If this works, hats off to them and we become France. If not, Americans may finally dump left-wing economics into the ash heap of history, starting next November and then in the next presidential election, which can't come soon enough.
The first purpose of the jobs proposals Mr. Obama announced Tuesday—TARP money for Main Street, tax credits for new hires, more infrastructure spending and the weird weatherization program—is to bail out Democratic incumbents. The underlying strength and resilience of the American economy may yet produce enough headline growth the next 11 months to slow the panic over employment levels by next fall.
No Democratic president, though, can just say, "I'm doing this to save the Pelosi majority and to protect the state and local jobs of Andy Stern's dues payers and party regulars in the Service Employees International Union." Mr. Obama's saving grace is that no matter how political his initiatives, the reasons he offers for what he's doing generally do describe what is at stake.
And so he did at the jobs summit: "We've got the most entrepreneurial spirit in the world, and we've got some of the most productive workers in the world. And if we get serious, then the 21st century is going to be the American century, just like the 20th century."
Too true. This global competition is what lies beyond the politics of next November's employment rate. Still, one must ask: Can weatherization save us from a billion Chinese workers?
Apologies for the glibness, but I don't see how one can sort through the Obama economic policies and conclude that we have a strategy for sending America's best and brightest entrepreneurs onto the battlefields of Asia. It looks instead like we're going to spend a generation looking for jobs in Uncle Sam's hiring hall of targeted tax credits and industry-specific subsidies.
Everyone in politics genuflects in the direction of the job-creation powers of "entrepreneurs" and their ideas. But the generation of Democrats who rose to power with the Obama presidency and the current House majority don't really trust or much like real entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship, the kind that creates industries and jobs on the scale we'll need in the next century, is about two things: Ideas that spring randomly from some slightly crazed dreamer's head; and worse, they often get filthy rich if the dreams are real. The left likes neither.
In their country, government guides capital to ideas prewashed for goodness. As to letting guys get rich, we know about that problem. Hating it isn't just political. It's cultural.
But unless these Democrats can reverse habits of history dating to the Renaissance, entrepreneurship's new men not only will build businesses and create new jobs, they'll still tend to measure their self-worth with outsized yachts, mansions and other crimes against prevailing norms of taste. The new Democrats bear a visceral antipathy toward these people, whom they've reduced to the lumpen "Republicans."
Barack Obama campaigned for a year against "the top 1%" and "the wealthiest." It sounded like more than economics to me. But a nation can't have entrepreneurs and eat them, too. Asia is overflowing with rich entrepreneurs. Google "China's auto industry." They have more new auto manufacturers than you can count. If the U.S. has any hope of competing long term with this rising force, it will have to let some Americans get as rich as nouveau riche Asians. This presidency won't do that.
At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said "I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment." Really?
How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?
Set aside income taxes as the unransomed hostages of progressive dogma. Justify this: The Senate health-reform bill imposes a $4 billion annual excise tax on medical devices and diagnostic equipment. In a slow-innovation economy, which is what we have now, medical and diagnostic miracles sit at the intersection of American science, technology, education and IQ. That stuff defines American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If the Obama Democrats will tax these people, they'll tax anything that produces income, no matter how innovative or job-creating.
The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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