Spending Everything While Building Nothing

Mark Steyn on the utter failure of big government, Obama-style:

If you’re saying, “Whoa, that sounds expensive,” well, our government is more expensive than any government in history — and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama’s 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. “A big storm requires Big Government,” pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn’t have — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multitrillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can’t do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government “investment” to approved Obama cronies.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government’s ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states — because your president spent 6 trillion bucks, and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

What has $6 trillion of Obama spending built? The food stamp rolls. The number of Americans on unemployment. The number of Americans claiming disability. A growing list of failed ‘green’ companies, lavishly funded with our money. The federal bureaucracy – with massive ongoing costs associated with their solid platinum benefits. These are things we could have done without. And would be better off not having.

But nothing whatsoever tangible and good. Could six trillion dollars have hardened all of our infrastructure? Probably not. But it could have made a real start.:  (Real businesses mostly operate in the one million or less rage, unlike the insane federal trillion plus range.)

We could have had something to show for it. Other than the debts still due, of course. These are very real.

And yes, Obama did build that great, sucking debt.

Cross-posted from Blue Crab Boulevard

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