Stimulus

So, the stimulus bill passed. I don’t know if it will work, probably nobody does. I am hopeful. And, certainly, if we have to spend piles of money, I’d prefer that money be in the form of bridges and roads in the United States as opposed to craters in the Iraqi desert and disappearing pallets of money in Baghdad. My preference would be to go back in time, require bank regulators to regulate and also require that loan risks be better tethered to the people originating those loans so that the bubble didn’t get so far out of hand. But, that’s not going to happen.

Very few Republicans voted for the stimulus. And, politically, there was probably very little upside for them to do so. If it works well, they probably won’t get any credit. But, they could have staged things a little better. Boehner was telling House Republicans to vote against the thing before Obama went in and talked to them. As a practical matter, the biggest downside they face is the potential that constituents might regard “tax cuts” and “no” as insufficient responses to the current economic crisis.

Now, I wonder how many conservatives and libertarians (and anyone else, I suppose) are opposed to this sort of spending for pragmatic reasons and how many for ideological reasons. By which I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that large scale government spending enhanced the well-being of a substantial majority of the population while leaving the already well-to-do remainder earning a comfortable but not a lavish income. Let’s further hypothesize that the government intervention curbed the excessive crashes and booms of the market while leaving a vibrant, growing productive economy. Would conservatives and/or libertarians support such a system? In other words, I know that plenty of folks oppose government intervention such as that in the stimulus bill for the very practical reason that they don’t believe it will work as well as the government doing little to nothing.

But for how many is unfettered or almost unfettered liberty and lack of government intervention and end to itself; even if the price of liberty is increased human misery?

I’m not framing this question as a foregone conclusion, by the way. This question or echoes of it are present in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of “The Brothers Karamazov” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for starters.

In any event, John Cole figures that, politically, this was not a good move by the Republicans and explains why.

I honestly have never seen a party go so far out of their way to marginalize themselves, and folks who study groupthink are going to look at the last few months as a veritable gold mine. Why the Republicans have decided to, in the middle of numerous crises, ignore the outcome of an election and run headlong against a popular new President into opposition for opposition sake is beyond me.

And look, there are very legitimate reasons to oppose the stimulus bill. . . .
Additionally, spending that kind of money shouldn’t be easy, and an opposition that didn’t spend every day running around yelling ‘No’ and ‘Tax cuts’ probably could have built a more effective case against the stimulus bill. Sadly, that would have required counter proposals and arguments that didn’t start and end with tax cuts. But it is the way the Republicans are going about opposition that is so ridiculous. Their unified vote is so transparently just political gamesmanship, especially when you consider that immediately after the vote, Republicans were issuing press releases touting the benefits of the bill for their district.