1 Boring Old Man

The Destructive Center
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 8, 2009

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses? A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years. Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending. The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump…

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal. In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years…

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short. So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good. For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.” No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Krugman does have a legitimate excuse. He sees what’s up ahead and knows where this thing is going. But maybe we aren’t hurting enough yet to do what’s needed. The Republicans are acting as if things just aren’t that bad and that Obama is some kind of socialist or social engineer who is trying to help the dregs of society – that the Stimulus Bill is a trick of some kind. And Krugman believes that Obama could’ve applied some kind of forceful rhetoric that would have cooled their heels. What actually happened was that all these compromises were made to get the votes – and the bloc voting Republicans had a Campaign to get what they wanted. So maybe there’s not enough of the pain Krugman sees coming to get the kind of sweeping Stimulus Package that might head some of it off. Krugman is seeing Obama as gutless, when the truth is that he’s shy the votes [see below] and the country hasn’t yet felt enough pain.

When I look at how much pain it took to get BushCo out of the White House, I suspect it’s going to take another kind of pain to get our government pointed in the right direction. And when I think of where we’d be right now had McCain and Palin been in the White House, I shudder. We’re apparently going to have to just have some of our 2nd Great Depression after all. The idea that we can prevent it may be bigger than our electorate and Congress can handle just now. Krugman sees where the economy is headed, but his finger isn’t on the pulse of America that elected Bush twice, tolerated the worst government in our history, and elected all these short-sighted Republican Senators that are making such a bloody mess of things. At least he and I agree that they’re making a bigger mess of our already big mess. F.D.R. came into the Presidency after three years of suffering and a 73rd Congress that looked like this:

Senate:

House of Representatives:

Unfortunately, this is Obama’s 111th Congress:

Senate:

House of Representatives: