FEAR FACTOR
(Consider this at present a rough draft – some noodling on the topic – subject to revision, expansion and alteration as time and energy permit.) Updated, expanded and links added Feb. 6 5:30 a.m., again at 11 p.m., Feb. 7 3:15 p.m., 11:30 p.m.
What are the congressional Republicans afraid of?
Under the previous administration was passed a bill which virtually no one read or fully understood (and that administration deliberately and purposely worked to keep it vague, toothless and unfocused), passed in a legislative Chicken Little rush, with no strings attached to speak of. The funds in that bill were often doled out hodge-podge or in reaction to whatever the headline of the day might have been, and to this day their use remains hazy and untrackable. Lack of transparency, lack of accountability, lack of even a plan more detailed than ’shovel it out’ are what transpired.
That money is gone, via management haphazard, for purposes often indeterminate and for use and implementation shrouded and inconsistent with purported policy. That money is one, yet the miasma of the economy deepens and spreads. That money is gone, but the need for economic stimulus remains demonstrable and on a Topsy-like growth curve.
Now comes along a bill, by design not piecemeal (the core of its construction in the works via research and debate literally since the day after the election), with budgeting calculated by use and spending to be audited. Now comes along a bill not just designed to bail out, but to work on patching the holes and provide the labor to do so.
This bill is, of course, neither perfect nor a panacea. Like any spending bill ever submitted for a vote in Congress in living memory, it contains items which may be questionable, insertions jammed in by the ego of individual congresspeople and narrowly-defined spending geared to specific interests or constituencies. If a perfect bill is a goal, one would have to dither and wait until some time well after the Sun has burnt itself out.
The bulk of congressional Republicans (their own party self-diagnosed as bereft of ideas) now prance and yelp that, because the bill they supported under the Bush administration, and which was so ham-handedly and spottily handled under the Bus administration, did not clean up the situation, therefore a new bill of specific, rather than generic, funding, to be handled under a new administration openly promising more mature, sober, professional and specific targeting, oversight and maintenance will likewise have minimal effect.
It’s like saying that because pissing (while keeping the eyes tight shut) towards one part of a burning building didn’t put out the fire, it is therefore useless and senseless to bring in the fire hoses. Trickle-down firefighting is a loser’s game and an arsonist’s dream. Put another way, assault the table with an axe and you lose the privilege of having a seat at the table.
What are the congressional Republicans saying to the new president? They are paraphrasing their hero and, in a nutshell, demanding “Mr. Obama, tear down this country.”
For any party, majority or minority, fear is a constrictive blindfold to the evidence of the vagaries of actual happenstance. Whether by inertia borne of association with the last administration and its widespread policy of power through fear, or by dint of fear of the necessity of directly dealing with territory unknown in modern times, the stench of fear is prevalent.
What are they afraid of involving the real world consequences of massive accelerated stimulus from the only entity with pockets deep enough to provide it?
They are afraid that it just might work.
– – Hubert H. Humphrey
Following up:
Let’s review some of the more silly arguments about the stimulus bill, starting with the notion that “only” 75 percent of the money can be spent in the next two years, and the rest is therefore “wasted.”
As any economist will tell you, the economy tends to be forward-looking and emotional. So if businesses and households can see immediate benefits from a program while knowing that a bit more stimulus is on the way, they are likely to feel more confident that the recovery will be sustained. That confidence, in turn, will make them more likely to take the risk of buying big-ticket items now and investing in stocks or future ventures.
Moreover, much of the money that can’t be spent right away is for capital improvements such as building and maintaining schools, roads, bridges and sewer systems, or replacing equipment — stuff we’d have to do eventually. So another way to think of this kind of spending is that we’ve simply moved it up to a time, to a point when doing it has important economic benefits and when the price will be less.
Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative.
“This is not a stimulus plan, it’s a spending plan,” Nebraska’s freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, “won’t create the promised jobs. It won’t activate our economy.”
Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.
[snip]
Actually, what’s striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.
What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn’t being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending. [ed. note: see relevant chart here]
[snip]
Spending is stimulus, no matter what it’s for and who does it. The best spending is that which creates jobs and economic activity now, has big payoffs later and disappears from future budgets. Source
Look, no one bill – not the House bull, not the Senate bill, not any bill which is the final product of a conference committee – is going to be a cure-all, fix all instrument. But staunching the bleeding is an absolute primary requirement when laboring to stabilize the patient.
The Sisyphean schema, indeed.
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years. Source
How bad? That bad, and still plummeting.
And what are among the items the economic troglodytes want to slash? How’s about programs well outside the lifestyle sphere of Wall Street honchos, but well within that of the newly jobless.
Latest Cuts To The Stim Package: Head Start, Child Nutrition, Food Stamps Public Transit Source
Per the above link, increases in defense spending? Yet more into the rathole which the Department of Defense has already prompted to confess totally and completely “lost” at the least $1 trillion (and who knows how much more since)? And that admission was before the massive additional budget totals and supplementary war funding showered on them by the previous administration. Such figures (which logically must be larger after the previous regime) would have been than enough to fund the largest stimulus plan under consideration, with a more than tidy sum left over. Or, alternatively, to more than wipe out a yearly deficit.
The urgency of now:
While economists remain divided on the role of government generally, an overwhelming number from both parties are saying that a government stimulus package — even a flawed one — is urgently needed to help prevent a steeper slide in the economy.
Many economists say the precise size and shape of the package developing in Congress matter less than the timing, and that any delay is damaging.
“Most of the things in the package, the big dollar amounts, are things that are pretty quick stimulus and need to be done,” said Alice Rivlin, who was former president Bill Clinton’s budget director and who criticized aspects of the proposed stimulus in congressional testimony two weeks ago. “Is it a perfect package? Of course not. But we’re past that. Let’s just do it.” Source
That many, perhaps the bulk, of the jobs envisioned for funding involve construction, teaching, state and local projects, etc. (cough - union labor - cough), is that as well what those same head-in-the-sand Republicans fear?
