Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. Posted on 07/24/2010 7:45:55 PM PDT by ex-Texan
WASHINGTON -- Economists generally agree that the largest spending package of all time -- the $787 billion stimulus law of 2009 -- worked as designed, stabilizing a heaving economy, possibly preventing a full-blown depression and freeing up money to pave rutted roads and keep many Americans at work.
This would seem to be good news for Democrats in a difficult election year. After all, they muscled the bill into law with virtually no help from Republicans.
Think again.
According to a July 13 CBS News poll, only 23 percent of Americans think the stimulus helped the economy (down from 32 percent in April). Eighteen percent say it actually made the economy worse, and 56 percent say it had no effect.
That view leaves Democrats grasping for a strategy to sell a policy they insist is economically sound and morally heroic. At the same time, some grumble that the White House and Democratic leadership have fumbled the sales job, allowing the stimulus to be "demagogued" by critics and co-opted by political opponents.
"Had we not passed the recovery act and enacted it, the economy would still be hemorrhaging jobs and we would be in much more dire straits than we are today," Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said Tuesday.
Then the lament: "It is very difficult ... as a political argument to say things would have been worse. You know a guy who doesn't have a job or a gal who doesn't have a job and hasn't had a job for six months or a year or 18 months says to themselves, 'Mack, I don't think things could be worse.' But, in fact, most economists agree that they would have been substantially worse."
Even Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, a conservative who advised Ronald Reagan and, later, Sen. John McCain, said a burst of federal spending was necessary to prop up the economy.
"I support the use of fiscal stimulus in the U.S. because the current recession is much deeper than and different from previous downturns," he wrote in January 2009 as the stimulus was being developed.
Feldstein later softened his support, saying that stimulus spending was needed, but the law had flaws that limited its effectiveness, in particular the lower proportion of direct spending on infrastructure. Many Democrats also embraced that view, including Oregon's Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Peter DeFazio.
While the proportions of the stimulus are subject to endless quibbling among economists and some Democrats, congressional Republicans attack the law's very existence.
"I think most voters believe it has created more government than it has jobs," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "It was a partisan exercise and it seems to have been a flop."
For the public, the stimulus has been blurred -- and combined -- with other unpopular laws such as the $700 billion bank rescue package known as TARP, which had bipartisan support, and with the health care reform law approved exclusively by Democrats. It's made worse by unemployment that remains high -- 9.5 percent nationally and 10.5 percent in Oregon -- and talk of a double-dip recession.
Democrats don't get credit for the stimulus, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said in an interview, because in "most Americans' minds," the stimulus and other spending have been conflated and people "got all wrapped around this notion that things have gone crazy in Washington: They've opened the windows and started throwing money out."
But without the stimulus, McCaskill says, Missouri would have had to make an additional $800 million in cuts to its already strained budget.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski certainly agrees.
"I think the president did the right thing with the stimulus," Kulongoski said in an interview Wednesday in advance of the state's latest stimulus report.
Without federal help to financially stressed states like Oregon, there would have been "panic," Kulongoski said, as the bedrock services of health care for the poor, schools and law enforcement were shredded. "The choice was between a depression and a recession, and I think that's where we were headed."
The Oregon report released Thursday shows how the stimulus money is propping up services in the state. Since February 2009, the Recovery Act has pumped $1.9 billion into food stamps, low-income medical help and unemployment. Of the 6,150 Oregon jobs financed by the federal pot in the last quarter, almost two-thirds were educators in public schools and universities.
While governors and other local officials praise the influx of federal dollars that maintained crucial services, some business interests also point to loans to small business and investments in technologies such as advanced batteries, wind power and nanotechnology that would not have been possible without stimulus funding.
Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer said business leaders who've benefited from the stimulus need to let the people who work for them know where that job came from.
"This stuff didn't just drop out of the sky at a time when the economy was teetering on going over the edge," he said.
How deep a fall there might have been is impossible to prove. So, how much has the stimulus helped?
In its quarterly report last week, the White House estimated that stimulus spending so far has increased gross domestic product by 2.7 to 3.7 percent and saved or created between 2.5 million and 3.5 million jobs.
Given ranges like that, even the stimulus act's biggest boosters agree that people are confused.
"There's obviously a lot of uncertainty about any job estimates," Christina Romer, head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers conceded to reporters when the White House released the report. "I suspect the true effects of the act will not be fully analyzed or fully appreciated for many years."
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, continue a relentless attack.
"This is no time to celebrate," Senate's Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday after the White House report came out. "The fastest-growing parts of this Democrat economy aren't jobs -- they're the crushing burden of the national debt and the size of the federal government."
