Musings on an Old Cliché

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. "
Attribution: Uncertain.
Applicability: Intermittent.

Barack Hussein Obama’s Labor Day activities caused me to spend a little time wrapping my brain around this old cliché. The first page of a Google type-ahead search on “The definition of insanity is” yielded this blog post from the election season of 2006. The author of this post gives us a good light-hearted rant on a basically meaningless topic. (Call it a “fun rant” – an FR, if you will.) Except for this comment that ties the four-year old FR to Barack Hussein Obama’s Labor Day activities.

(Yes, it would appear people comment on 4 year old posts. What is THAT the definition of?)

Well, I don’t know if “Tom” is in fact a “Repubican” (in Mark Levin’s lexicon), or he just can’t spell very well on a keyboard (there being at least two other errors to point to), but his observation certainly seems like that of a Patriot.

And “Tom” was keen enough to make this observation almost six months before Barack Hussein Obama gave a major speech – in public, no less – for a new Keynesian stimulus bill. This time it’s Fifty B-B-B-B-Billion (gratuitous Doug Tracht reference) dollars for infrastructure projects. INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS! AYKM!

One of my commute options, on the DC beltway, between the Wilson Bridge and the Dulles Toll Road, is absolutely littered with so-called “infrastructure projects” that divert traffic every which way, in a different way, every single day. All of these projects have four things in common:

• No doubt initiated with Stimulus I funds

• Always in progress

• Never finished

• Hasn’t put a dent in the economy at large

==

In fact, you could argue very successfully placing construction at practically every exit all at once slows traffic measurably, and is therefore a measureable drag on the economy at large. I wonder if there’s a Patriot out there in position to measure it?

And it’s not even as if the 2009 Stimulus I bill is the first epic failure of this model. I mean, what was the Great Depression if not one massive public works program micromanaged out of Washington? Despite ten years of WPA, TVA, and an alphabet soup of Keynesian nonsense – in the end we had to go through Hitler and Tojo to reach prosperity again.

Yet, here we are, 50-60 years on from the pro-growth policies of the 1950’s that wiped out the WW II deficits in short order, and 20-30 years on from the economic juggernaut known as Reaganomics that set records for expansion – and the Democrat one trick pony is out telling us the path to prosperity is spending more money we don’t have - on public works projects.

Well, here’s one example of “Publik Werks” I encountered on the DC Metro system – L’Enfant Plaza station to be precise – on Labor Day 2010. I was returning home with my family from the Nationals’ 13-3 thumping of the Mets at Nationals’ Park.

 
 
  For those of you who are not DC natives;

• The Blue Line and Yellow Line branch at King Street station

• Van Dorn and Springfield are Blue Line stops

• Look at the picture again

The yellow line took me to my home station of Huntington nevertheless. I had no fear this would be the outcome – only because I must have looked at this display Fifty B-B-B-B-Billion times on Metro cars and in Metro stations over the past twenty years.
 

 
 
More infrastructure spending? AYKM?