Now, with the federal government deep in debt, unwilling to address an entitlement disaster, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at private enterprises in a vain attempt to rescue them from their own bad management and labor practices, Obama wants to create a new WPA to renew American infrastructure not because it’s needed as much as Obama needs to ensure his re-election.
None of this comes as a great shock, though. While Obama has given some indications that he doesn’t intend a massive shift to the Left on defense and foreign policy, his economic plans have always favored statism, class warfare, and a striking ignorance of history and reality. Recreating the WPA and proposing even more massive spending programs in the face of our precarious financial condition and debt load finds its equivalent only perhaps in the apocryphal fiddling of Nero while Rome burned.