So now the Stimulus Bill is going to pass. I would like to know if that is a good thing, and I would like to know it in the following order:
a) is it better that this bill is passing vs. nothing being done at all?
b) would it have been better if a trillion dollars were spent instead of 800 billion?
c) would it have been better if two trillion dollars were spent instead of either?
d) does this actually have a chance of preventing the depression from getting much, much worse?
e) and this is the difficult question, did Obama forever forsake liberals by allowing this bill?
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a) Yes. Anything is better than nothing at this point, and pretty much everyone knows it. The Republicans knew, from a short-term strategy perspective, that they had the ability to beat a couple hundred billion dollars worth of tax cuts off the stimulus, but they also knew that if they had filibustered all hell would have broken loose. It is a messy, stupid bill at the moment, and it is definitely not going to fix the recession, but it will put money out there, and save a lot of jobs.
ReplyDeleteb) Yes. Paul Krugman said it should be twice what it is now. I think, though, that a trillion dollars was an un-passable sum politically. Unfortunately, a lot of the debate among liberal economists over the stimulus is ignoring the fact that a trillion plus is a big fucking number and not one that Washington could move properly. In other words, anything that large would never, ever survive, no matter how hard Obama fought for it or how much economists hoped it would.
c) Yes. Again, however, I can't see how the hell you would slide a 2 trillion dollar budget past the House and the Senate.
d) Probably not. That graph that Ben put up before, of the job losses so far in this depression compared to 1990 and 2001, will probably bottom out sooner than it would have without the stimulus, and the recovery process may come a little sooner, but in terms of general shittiness it is doubtful. My thinking is that the stimulus is an emergency bill, designed to save as many jobs as possible and keep money moving, whereas the real task that Geithner and Summers have in front of them is to deal with the root of this mess: bad banking regulations. In two or three years, the banking regulations will be the thing that Obama is judged on, methinks.
e) No. Liberals have to get used to being in power and NOT being a dick. This means that, no matter how much they look back on the Bush years in anger over how they were treated, they cannot act the way Republicans did. America is in the mess it is in now because of this nonsense. Also, even if the stimulus starts to stink publicly (which it hasn't yet), it does not seem to have a very strong connection to Obama - he isn't seen to be the one, basically, who's fucking the stimulus to death.