Obama Administration
The brewing scandal regarding Solyndra is an opportunity to consider which roles the federal government can and should play in developing alternative energy and which roles it should not. Take as a starting point the friendly column by Joe Nocera in Friday's New York Times:
But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse. Thus, the real question the Solyndra case poses is this: Are the potential successes significant enough to negate the inevitable failures?
Dartmouth welcomed the Gallup Poll's editor-in-chief, Frank Newport, to campus yesterday for the closing lecture in our "Leading Voices in Politics and Policy" series. His assessment of President Obama's re-election chances was negative:
Ten presidents have run for re-election since we’ve had modern polling, since Harry Truman. Seven of them have been successful, and three have been defeated. … in August before his election year his current 38 percent job approval rating is lower than any other president who was successfully re-elected. So history would say he’s in big trouble.
There has been a rash of commentary in recent weeks about what the Obama Administration could have done better. (Pick up one thread here and follow it back.) At a very general level, I think President Obama's biggest problem is that he wants to be the president who transcends politics. The president who wants to transcend politics will be a patsy for a Congress that doesn't.
Should the government budget the way families do? Here's an excerpt from Paul Krugman's latest column:
One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”
In my reaction to President Obama's state of the union address, I wondered, "If we win the future, who loses?" and suggested that the analogy to a "Sputnik moment" was inappropriate. In his New York Times column this weekend, Greg Mankiw makes a similar point, urging us to see "Emerging Markets as Partners, not Rivals." The key excerpt:
Listening to the president, you might think that competition from China and other rapidly growing nations was one of the larger threats facing the United States. But the essence of economic exchange belies that description. Other nations are best viewed not as our competitors but as our trading partners. Partners are to be welcomed, not feared. As a general matter, their prosperity does not come at our expense.
The trouble with the State of the Union address is that it is a good 20-minute speech that drags on for about an hour. Whatever is useful about it is drowned out by the rest, which is typically a poor combination for cheerleading and inconsistent policy suggestions. What did I like about the speech?
