Doubling down on failed stimulus policy

By Victor Davis Hanson

To newly inaugurated President Obama and his prime-the-pump technocrats, the logic seemed so simple: America's problem was a struggling economy. The solution was to spread around even more borrowed government money. The result would be a return to prosperity.

But after nearly three years and almost $5 trillion more in borrowed "stimulus," things have only gotten worse. Unemployment is stuck at 9.1 percent. Consumer confidence is approaching a record low. The stock market is tanking. National debt increases at the rate of $4 billion a day. Economic growth has almost vanished. U.S. creditworthiness is downgraded. The housing market is still depressed. Food and fuel prices skyrocket. Only 26 percent of the public expresses confidence in the president's handling of the economy.

Apparently, government cannot so easily, as even the president himself recently confessed, manufacture "shovel-ready" jobs. But it did far better at scaring cash-hoarding businesses into a historic hiring paralysis with nonstop talk of higher taxes, more national debt, more regulations, them-vs.-us class-warfare rhetoric, threatened government shutdowns of private plants, and higher-priced energy.

Obama is still promising to borrow more for "infrastructure" and "jobs." Despite $16 trillion in federal debt, the administration apparently wants to do more of what made things worse in the first place, using the euphemism

investments

. It still adheres to the notion that the medicine cannot be proven useless or toxic because the dose wasn't large enough. And the proof is that the patient is still not quite dead.

The same fallacy arises over the rioting in Britain and the flash-mobbing in Philadelphia and other American cities. With food stamps, housing subsidies, unemployment insurance, disability payments, and general assistance at all-time highs in the affluent West, why did looters target high-end stores? Was it really due to a lack of government investment and public caring - or to too much coddling and dependency? Yet some observers talk of renewed "investment," not of pruning back the programs that seemed to facilitate an angry underclass' robbing of electronics and clothing stores.

That there is never enough spending is a seductive fallacy, because it requires no empirical proof. If millions supported by the state have lost their self-reliance, perhaps it is because they were not supported well enough.

Consider also the current government-sponsored notion of "millions of green jobs" - a siren call that Obama and former "green jobs czar" Van Jones voiced, claiming they could lift the economy and usher in sustainable, affordable energy. But tens of billions of wasted dollars later, electricity and gas prices are at near-record levels. The idea of making subsidized green power competitive by cutting back on fossil-fuel exploration while trying to shut down coal plants and gas pipelines has only further burdened American households.

Meanwhile, hundreds of billions in green subsidies created neither much new energy nor new jobs. But they did provide a lot of sweetheart deals for administration-friendly companies that went broke, outsourced jobs to China, or hired the unemployed at insane costs, sometimes $2 million per worker. Yet despite this dismal record, Obama is still touting the same old "millions of green jobs" mantra, apparently on the premise that massive subsidies have not worked only because there were not enough of them.

As we witness the financial insolvency of blue-state America, the monetary meltdown in southern Europe, and the criminality breaking out among some members of the so-called Western underclass, logic suggests that massive state deficits not only failed to bring a promised utopia, but ensured chaos.

But for those invested materially and psychologically in the religion of never-ending government borrowing and spending, there is always the true believers' excuse: "Not quite enough."