Jennifer Rubin on Obama's New New Deal:
The Obama transition team, soon to be the Obama administration,
is concocting a reenactment of the New Deal.
A trillion dollar stimulus is going to "create" jobs, and the
government will "bailout" failing industries (with additional
debt funded by the Chinese, so long as they have an appetite
for quickly depreciating dollars). If you think this sounds
half-baked and suffers from historical amnesia, you are
right.
Despite the obvious shortcomings with this approach (e.g., it's
never worked before), the Republican Party so far isn't doing a
very good job of coming up with alternatives. Plainly, they
don't like the mounds of debt. And they are skeptical of a
gigantic public works projects. But what could be done instead?
What about doing nothing? It seems to me that the "do
something" demand for economic intervention is fundamentally
misguided. We are experiencing the downside of the business cycle
which, however painful, is certainly temporary. In its
stimulus-and-buyout frenzy over the past several months, the
federal government has already made extraordinary interventions.
What Obama proposes is essentially more (much more) of the same.
Isn't the true conservative response to say that the federal
government has already done too much, and that doing more will
only compound the problem? If the problem is too much
intervention -- and
cutting the prime rate from 6.5 percent in July 2000 to 1
percent in October 2003 can be characterized as an intervention
deeply implicated in our current woes -- then less intervention
would seem a plausible solution.
The compelling urge to "do something" about the economy may be a
political necessity for the incoming administration and the
Democrats in Congress, but it does not follow that Republicans, a
powerless minority in Congress with no meaningful influence in
the Obama administration, must offer "do something"
counter-proposals. Republicans could without political peril
respond to Obama's New New Deal with a simple three-word message:
"It won't
work."
(Cross-posted at The
Other McCain.)
