Facts rise to embarrassing visibility, careful analysts of varied ideological persuasions speak out, and the truth gradually becomes known — the Democratic stimulus package could well be an extravagance helping the economy about as much as John Thain’s office renovation helped Merrill Lynch recover stability.
Thain, the recently resigned chief executive officer of the financial firm, was in a tough situation — the company was in bad times in 2008, laying off employees, wondering what tomorrow might bring, and he acted decisively, spending $1.2 million to make his office prettier. He skipped no detail. You may figure waste baskets don’t matter, but he knew differently. He invested more than $1,000 to get one that was exactly right.
The wastebasket equivalent in the House-passed version of this rescue-the-nation-quick legislation was $200 million for condoms, but after Speaker Nancy Pelosi got through with her hazy explanations of how they would save state governments expenditures, guffaws echoed like thunderclaps around the nation. The Democrats apparently concluded the public was coming to see their bill as a joke, and got rid of this particular punch line.
The bill still was a joke, though, and much of what the Democrats in the Senate have been devising is a joke as well. Very little of the legislative possibilities we are now looking at would have an immediate effect and maybe as much of two thirds of them are a combination of stupefying protectionism, unaffordable welfare-state hooey, bailouts for state governments that ought to have to repay any grants, halfway measures for long-term growth and projects that could well stymie our energy future more than assist it.
Supporters have claimed a virtual unanimity of expert opinion on their trillion-dollar side, but they should look again. Even the respected Alice Rivlin, a liberal who was director of the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton, thinks too little stimulation and too much waste lie in wait in the absence of massive revisions of the bill. And meanwhile, we have hundreds of conservative economists who from the start have argued that Keynesian-style, borrowing-financed spending will only take money from job creation in the private sector to give us even less job creation via public projects.
Their solution? Do what it takes to prompt more productivity, more investment, more jobs. One wonderful way to get us there is tax cuts. We already have tax cuts as a part of the stimulus package, but we need more — they ought to be practically the whole thing. One increasingly interesting idea is to cut payroll taxes, thus making it cheaper for companies to put people to work and providing relief to workers nationwide.
Given the reluctance of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to pay his own taxes, you’d think he would have sympathy for this and some of the other GOP-suggested, tax-reducing ideas, but if he doesn’t, here come the Republicans. What a fine, glorious moment it was for them when they stood up to the Democrats in the House and said no, no, a thousand times no, and the hope has to be that Senate Republicans will be as firm, as resolute, as principled — and just as willing to do the same if necessary.
That’s the way for this party to restore itself in this country, to stand for something real and to give us an opposition that just might slow things down a mite and encourage a government that has rejected John Thain as its model. You can note, as some do, that the Republicans were deficit-happy spenders themselves when in power, but that’s an irrelevancy at a moment when we desperately need a wall of some kind between congressional Democrats and a vulnerable economy.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington, D.C., opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
