Professor Obama’s Take on the Economy

The National Review reports:

President Obama’s is getting a lot of attention for his quip that the private sector is doing fine amid weak growth and high unemployment. How odd is his diagnosis when Democrats themselves not long ago attacked George W. Bush’s “jobless recovery” of 5.4 percent unemployment and George H. W. Bush “it’s the economy stupid” of 3.4 percent GDP growth. Yet Obama’s problem was not just the absurdity of defining economic distress as too little borrowed federal money for insolvent states and municipalities, but his timing right after blue-state Wisconsin repudiated just that philosophy.

So we are in an interesting paradox: All empirical evidence points to the worldwide failure of the blue-state model (e.g., California, the southern Mediterranean, anti-Walker Wisconsin), and yet Barack Obama’s entire career, from community organizing, to the state legislature, to the Senate, was predicated on just such a protocol of public borrowing to provide expansive government entitlements and jobs in exchange for a loyal political constituency, with the debt, in redistributive fashion, to be serviced by wringing more revenue from the suspect private sector that is always doing “fine.”