With a month to go, and only a week or so until Christmas, the Biden administration is checking its winners and losers list, and delivering cash packages as fast as it can. Welcome to the season of Bidenomics at the speed of Donner and Blitzen.
Bidenomics was peddled to the American people as a focus on growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, which presumably meant that the middle class was going to benefit. Try as they might, administration officials, including the President, could never successfully sell the big spending plan to the people. Voters hugely rejected its tenants at the polls in November.
But the nightmare before Christmas has been revealed in true form – turns out that Bidenomics is just a means of picking winners and losers to favor political allies. It is industrial policy meeting old fashioned cronyism, that is, doling out favors to labor and those with DEI initiatives, amongst others. Now the administration is doubling down on its way out the door.
Agencies across government are clearing out the cupboards of taxpayer money, throwing it at their friends. This is no idle speculation, but rather was confirmed by Secretary Raimondo herself. As reported in Politico, “Raimondo said she recently directed staff to work through the weekend…The forthcoming change in administration is ‘a clear deadline’ that ‘focuses the mind,’ Raimondo said, but added she’s not overly concerned about budget-conscious Republicans clawing back money from the program next year, despite their threats to do so.”
The approach is reminiscent of one of government’s worst impulses, that once government agencies are provided their budget they tend to spend everything in that budget by the end of the fiscal year whether it’s necessary or not.
But now, it’s an all of government approach paying off political friends instead of furthering intergovernmental work.The table was set for this end of year binge by the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act. Regardless of the advertised reason for either, both pieces of legislation were stuffed with new federal spending toward reducing carbon emissions, environmental justice priorities, requiring recipients of many funding streams to demonstrate equity impacts, advancing zero emissions technologies, returning people to the moon and a human mission to mars. All Biden favored projects and all beside the point of advertised purpose, including forwarding innovation.
The lessons of Solyndra and national high-speed rail seem long forgotten, industrial policy as Bidenomics imagines it has routinely been a failure and often hindering the next step in technology by leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. In the meantime, there are national policies that are being slowed or ignored while the favorite children are being lavished with attention.
Despite a supposed urgency to rid the US of Chinese technology, some of the most concerning hardware for national security is still in place across the telecommunications systems despite Congress acting four years ago, in a flurry of grand standing, to provide a mere fraction of what it would take to compensate companies for demanding they change out equipment. Other monies have slowed to a stop, such as BEAD with NTIA adding various requirement including mandating union labor and attempts to regulate price, never part of what Congress approved.
We are past time for the free market to make a come back and along with it an economic landscape that allows innovation to flourish. That landscape includes the government but not the government substituting the whims of bureaucrats with the wisdom of the market and those who operate businesses day to day. End of administration stoking stuffing for favored children must stop.
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