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Mark Steyn wonders what a trillion dollars is, and what it might buy.
… And by then we’ll probably need a new round number. What’s the name for the avalanche of dough that comes after a trillion? I asked Senator-designate Caroline Kennedy, and she said: “Cotillion?” Close enough. By 2011, we’ll need a cotillion-dollar stimulus package to . . . um, “create jobs” and, er, “help middle-class families.”
That’s the funny thing. The price tag may be unprecedented but the products are distressingly precedented. “The administration’s number-one goal,” said the new president, “is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.” And that sounds kind of impressive — unless, that is, you’re one of those capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw types who wonder what kind of functioning polity is so structurally decayed that it’s supposed to be good news that a mere 20 percent of new jobs will be government work. Are 600,000 new government workers really necessary to stimulate the U.S. economy? And, come to that, will a $3,000 tax credit really persuade a private company to take on a new employee it wouldn’t otherwise have hired, or will the bulk of the dough just go to companies that would have hired the extra workers anyway?
Then there’s infrastructure. “Infrastructure,” says James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “is going to be the cornerstone of this stimulus initiative.” Representative Oberstar has a fairly expansive definition of “infrastructure investment” — it includes remodeling the National Zoo in Washington — but one assumes at least a portion of the outlay would do some good. After all, freight trains that take two days to get from the Port of Los Angeles to the outskirts of Chicago currently spend another 48 hours crawling across the congested rail lines of the Windy City.
But it’s not lack of money that’s responsible for America’s sclerotic infrastructure, it’s the inability to make things happen on an expeditious timeframe. You think that Chicago bottleneck’s bad? If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the golden spike to celebrate the point at which the feasibility commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the zoning board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor. If 9/11 was (as they used to say) “the day everything changed,” that seven-year hole in the ground in the heart of Lower Manhattan is a monument to how hard it is to get anything changed in today’s America. So good luck “stimulating” the economy with infrastructure. One reason Google and Apple and other American success stories started in somebody’s garage is that that’s the one place where innovation isn’t immediately buried by bureaucracy. …
And David Brooks looks to coming to his senses concerning Obama.
… The problem is overload. Four months ago, no one knew how to put together a stimulus package. Now Obama wants to use it to rush through instant special-ed programs and pre-Ks. Repairing the power grid means clearing complex regulatory hurdles. How is he going to do that in time to employ workers in May?
His staff will be searching for the White House restrooms, and they will have to make billion-dollar decisions by the hour. He is asking Congress to behave and submit in a way it never has. He has picked policies that are phenomenally hard to implement, let alone in weeks. The conventional advice for presidents is: focus your energies on a few big things. Obama just blew the doors off that one.
Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.
Cafe Hayek leads us to Arnold Kling’s analysis of the stimulus.
Here’s Kling with the “Stimulus and the Somme.”
… I was reminded of the Battle of the Somme, one of the worst policy blunders of all time. Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was….a really big offensive. Just as Feldstein and Stiglitz pay no attention to the on-the-ground the housing market, the British generals ignored the impact of machine guns on men advancing over open fields.
My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media. …
Sacramento Bee reports a story in Fullerton, CA. Is this the beginning of the end for government pension increases?
Jennifer Rubin looks at the work product of Harry Reid.
The Senate Democrats are not amused with the handling of the Roland Burris mess. (Re-enacting a scene from the civil rights era – in which a neatly attired African-American man gets thrown out of a building to huddle in the rain — was one heck of a way to start the session, wasn’t it?) They are mad at the Senate leaders and at the President-elect according to this report …
This is a good issue of Pickings to consider Ayn Rand and “Atlas Shrugged.” Stephen Moore in WSJ does the honors.
Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.
Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.
Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.
For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism. …
Al Gore must be peddling his nostrums in Slovenia where temperatures are setting all time record lows. Macedonia On Line has the details.
Pravda warns of new ice age.
The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. …