Same Old Stuff

Marxism, by any other name is still Marxism. The single reason why the American standard of living is so high and American innovation is so far advanced is that we don't really on the Federal Government for innovation and progress. Once again, the left is unhappy with that. Their only vision is an American public that is totally dependent on a "God of Government". With a dependent class comes absolute power, they believe that they are the annointed ruling class and can't understand why so many of us won't just accept it.

From IBD:
Posted 4/18/2006

Economic Policy: With great fanfare, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin unveiled "The Hamilton Project." But its "innovative policy ideas" are just big-government nostrums dressed up with new phraseology.
The Brookings Institution and Rubin have joined forces to issue a vague "economic strategy" manifesto invoking the name of our first Treasury secretary. For the record, Alexander Hamilton bemoaned "an unequal distribution of the taxes" as an evil to be avoided — an indictment against the soak-the-rich principles that define the Democratic Party today.

"The two greatest economic risks our nation faces today," the latter-day namesake says, "are our country's large fiscal imbalance and inadequate investment in key growth-enhancing areas — such as education, health care, energy independence, scientific research and infrastructure, among many others."

That's patently false: The greatest economic threat we face is the growth in entitlement spending. But when President Bush tried to reform one of those ever-expanding programs last year — Social Security — congressional Democrats refused to play ball.

Rubin calls for "increased public investment in key growth-enhancing areas" — the notion being that well-targeted government initiatives can spur economic growth.

"Markets are the cornerstone of economic growth," the document notes, "but government must invest in critical needs that market forces will not adequately meet . . . significant new intellectual work is needed to identify and devise innovative approaches to investing in key growth-enhancing areas."

Translation: Economic growth depends on the government spending more of your money in ways you've never thought of.

Here's more Hamilton Project double talk: "The lack of adequate investment . . . impairs the economic growth that could help to narrow the fiscal imbalance."

Now, in English: Let's spend our way out of the budget deficit.

Few specifics on the "investment" are provided, but here's a giveaway: The project's answer to high energy prices is for Washington to find alternatives to oil and gas by starting "a new federal research agency" similar to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which was set up after the Sputnik launch to keep U.S. military technology ahead of the Soviet Union's.

So for all the hoopla about exciting new ideas, the Hamilton Project is all about the same tired, discredited approach to problems we've come to expect from the liberal Washington establishment: new federal agencies.

Rubin's current successor, Secretary of the Treasury John Snow, came out swinging against the Hamilton Project last week, pointing out that "growing the public sector — that is, making government bigger — and achieving fiscal discipline, can only lead to one thing: higher taxes." Snow said it "sounds to me like nothing more than the same old 'class warfare.' "

But it also shows that out-of-power Democrats holed up in a room to think up policies seem able only to dress up expanded government in new clothes — instead of staving off the train wreck coming for the American people if we don't rein in uncontrolled government spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The so-called Hamilton Project is nothing but an exercise in deceptive semantics. "The Burr Project" — as in Hamilton's disreputable adversary and killer, Aaron Burr — would be a better name.