Criticisms from moderates of the Stimulus Bill that Obama signed in Denver yesterday have ranged from measured to hysterial. Over at the New York Times’ “The Conversation” blog, David Brooks said the bill’s main problems were that it set a bad precedent for deficit spending with no way out, and that it included a lot of pork — but not only that, rushed pork, which he claims is half as effective as the type of programmatic support that comes in regular appropriations bill.
Meanwhile, on a certain urban planning newsgroup that I read, a former city planner said this:
Short-term economic stimulus is the enemy of thoughtful productive long-term infrastructure investment. The Federal government is looking like a bunch of crazed idiots right now.
Surely there’s some middle ground, here. Some of the healthcare measures in the stimulus, like the family planning education money, were simply not stimulus. They were good programs, that likely in the long run will work to lower health care spending and improve living standards, but they had no place in the AARP. Likewise, the COBRA funding that was cut out did, in my humble, have a place in the bill even if only as an accompaniment to job-creation measures. A lot of people are losing their jobs and their insurance right now — think of a boost to COBRA as a layer of padding that keeps a bad problem from getting drastically worse in a time of recession.
But overall, the form the stimulus has taken strikes me as a half-full glass. It will not create enough jobs to turn the economy around, and it cost Obama enough political capital that his supporters ought to be legitimately worried about 2012, I think. The hope now is that the three other extremely important economic bills: the Big Auto bailout, the bank nationalization, and the foreclosure bill, will work in tandem with the stimulus to get the economy back on the right track.
- TF100D
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