The Obama Stimulus: A need for sober judgment
February 2, 2009 6 Comments
With a political environment and public calling for action, and a party and President in command of nearly all policy intiatives…what would you do if you were in power?
The current economic downturn, wrought with daily headlines decrying financial crisis, has created a political environment starving for action. Coupled with the sweeping popularity of the newly elected President, the state of the economy provides a powerful opportunity for the Obama Administration to get something done. This is nearly always true for Presidents in a time of perceived or actual crisis—the status quo is never acceptable for voters when the world seems to be falling around them, so movement in any direction is immediately popularized. People often forget, for example that over 75% of Americans supported the Iraq War in the weeks prior to invasion, largely because it was so closely positioned to 9/11. And, regardless of political preference, most people believe that some action needs to be taken to reverse the downturn. In short, we are a nation ready to be lead, ready for movement, or even change.
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
-Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff
It is also clear that the Democrats control the House and Senate by a wide margin, and have plenty of political capital to spend behind one of the most popular newly elected Presidents in our nation’s history. So, with a political environment and public calling for action, a party and President in command of nearly all policy initiatives…what would you do if you were in power? What they have done with the recently proposed $825 billion stimulus is not terribly surprising given the political opportunity, but it is deeply troubling. The “stimulus” is anything but, with only 23% ($90 billion) going toward a growth stimulus package (tax cuts plus infrastructure investment), and the other $735 billion going toward various political agenda items. Among the most egregious pork-filled agenda items:
1. Nearly $4 billion to ACORN (the far-left group that helped President Obama get elected); 2. $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects (a hot button environmentalist agenda item); 3. $400 million for global-warming research; 4. $20 billion for food stamps and $36 billion for expanded unemployment welfare (welfare expansion policies long hoped for by Democrats); 5. $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts; 6. $150 million to the Smithsonian museum.
Those items are simply the tip of the iceberg, and represent what the Wall Street Journal so adeptly called “A 40-Year Wish List” for the Democratic Party. Will $150 million to help update the Smithsonian’s collection help thaw Wall Street’s credit freeze? Will $2.4 billion for a controversial environmentalist carbon-capture program bring back the housing market? Will $4 billion to the extremist group ACORN spur business investment and job growth? This is not to mention the vast expansions of welfare programs, which have been shown to have a direct inverse correlation to job rates and economic growth.
Here, it is not important to discuss the merits of many of these proposals in and of themselves–some of them might even be important in the long run. However, at a time when the nation needs a serious answer to a complex financial problem, there is simply no justification for these line items. They certainly do not deserve to fall under the touted umbrella of a stimulus or economic rescue plan.
What we are seeing is a troubling display of partisan politics in a time where the country needs sober judgment and unifying leadership. If President Obama wishes to be the great unifier he spoke so much about, he will need to realign his policy to reflect the needs of his country, not the wishes of his party. This is something both Democrats and Republicans can agree upon.
-Matt Benchener from TruPolitics.net
taken from the daily kos, Jan 29
“There are good ideas, and bad ideas. And it’s clear that the GOP was full of nothing but bad ideas, since they’re the ones that brought us to where we are today.
So if you’ve got two parties that fundamentally disagree on how to solve our nation’s problems (including one that created said problems), it’s not better to take the good ideas, take the bad ideas, and somehow “meet in the center”. That doesn’t make the “good” ideas any better. In fact, it makes them worse. It’s simple logic anywhere but inside the Broder/Halperin world.
Bottom line, there is nothing inherently good about “bipartisanship”. The only thing that matters is whether a solution is good or not. Consider that two of Bush’s biggest disasters — his tax cuts and Iraq — were “bipartisan” affairs. Getting votes from the opposite party doesn’t make the underlying legislation any more likely to succeed. If anything, our nation would’ve been better served with more partisanship during those times.
Finally, as we’ve discussed ad infinitum, there was no margin for Republicans to support this. If the stimulus succeeds, Obama and the Dems will get all the credit. If it fails, everyone who voted for it will get tarred with it. So Republicans are better off making sure it’s seen as a Democratic proposal rather than a bipartisan one. That way, they can wield it as a political weapon.
And that’s not a bad thing. There’s one last negative byproduct of bipartisanship — lack of accountability. It’s harder to hold people responsible for their mistakes when everyone points a finger at someone else. In this case, let the voters note which party is responsible for the stimulus. If it succeeds (and I’m not 100 percent confident that it will), let the credit go to those who deserve it, and if it fails, then Democrats will have to take their accountability lumps. And that’s the way it should be.
Republicans played this properly, unlike the constantly-capitulating Dems the past decade. It’s Obama’s chasing of the magic “bipartisan” pony that deserves scorn, because no number of concessions was going to get him a single Republican vote in the House. The Senate is different, and he’ll get crossover support there which he can use to laud his ‘bipartisanship’.”
I think most people realize that this bill is bad. A majority of Americans are against it in the latest polls. Everyone (even conservative economists) thinks something needs to be done, but putting so much waste in the bill ($ for STD treatment, modernizing classrooms, re-sodding the National Mall) means that the bill is just a Trojan Horse for programs that the Democrats in the House have been dying to fund for years. The “waste” in the bill includes programs that may have merit in themselves, but these should be considered in other bills, not one that supposedly is going to help the economy.
I still don’t understand why we can’t have a bill that has tax cuts for small business and infrastructure spending. That would directly stimulate the economy. Simple. This current bill, sadly, is typical Congress, and is one of many reasons why people should not put all of their faith in government to “fix” all of America’s problems (I’ll leave it to people to figure out which party that is).
Arguing against Democratic impulses because a. they’re “communistic,” “Leninistic,” “liberal” or “socialistic;” or b. they’re anti-Reagan; or c. they represent “big government” emerges from what could fairly be characterized as archaic thinking. “It’s so 20th century…” would be the hip way of writing it. Even worse, it’s so 1980s. Indeed, hearkening back to the 1950s, anti-communism was the rallying cry of every Rightwinger’s hero, Joe McCarthy — and we all now how productive that was.
When Ronald Reagan suggested that society’s problems weren’t the result of too little government but that they grew out of too much government, he dealt the cards that subsequently led to the kind of frantic deregulation that Wall Street officials and bankers love. And now we have begun to see what those industry leaders did with the new “freedom” presented by Reagonomics. “Trickledown economics” feathered the nests of only the very wealthy, and it did so at the expense of both the middle class and the very poor. Yes, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. That’s the heart of the “small government” argument.
As California’s governor, Reagan helped to decimate the school system (widely praised as the nation’s best prior to his tenure in office) and the social services sector, all in the name of “smaller government.” In the White House he convinced us that lowering taxes on the wealthiest would benefit everyone. Now we know that it wasn’t true.
So the answers to our current economic woes clearly do not fall within the “smaller government” mantra. And the government’s first instinct — propping up the financial institutions — is clearly not the complete answer. From everything I read about economics, especially economics in a large capitalistic society, the engine of the system is in the hands (or perhaps we should say the wallets) of the consumers. So, federal and state programs that directly benefit these folks, society’s spenders, might begin to move us out of the economic doldrums in which we currently find ourselves.
I agree that government spending on badly needed infrastructure improvements is one of the best ways to “stimulate the economy” quickly and efficiently. But I also believe we need some sort of mortgage relief for folks in danger of losing their homes. As for the second round of “loans” for the financial institutions, I hope the “strings” attached to such loans include limitations on golden parachute payments and executive compensation (granting executive stock options that they cannot exercise until the loan and interest on the loan have been paid back is an eminently sensible suggestion).
It’s patently clear that the current situation we find ourselves in cannot be solved by “shrinking government.” Maybe next year or the year after that, we can begin working on that issue; right now, we need the government to take action that only the federal government can take.
Bail-outs prop up large, failing businesses. A stimulus package encouraging small business and their investors might get the economy moving again. Then let the free enterprise system work its way out of the mess. It will be painful, but what will be left are well-run, efficient businesses who can engender investor confidence.
The current plan by the new President is a stage prop with no foundation. In the Great Depression, the “make work” plans did not work at all– it took the war to lift us out of that calamity.
The Republicans are the ones proposing 4% loans to get people invest in real estate. The Democrats are using their typical ploy — throw money into programs that will be mismanaged and bungled by the bureaucracy. It won’t work.
I agree with Saylor’s comment that arguing against Democratic impulses with words like “Marxist,” “socialistic,” etc. are not helpful and cloud real arguments.
I, of course, am a small government guy. The government bureaucracy wastes money. We see this all the time in projects and programs (Medicaid, Social Security etc.) that are going bankrupt or have cost overruns. We see this in the latest stimulus bill (or any bill that Congress puts together), which always includes pork and waste. That’s why, in my opinion, the government should empower people by cutting taxes that stimulate business and providing incentives (such as housing credit) for people to spend money. I know how to spend my money better than the government does. They should take less of my taxes.
Pingback: It Is Time to Believe Again « TruPolitics