Is the Left Crazy?

Albert Einstein gets credit for a rather famous quote: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." This point is very appropriate in the current debate regarding national economic policy. On the one side, there are president Obama and the Obamacrats who argue for more stimulus through government spending. They want more taxes. They want more regulation. They want more government intervention in both the American economy and the daily lives of the American people. They want more entitlements which will blunt the drive of the average American to work hard to succeed in life. And all of this is supposed to give us a better economy and a better life.

These methods are exactly those which Obama and the Obamacrats tried for the last three plus years. We have already seen government spending soar by about 30% through the stimulus and a whole host of other Obama spending initiatives. It did not help. We have seen tax increases in all sorts of places and there is a huge batch which kick in next January. These did not help either. The Dodd-Frank bill and the EPA regulations have intervened in an extraordinary way in the economy while Obamacare has pushed into new areas of American life with the heavy hand of government. But these too have not helped. Obama is pushing for lower student loan interest, guaranteed equal pay despite differences in work performance, and almost perpetual unemployment compensation. Again, this has not helped. The US economy is now three years into the Obama recovery and it is just barely growing. Indeed, the growth maybe sputtering to an end. So we know these programs failed, and yet there are Obama and the Obamacrats pushing to do the same thing again while hoping for a different outcome.

Some on the left realize the craziness of this economic push. These folks do not argue for different policies; instead, they scream that all of the failure is the fault of Republican "austerity". That's right, the GOP has imposed austerity on the USA. For example, Joan Walsh, writing at Salon.com, argues that GOP austerity is killing the US economy. These claims are so bizarre that it makes one wonder if these folks are crazy or if they are just liars.

The idea that the US has adopted austerity is a joke. Spending is not going down. Even after all the fights between Obama and the Obamacrats on the one hand and the House Republican majority on the other hand, all that has happened is that the rate of growth of spending has slowed. Only in the weird world of Washington could growth in the level of spending be labelled "austerity".

Three years after a severe recession there ought already to have been a boom, a period of strongly rebounding economic growth. During the recession, the natural demand for housing, automobiles, and many other goods was not satisfied. Folks held back from making big purchases due to lack of money or due to fear from the bad economic conditions. Once the downturn ended, we should have seen all of the pent up demand moving back into the economy to push growth back up quickly. In the Obama recovery, however, the Obama policies have prevented this from happening.

We should keep clear that just because the pent up growth has not materialized, it has not disappeared. There are still millions of folks who need a new place to live. There are millions of others who need new cars but who are holding off on the purchase. Millions more need appliances, computers, TVs, and all sorts of items. At some point all this demand will drive the economy forward quickly. Hopefully, these purchases will be made from American manufacturers rather than foreign ones, but the purchases ultimately will come if confidence is restored to the country.

That is why it is time to try something different. Not something new, but clearly something different from Obamanomics. We know that a free market economy will bounce back quickly from a downturn. It has happened in the past again and again. We need to move back towards the free market system and we need to do so now. The crazy economic policies of the left have got to be rejected.