Return Of The WPA

Prior to the election, the question loomed — would a potential Obama administration govern as a political moderate?

The recession and financial crisis have solidified the answer… FDR and LBJ may have nothing on BHO!

President-elect Barack Obama is focusing his economic recovery strategy on making the biggest investment in the nation’s infrastructure since President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the interstate highway system a half-century ago.

Speaking yesterday at a Chicago news conference and on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama said state governors have many such projects that are “shovel ready,” meaning they could be undertaken swiftly and have an immediate impact on jobs.

He declined to specify a price tag for the stimulus, saying his advisers are “busy working, crunching the numbers, looking at the macroeconomic data to make a determination as to what the size and the scope of the economic recovery plan needs to be. But it is going to be substantial.

How substantial? Let’s just say that price is no object to this administration:

Later at the Chicago news conference, he said “more aggressive steps” are needed to cope with the housing crisis.

Even with the prospect of a federal budget shortfall approaching $1 trillion, “we can’t worry, short term, about the deficit,” he said on NBC. “We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving.”

It seems we’re in stage three of Reagan’s aphorism:

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

And oh, the subsidies will be expensive. We’ll all pay for them, whether through crushing taxation or runaway inflation, but we’ll pay. Welcome to the United State Formerly Known As America, people.