Leftward lurch or world-class flapdoodle: Some days it’s hard to tell which better describes the Obama economic plan — though, to be fair, a degree of flapdoodlery inheres in any socialist economic model.
Remember when Mr. Obama said as president-elect that the focus of his jobs plan would be “not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence and a willingness to try things and experiment …”?
We’ve since painfully learned that “not always” means “not once.” (For further reading, see “stimulus.”) But more worrisome still, the president’s homage to confidence and experimentation over substance and results seems to extend to the rest of his economic agenda as well.
Now he wants to slap new taxes on banks to recover more of the money that some of them got from Congress (with the help of his Senate vote) via the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The banks were bailed out — by unwilling taxpayers, it should be noted — over fear and anger about their potential collapse, and now their return to profitability has the administration equally miffed. They’re fat cats, the president rails, and it’s time to put them on a diet of kibble and water.
It’s moments such as these when somebody ought to ask the secretary of the White House Office of Unintended Consequences to come back from the vacation he started on Inauguration Day.