George Rebane

To keep track of what our socialist brethren in the country are saying, I visit sites like truthout.org.  One of the Left’s champion commentators is economist Dean Baker who writes ‘The Anti-Stimulus Crowd Blows a Gasket’ .  I cannot claim that I understand any of Baker’s logic or development, it comes from a universe I have spent my lifetime studying, and subsequently unsuccessfully avoiding.

Now it looks like we are all fated to ride the train of Team Obama into a socialist future that even they are unabashedly giving the redux label of ‘New Deal’.  The Right has no goods to sell on this train, their only hope is that people see sooner than later that it’s headed in the wrong direction.  But given examples like the mindless support that AB32 (California’s greenhouse gas law) continues to draw, there is little hope of that.

[update – to those concerned that “mindless” is perhaps too strong of an adjective, please check out the long list of analyses at the Institute for Energy Research site on the cost of the federal Lieberman-Warner climate change legislation that California’s AB32 seeks to trump in its implementation.  Especially revealing is the SAIC study done for the National Association of Manufacturers.  Hat tip to Russ Steele on NCMW for sending me this cost analysis.]

Perhaps the only chance of some redemption lies in Baker’s own prescription of how long it will take for Team Obama to succeed.  He states that

The anti-stimulus crowd is getting desperate. The possibility that a young charismatic new president will push through an ambitious package that begins to set the economy right is truly terrifying to this crew. After all, if the economy begins to turn around and has largely recovered in three or four years, the Republican leadership can look forward to spending most of their careers in the political wilderness. (Emphasis mine)

‘Three or four years’, ‘largely recovered’ (!?) seem to me admissions that the Dems are going to wander in the woods for a while before coming to the tunnel with the light at the other end.  Last I looked, there will be an election in 2010.  And if we are still in the full bloom of a recession, someone may notice.  The problem is that by that time we will be used to getting our semi-annual Vote Democratic (aka ‘stimulus’) checks.  At least those of us who can reliably be counted on to vote socialist will get their checks and tax rebates.

The Republicans don’t yet have a plan on how to communicate to the voters a solution to this prolonged economic travesty.  It’s not even clear that such a concept can be communicated to the very large, pre-educated segment of the electorate, especially when your message is that you have to retrain yourself to regain your relevance in the new workplace.  It’s hard to embrace that kind of responsibility when the Left is saying, ‘Pay no mind, just look at the checks you’ve been getting, and here’s a nice new government job waiting for you, all paid for by the coddled rich.’

Oh, in case you’re confused about the ‘coddled rich’ part, Dean Baker also has that sorted out for you in his new book The Conservative Nanny State.  And here is the part that I really worry about – Baker has a point.  We all know that the big corporate rich have received their share of government coddling.  And while the Dems try to uncoddle those people, the successful entrepreneurs and wannabes – those who risk in creating our new technologies, industries, and jobs – will be swept along and made to pay through the nose as we all sink into the suffocating sameness of a socialist sunset.