Democrats acknowledge they could have done a better job selling the stimulus. Some complain that the law's structure has hurt them because the tax break and assistance to states came first and only now are the more obvious -- and tangible -- benefits arriving as money for infrastructure begins to flow.
Oregon, for example, expects to get $410 million in transportation money. But most of that is coming in the second half of the three-year stimulus plan. Of 350 highway, road, bridge and transit projects already targeted around the state, half are completed. This summer, Kulongoski's office predicts, stimulus money will give Oregon its busiest summer transportation construction season in 50 years.
Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. I didn't read much further. That kind of lead-in sentence is practically guaranteed to be designed to cover a huge ration of BS.
What economists? Why "generally"? As long as the author can find two people who call themselves economists and support Obama he probably get away with writing "Economists generally agree..." without quite crossing the line into mendacity.
With very few exceptions, I have never had much respect for "economists" anyhow. Get a room full of them together and it is unlikely that you will get the majority to agree on what day it is, much less anything else.
This article is utter tripe, aimed Mein Kamph style at the lowest common denominator of brainwashed liberal.
The stimulus package was the democrat payoff to their number one constituency: public employees. Even though it was touted as targeting “shovel ready” projects across States and localities, it is interesting that construction workers are now one of the highest unemployment categories.
In the end, it allowed government at every level to lay off fewer public employees in the past year. That’s now changing and probably is a reason the dems aren’t cashing in with an election rolling around. Their political capital has run out.
The libtard brain says:
Spending gazillions of dollars we don’t have is making the economy “work”.
The gazillions in debt that are holding the economy back, well, that’s Bush’s fault.
"Really? When did that happen? I must have missed that little bit of news."
Surely the reference was to "liberal hack economists". Paul Krugman, after all, didn't think it was enough...
That's because it's not designed to actually help the economy. It was designed to create a larger dependent class at a time when the libs were planning to make a big push toward socialism. Basically trade one group of useful idiots that got them into power for a slightly smaller, but much more dependent group of useful idiots that will keep them in power. Actually pretty solid logic if you think about it and really don't care about the nation.
Actually helping the economy early in the crisis would have been cutting tax rates and federal expenditures across the board. Sprinkle in some extra dollars through printing presses or limited (and temporary) purchases of mortgage back securities to light a little fire under inflation and the summer of 2010 could have been noted for it's actual recovery instead excuses about the Independence Day holiday throwing off unemployment numbers...
But what do I know - I'm not an economist. Hell - my wife won't even let me use the checkbook...
ping
Complete BS from the first sentence!
“Stimulus May Help the Economy”
John Maynard Keynes was a pinheaded sexual deviant, and his “economic theories” have failed every time they’ve been tried.
I was in Japan from 1985 through early 2006, and watched their entire financial debacle. “Stimulus spending” was the first boneheaded Keynsian thing they tried, over and over again, and it only made things worse. Earlier, it failed when Kamarade Franklinovitch Rooseveltsky tried it.
When are these crazed idiots going to realize that an unbroken record of failure means that it shouldn’t be tried again? And no, leftards, “your magic touch” will not make it finally work *this* time.
No. We stole it from our old age, from our kids, and from our grandkids.
The author should look at Exhibit A for real-world empirical evidence, i.e., the Canadian and other economies that did not squander their progenies' wealth to prop up current spending. They are booming and we are still screwed -- and we haven't even begun to pay the piper, either.
Trillions towards reparations. It is out there. The stupid idiots who watch TV keep him in power.
Ask Japan how well their 8, yes 8, Stimulus packages over the past two decades worked at getting out of their recession and job growth.
Answer: It didn’t and 60% of the nations wealth has disappeared.
The Porkulus bill did nothing but pay the salaries of government workers and unions, and spent more money that we don’t have. Much of it was rewarded to those that help the dems win elections.
Horse crap.
Hussein said the stimulus would keep unemployment at 8%. He, and his PORKulus, is a failure.
The Oregonian is one of the most loathsomely liberal fishwraps in the country. What do you expect from them?
There’s a blog that keeps an eye on these clowns: http://www.deadfishwrapper.com/
Yes, it “worked as designed”:
It enriched and empowered Obama’s allies at the expense of the American people — that was the purpose all along.
And Obama is a liar.
I see they are still using drugs for recreational purposes in Oregon.
“Economists generally agreed ...”
Sounds like the TV ads I used to hear back in 1950’s.
“Most Doctors agree that Old Gold smokers are 47 percent more sophisticated.”
Support for this gigantic taxpayer-funded DNC spending turd is down to the 23% tooth fairy level.
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