The attempted field goal went wide left in the final moments of
the Baltimore Ravens 23-to-20 loss to the New England Patriots on
Sunday. Poor snake-bitten Billy Cundiff! If that had been Barack
Obama instead of him doing the kicking, the president would have
split the uprights — with the exact same kick.
The trick is to kick first, and then move the goal
posts into the desired position.
If you tune into tonight’s State of the Union
address, you will see how the president snatches victory from the
jaws of defeat in his telling of recent economic
history.
He does it with a hypothetical field goal
— claiming credit (even in dismal economic circumstances) for
saving the country from a far worse financial and economic
disaster.
When President Obama gave his first address to
Congress three years ago, he spoke of how the so-called American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act would transform the flagging economy.
He stated:
Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5
million jobs…. Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double the
nations supply of renewable energy over the next three years…. We
have also made the largest investment in basic research funding in
American history — an investment that will spur not only new
discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine, science, and
technology.… We will soon lay down thousands of miles of power
lines that can carry new energy to cities and towns around the
country.
Never mind that the U.S. economy actually had a net
loss of more than two million jobs over the same period of time
that the Obama administration had projected would see the creation
of more than three million new jobs.
And never mind that we haven’t seen a real boom in
renewable energy or the creation of thousands of new power lines
carrying new energy to cities and towns across the U.S. Instead of
that we have witnessed a series of debacles involving Solyndra and
other clean energy startups that sucked up hundreds of millions of
dollars of federal subsidies before going bust.
Obama’s hypothetical field goal — the what-if
projection of what might have been in the absence of the stimulus
program — is based upon a computer model which assumes (against a
large body of contrary evidence) that every $1 of government
spending will yield $1.50 or more in higher GDP. On this basis, the
president claims that he has “created or saved” several million
jobs. The logic here is — ‘It is assumed, therefore it
is.”
Still more, this assumption is based on the logic —
or illogic — of thinking that it is possible to enlarge the public
sector (through borrowing or taxes) without depressing the private
sector.
No one — even Obama — expresses much satisfaction
over the actual performance of the economy. That best he can say is
that it could have been worse. Hence the focus on fairness
— the divvying of a pie that no one assumes will be growing from
one year to the next.
According to a front-page
story in this weekend’s
New York Times, Obama is working toward his vision of “an
America where everyone gets a fair shot, every does their fair
share and everyone plays by the same set of
rules.”
But when the president talks of everyone playing by
“the same set of rules,” it seems that what he really means is an
ever-changing set of rules — which can be endlessly adjusted for
any lapses between planned and actual outcomes, and further
adjusted to accommodate his personal preferences as to what may be
fair or unfair any given
situation.
Hence all the Obamacare “waivers” and countless
examples both of crony capitalism and of special treatment for
political allies in the trade unions and environmental
circles.
