Obama's False Choice Between Doing Nothing and Doing Something

“So, you know, we — we can differ on some of the particulars, but, again, the question I think the American people are asking is, do you just want government to do nothing, or do you want it to do something? If you want it to do something, then we can have a conversation. But doing nothing, that’s not an option from my perspective.” As a friend said to me last night, these words from Obama sound like something Michael Scott would say. In fact, the American public is much smarter than Obama is giving them credit for. They have very specific ideas about what they want and do not want in the stimulus. They recognize that a Congressional solution will likely be a compromise. They are peeved by the relative lack of transparency in the bill process, and understandably worried about oversight and overdoing, given the questionable fate of the first half of TARP. Which, if you’ll remember, Obama assured proper oversight of while he was doing double duty as a Senator and a candidate last fall. As Obama might say, the American people “reject the false choice between” doing something and doing nothing. For that matter, so does Congress. As Ed Morrissey notes today, Obama’s allegedly intractable Republican opponents got past their “ideological blockage” long enough to offer at least two alternatives to the Democrats’ plan. Undoubtedly, those plans were more tax cuts and less spending than Obama desired, but they don’t constitute an overwhelming desire to do “nothing,” as the president so disingenuously suggests. The only entity I’ve heard suggest explicitly that doing nothing might be better than doing something is, in fact, the Congressional Budget Office.

President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.