Like a thirty-year pendulum, governing and economic philosophies seem to sweep from left to right and then back again. The left focuses on trickleup economics, while the right focuses on trickledown economics, and everything in the middle seems to be a transition from one wealth redistribution extreme to the other.

The Wall Street Journal says: “The $3.6 trillion budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 marks a significant change in nearly 30 years of governing philosophy.” The pendulum has certainly swung to the left. For the next thirty years, or until the pendulum peaks, our lives will be shaped by a spectrum of trickleup economic policies.

Since I have been a creative entrepreneur for the last twenty-five years, working in the music industry for the last five, I thought I would weigh in on one of the biggest questions of our time: Will Barack Obama’s economic policies fuel or stifle innovation and creativity?

Consider the 50’s, 60’s and the 70’s, versus the 80s, 90s and the 00s… I doubt the thirty years prior to the election of Ronald Reagan were less innovative or less creative than the last thirty years. Although I have never been a fan of big government, excessive regulation, higher taxes or wealth redistribution, I don’t buy for one second, the assertion that Barack Obama’s economic policies will somehow stifle innovation and reduce the incentive to create.

Wealth and tax brackets have very little to do with innovation and creativity. Those that create are driven to create, and the desire to seek excessive wealth is not the fuel of innovation. If obtaining riches was the primary motivation to create, we would still be eating raw mammals and shivering to death in caves. Earning a pile of money is great, but most of the things I built and created, I did so because I could; economic reward was an occasional byproduct, and a tax bracket to me was something I paid an accountant to calculate.

Every successful manager understands that humans innovate and create when their basic needs are met. The right side of me says it’s getting harder and harder to lead (versus help) people down the path of no reversal, as that path has been narrowing for some time now; while the left side of me says that it’s just simply getting harder to help people…period.

I generally feel, as the pendulum peaked to the right (the trickledown side), the sum of all innovation and creation trended south. Although Americans acquired a staggering amount of household debt to meet real and perceived needs, most of us were not fueling innovation and creation; what we have been doing is digging holes that we can barely climb out of.

The market is clearly demonstrating that we didn’t create a lot of true value over the last ten years, as it has all seemingly disappeared inside of the last six months; it was only a debt-fueled party that kept us (collectively) from derailing much sooner.

Back to the Obama plan… From the perspective of meeting the basic needs of a modern society, which I am convinced will fuel innovation and creativity; the cornerstones of the Obama plan seem like huge steps in the right direction:
• Make healthcare more affordable.
• Make higher education more affordable.
• Make sure the planet doesn’t melt.
• Develop homegrown energy.
• Reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Every thing on this list has to be addressed. America’s ability to collectively innovate and create in an almost borderless world will rise and fall with our ability to meet these basic needs, as any one of these items will or does represent a roadblock to enabling individual creativity.

How so you ask? Creation and innovation is an iterative process. It’s difficult to iteratively improve anything, mentally or otherwise, when you can’t get healthcare, or obtain the education you need to compete globally, or when cataclysmic ecological events happen, or when you can’t put fuel in the car, or when you have to shoulder the burden of a massive generation of retirees. When any of these things happen, innovation and creation decelerates.

If you are an artist, inventor or innovator, the next thirty years may be kinder to you than the previous thirty years. But watch out: waste, special interests, excessive taxation or failure to execute will push the pendulum back. Instead of blindly following Obama, we all have to be vigilant about preventing the things that will enable the Rush Limbaughs of the world to say…I told you so.