It became a joke among those of us on the political right that every failure of the economy to surge during the Obama years happened “unexpectedly,” at least in the eyes of the mainstream media.  Now we have President Trump, and economic growth has improved, and here come headlines like, “Is the global economic expansion party over?,” which the Providence Journal gives to a Washington Post article by Heather Long.

Long lists a number of areas about which people should be justifiably concerned, but one can’t help but feel that the Post was disappointed that Trump wasn’t sufficiently rebuked by the global elite at Davos and is searching for something critical to say.

All that said, it’s hard to argue with this:

No one knows exactly what the next crisis will be. The best defense is to make the necessary tweaks to government programs and spending now, top business leaders and experts say. This is especially true for the United States as it goes up against China in the battle for global supremacy.

Of course, what the big-government types mean by that is to cut short the policies that are leading to expansion (decreased regulation, lower taxes, and generally more emphasis on the private sector than government) in favor of more reliance on government spending and power.  And of course, they hope that people won’t understand that this is the fault of government intervention and mismanagement, not neglect:

“You must have good infrastructure. Our infrastructure has fallen from first or second in the world to the teens. And our education has gone from No. 1 or 2 in the world to 27th or 28th,” [Blackstone chief executive Steve] Schwarzman said.

Conspicuously, Schwarzman’s Blackstone has been relevant to discussions about government-directed investment in projects around Rhode Island.  So, government undermines U.S. infrastructure and education by redirecting those investments to special interests, and now special interests are (we can infer) arguing that more money ought to flow into those two areas.

Let’s not be fooled again.