OBAMA'S ECONOMIC POLICIES

I have never been a supporter of Obama's economic policies, because they never seemed to get to the root of the problem. Somehow wealth-creation has to be stimulated which will create jobs as businesses develop and expand to meet the needs of our country and the world. People need to have meaningful jobs creating wealth and also providing a tax-base. Instead he has just thrown money out there as a stimulus. It may stimulate for the short-term, but unless productive capacity and innovation is taking place, it will only have a short-term impact. For example, extending unemployment relief may be good in the short-term helping a person transition, but it really doesn't get people back to work.

I have not seen the main-stream media really raise any serious questions about the theories behind his stimulus. The August issue of Money does have a columnist talking about how Obama is using "spackle" to deal with the economy (painters will understand the analogy).

On July 14th I read a column by Bob Hebert in the Dallas Morning News that begins to address the problems in a more serious way (Hebert is a NYT, African-American, Obama supporter). While I don't agree with everything he says, I do like his principle that the administration is not dealing with fundamental economic problems.

Vice President Joe Biden told us last week that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.

Puh-leeze. President Barack Obama and Biden won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Obama tried to clean up the vice president's remarks by saying his team hadn't misread what was happening, but rather "we had incomplete information."

That doesn't hold water, either. The president boasts the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they're crunching numbers every which way they can. They've got more than enough data. They're not coming up with the right answers because they're missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.

The reference to McNamara and the "best and the brightest" who got us into Vietnam is quiet troubling. How do we know that the Obama economic team isn't made up of a bunch of McNamaras who tell us they have the answer, but as the years pass, the country finds that the "best and the brightest" on Obama's team have created even more problems?