TheMiddleofSomewhere A grab bag of interests

A lot of people are wondering why, if President Obama has a plan to get people back to work, he’s waiting until September to lay it out before the public. Well, I suppose he has to wait for Congress to get back from their break. No sense letting people know what’s in the “plan” before people like Chuck Schumer, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, et al. are around to obfuscate the distasteful parts.

I doubt, though, that that’s the whole reason. I seem to recall that other schemes by team Obama were accompanied by crises. Now maybe 9.2% unemployment is a crisis, but not enough of one to scare people into welcoming another big centralized government plan. Not enough, for example, to want yet another federal department with a “Czar” to run it.

It takes time to create a useful crisis. Sometimes one has to settle for a fake crisis. For this, many in the main stream media can be of immense help. Get them talking about a “crisis,” and before you know it, the people think there is one. When Pelosi was pushing the Health Care Bill through the House of Representatives, The MSM was talking endlessly about “the health care crisis.” This created just the sense of urgency to convince much of the public that there really was a crisis and that Big Brother was moving heaven and earth to fix it. The facts that much of the bill had nothing to do with health care and that some of its key provisions were not scheduled to go into effect until years later, didn’t come out until the thing was passed.

Nothing succeeds like success, so I look for a similar tactic to be employed with the so called jobs plan. What kind of a “crisis” would work? My guess is that in September we will be hearing much more about “the growing inflation crisis” and how the only way we will be able to prevent drowning in inflation will be to rush through another big government “solution.” I guess, too, that not everything in the plan will have to do with jobs, unless it means everybody goes to work for the government. Just sayin’.

Another reason the Plan will have to pose as a response to an emergency is that Obama promised that he “will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” Heaven forbid we should get to comment on the “emergency” bills before they’re signed.

Dwight Boud ©2011