LAMBRO: More like ‘shortchange’

COMMENTARY:

Barack Obama likes to use the word “investment” in his campaign speech on getting the U.S. economy growing again, but it means something very different for him than it does for most people.

To the average American, making an investment means putting one’s money into an asset or business enterprise that will return a dividend or interest payment or capital gain - something that will grow in value over time.

The lifeblood of the American economy and the source of all jobs and growth is capital - investment capital - that comes from people who are both workers and investors. Each benefits from the other. But in Mr. Obama’s speeches, “investment” is a euphemism for government spending - and it plays an all-too-prominent role in his platform. As for the word “capital” - without which there can be no investment to build or expand businesses and create jobs - that doesn’t turn up at all in his economic speeches. More on that later.

The freshman senator from Illinois told an audience in St. Louis, Mo., that “the answer to our fiscal problems is not to shortchange investments that will help our families get ahead - investments that are vital to our long-term growth as a nation.”

But what Mr. Obama calls “investments” sound like government giveaways - taking money from some Americans to give to others - otherwise known as income redistribution. He is planning a lot of giveaways. Here are four of them:

Whatever the merits of these spending programs, they won’t reinvigorate the economy or create any private-sector jobs.

Mr. Obama talks a lot about creating jobs, but his speech is disturbingly hostile to wealthy people, who do the most investing. He also harbors no fondness for the notion of using tax incentives to boost capital investment - i.e., venture capital and risk capital - to grow the economy, which in turn will create more jobs.

Job creation, to Mr. Obama, is one vast public-works project in which a bunch of government bureaucrats will do the “investing” with the tax dollars he expects will flow into federal coffers when he raises tax rates on upper-income workers - including capital-gains taxes on investors (which always results in less revenue, not more).

“One place where that investment would make an enormous difference is in a renewable-energy policy that… builds a green economy that could create up to 5 million well-paying jobs,” he asserted during a speech in Raleigh, N.C., last month.

Who will decide where those tax dollars are invested to create these jobs? Well, the same bureaucrats who are pouring billions into schemes such as corn-based ethanol, which has helped to drive up the price of just about everything in the food chain.

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