the same plants, with lowered labor costs allowing more effective competition with foreign rivals.<\/p>\n
In fact, we have no idea whether GM and Chrysler are now \u201csucceeding,\u201d nor can we know, until they again stand free of taxpayer support.<\/p>\n
Mr. Clinton does at least acknowledge that America needs to cut corporate taxes, acknowledging \u201cIt\u2019s true that our corporate rates are the second-highest in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there are caveats, of course, including the inevitable call for \u201celiminating loopholes\u201d (why is it everyone ELSE\u2019S deductions of costs and depreciation are dubbed \u201cloopholes\u201d?) and \u201cbroadening the tax base so that all of them pay a reasonable amount of tax on their profits\u201d — which sounds suspiciously like a corporate version of the \u201cAlternative Minimum Tax\u201d which has driven so many successful entrepreneurs into early retirement if not outright expatriation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most thought-out and specific\u201d of these proposals, writes Joseph Lawler at the American Spectator, \u201cseem like they were taken out of Barack Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign, especially the five that are \u2018green\u2019 initiatives,\u201d one of which is to paint every roof in America white, so they\u2019ll better reflect away sunlight.<\/p>\n
Seriously. \u201cEvery roof.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that the government could put unemployed people to work on green jobs to the benefit of the economy was fatuous in 2008,\u201d Mr, Lawler writes. \u201cThat Clinton doesn\u2019t have any better ideas now, three years later, is frightening, if it\u2019s any indication of what the Democrats and Obama are thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bill Clinton presumably didn\u2019t do much to smooth over his family feud with \u201cupstart\u201d President Barack Obama — running scared from today\u2019s already heavily understated jobless numbers — when the former president came up with a plan, published in last week\u2019s Newsweek, called \u201c14 Ways to Put America Back to Work.\u201d It would have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,17,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election","category-big-brother","category-economics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-cT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}