Recommended: Obama's Economic Trifecta

Joel Kotkin has an interesting piece over on the Forbes website this morning: Obama's Economic Trifecta: How The President Helped Kill Progressivism, Capitalism And Moderation. It is not very flattering to the administration, as is obvious from the title, but on balance I think his charges are pretty accurate. Of course, he is not particularly kind to the Republicans either, and again I think his criticisms are accurate.

What has been notable about this administration's attempts to deal with the recession is that despite all the rhetoric, the measures actually taken have been aimed largely at preserving jobs on Wall Street, in large corporations like the auto companies, and among union members, with little or no effective action to help main street small businesses, homeowners facing foreclosure, or the jobless. It is hard not to come to the conclusion that despite being a Democrat (supposedly representatives of the common working person), Obama is actually more concerned with shoring up the in-group wealthy establishment and his union political base than helping the nation as a whole.

He will apparently propose yet another expensive stimulus plan tonight, even though his last, much larger stimulus plan didn't seem to do much to help the situation.  There is a legitimate question, of course, about just how much the government can do in any case to "create" jobs.

Government policy can certainly make it harder for companies to function, but I think there is relatively little the government can do to actually create more productive jobs (as oppose to simply more bureaucratic jobs). Only private businesses can create jobs that actually add to the national wealth, and the administration's efforts to push high speed rail and green technology companies as new sources of jobs has been pretty naive at best, and look more like pandering to his supporters than actually trying to do anything effective.

It will be interesting to see exactly what he does propose tonight, and whether it is any departure from Washington's usual solution of just throwing more (borrowed) money at a problem.