Is Failure An Option?

In my last blog, I discussed, briefly, the possibility of the administration failing to right the ship over the next four years. I think that is a subject that deserves deeper examination. I firmly and honestly believe that Obama and his advisers have been on the wrong track since they took office.

Let's examine the past a bit. He immediately went after shovel ready projects to get the construction industry back on it's feet. Anyone with experience in the construction industry will tell you that it takes as much time to get a project started as it does to build it. Sometimes it takes more. If a project should involve the government, it takes twice as long. With all of the different agencies, permits, fees, inspections, planning meetings, making the pols happy, and change orders there is no such thing as a shovel ready project sitting there waiting for the funding to get off the ground. But without real world experience you would not know that.

Since he felt that he had started to help the construction industry, Obama then dished out money to the states to pay for teachers, police, and firefighters. Much of that was not  accepted because the states and municipalities realized that the funding was short term and then they would have the expense for these new jobs in their future budgets. Budgets that were already over strained. But to make another point here, all these jobs that Obama supported with your money were union jobs. What about waitresses and engineers. Factory workers and nurses. How about all the non-union families that were, and still are, in financial pain.

Then, of course, there were the wheel barrows full of money that were pushed out to Obama's supporters in the "green power"industry. You remember. The ones that grabbed the money on their way to bankruptcy court. Good job there oh faithful stewards of our tax dollars! Simply put, the technology of solar energy is not ready for prime time. Wind farms will never be. They will create a sorry sight twenty years from now. Those big tall towers with physically large but electrically small generators on the top are extremely difficult and costly to maintain. In twenty years they will be abandoned and rusting, a blight on the land scape or seascape.

Then the Obama administration took a sudden left turn into health care. Obama wanted the government to control every citizens medical care, except congress of course, and one sixth of the nations economy. Although this program is commonly called Obamacare, he mostly talked about it while others, including a lot of lobbyists, did the heavy lifting. And heavy lifting it was, with over 2,000  pages.

So after four years of wheel spinning we are about where we started. The worst part is, that for the first two years, the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. They could have worked wonders. But the net result was nothing. It was time wasted never to be regained. Based on this Obama feels that he deserves another four year to finish what he started. But since nothing has been accomplished regarding jobs and the economy, what does it mean to finish? Really, nothing of substance was ever started.

What if we get four more years of failure? We already have at least three years of high school and college graduates that are struggling to find jobs. Not careers, jobs. If this country ends up with eight to ten years of job depletion we will have stolen the hope of most of a generation. If we don't have people out there working, where will the new technologies come from? Where will the new and better products come from? I'll tell you where they will come from. They will come from the first country that will free their businesses to create without the weight of government holding them down. They will come from the first country willing to be what America used to be.