by Fred Pruitt
Before returning to the Health Care Program® with a literal vengeance the Obama administration paused briefly to tout its Jobs Program® before reaching for a nuclear option. Not particularly surprisingly, this looked a lot like the Stimulus® looked. It involved taking large amounts of money and giving it to lots of people: donors, potential donors, or people who are powers behind the throne, which is to say those same donors and potential donors.
All government programs translate into either bureaucracies -- government employees, many of them unionized, answering to political appointees who administer budgets that include at the very least seven signicant digits -- or contracts, which are similar, except that the employees don't get their checks from the government and the people in charge are castigated as "fat cats" when not being solicited for donations or awarded contracts or given cabinet positions within the administration. We have reached a point in our decline where that process constitutes the measure of government activity. The Democrats can't conceive of any other way of doing things; it's the extension of Chicago or New York or Massachussetts politics, to whit, government by ward heeler, the Big Dig on a national scale. The Republicans aren't much better than the Dems at coming up with ideas that don't involve controlling the flow of cash. Every time they achieve significant power they're admonished to "govern from the center," which means letting the Dems control that flood of cash and increasingly credit. They're dumb enough to do it, too.
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