Amid all the excitement about a transition to a new presidential administration, Newsweek?s Robert J. Samuelson uses his latest column to urge President-elect Obama to avoid confusing short-term measures designed to shore up the economy with grandiose schemes favored by his left-leaning friends:
[T]he parallel pursuit of crisis management and sweeping domestic reform is at best distracting. In practice, it may be politically poisonous. Superficially, the two objectives can be made to seem compatible. Obama can plug “green” investments as a way to restore job growth; he can tout a more efficient health-care system as a way to control health costs. But these debating points obscure as much as they reveal.
Any program to refashion the energy and health-care sectors ? to take the obvious candidates ? would be enormously complicated, controversial and contentious. The idea that the present crisis atmosphere would make congressional passage, even with Democratic majorities, easy is a fantasy. Some producers and consumers would win; others would lose. Proposals would create massive uncertainties for businesses and raise the probability of higher costs. To succeed in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, for example, any “cap and trade” program must involve higher energy prices.
The notion that “green” investments would be large, permanent net creators of jobs is mostly a mirage. Somehow these investments must be paid for. If that happens through higher prices, higher taxes or cuts in other government programs, then “green” jobs will mainly substitute for some other class of jobs. As for curbing health-care costs, that’s desirable. The trouble is that the first effect of Obama’s health-care program would probably be the opposite.