CAN YOU CALL A MAN A PRAGMATIST IF HE REFUSES TO DO WHAT WORKS?:

Obama the Slow Learner: Time for a remedial course in how to create jobs. (Fred Barnes, January 25, 2010, Weekly Standard)

The first of Obama’s failed ideas is that government spending is the most effective method of stimulating the economy, spurring strong growth, and generating new jobs. The president needs to chat with Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna on this subject. They studied dozens of examples of economic stimulation between 1970 and 2007 in 21 countries, including the United States.

Their findings are unequivocal. “Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based on spending increases,” they wrote in a paper revised and published last October. “We would argue that the current stimulus package in the U.S. is too much tilted in the direction of spending rather than tax cuts.” Indeed it is, and Obama’s paltry tax cuts aren’t the kind of across-the-board reductions in individual and corporate income tax rates that have revived sluggish economies by incentivizing private investment and stirring job creation.

Another finding by the economists bears on a separate aspect of Obama-nomics, deficit reduction. “Spending cuts are much more effective than tax increases in stabilizing the debt and avoiding economic downturns,” they said. “In fact, we uncover several episodes in which spending cuts adopted to reduce deficits have been associated with economic expansions rather than recessions.”

This, too, would probably be news to Obama. Spending cuts, like tax cuts, aren’t his strength. He plans to let Bush tax cuts on personal income, dividends, and capital gains expire in 2011 for individuals making more than $250,000 annually—that is, for those most likely to invest. Their taxes will increase. And Obama favors other tax hikes: on banks, medical device manufacturers, health insurers, high-cost health insurance plans.

What Obama would learn from a chat with Alesina and Ardagna is pretty simple: Do the opposite of what you’re doing now.