PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

It's That 70's Show all over again. See this article by Bruce Bartlett on Bush's plan to expand taxpayer subsidies for manufacturing -- i.e. it's back to the future with "industrial policy" madness. Even Carter -- and the Carter economists -- were smart enough to reject this both dangerous and idiot 1970's fad. And don't be mistaken. This thing is straight-out of-the-dictionary fascism, and we need to kill it while it's still in the crib. Quotable:

As is so often the case, the Bush administration is approaching the alleged problem of manufacturing's decline as if no one had ever noticed it before. This results from the fact that administration initiatives are never studied or analyzed carefully before being announced. This is one area where former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's criticism of the Bush administration is right on target . If anyone had bothered to check, they would have found that the federal government has been issuing detailed reports on the demise of manufacturing for more than 20 years .. The point is that the ground was already well plowed before the Bush administration decided to turn its attention to the decline of manufacturing, which it did in a new report from the Commerce Department last week. Yet at the end of this exercise, the Bush administration could do no better than propose more taxpayer money to help private businesses do their jobs. According to press reports, the 2005 budget will propose substantially increasing spending for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership -- a program it proposed phasing out just last year.

Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack