Talk about bad timing:

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse — with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans — led by Maine Senator Susan Collins — aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

Now, as the World Health Organization says a deadly swine flu outbreak that apparently began in Mexico but has spread to the United States has the potential to develop into a pandemic, Obey’s attempt to secure the money seems eerily prescient.

Collins, echoing Rove, was particularly adamant that $870 million directed at preparing for a flu pandemic did not belong in the economic stimulus bill. Because pandemics aren’t bad for economic activity or anything. And, of course, no one could have predicted that “swine flu” would present a potential pandemic all of 3 months later.

But at least Collins is a moderate.

Technorati Tags: Pandemics, stimulus, Susan Collins

On the perennial dilemna of Governors harboring national political ambitions, Anonymous Liberal writes:

Governors with presidential ambitions often spend much of their time in office trying to raise their profile and pad their resume for a future presidential run. That’s to be expected, and in general, it’s not a bad thing for the people of their state. Yes, these governors probably spend a little too much time in Iowa and New Hampshire, but they also tend to do things to bring positive attention to their states. Governor Mitt Romney, for instance, worked with Democrats in his state to construct a universal health care system, the first such system in the country. Though his ultimate ambitions were clear, he attempted to further them by creating a record of accomplishment as governor.

What’s happening now, though, is very different. The Republican governors with presidential ambitions are tripping over each other to be the one that hoses over his own constituents the most.

This is, of course, pretty obvious. Ever 4 years, you get a rash of Governors who kick around the idea of running for President, and this generally leads them to try to do a lot of good things for their state in order to create a list of accomlishments to, possibly, run on. Similarly, Governors often run for the Senate after leaving office which, again, is usually predicated on being remembered fondly by the voters of their state. Here, however, you have a rather odd scenario in which a group of Republican Presidential aspirants have decided the best way to further their national ambitions is to give the residents of their state the shaft. And, perversely, they’re probably right. It’s certainly not hard to imagine a non-Gubernatorial candidate for President, say, Mitt Romney, criticizing any governor who accepts federal money as only paying lip service to their opposition, and it’s also not that hard to see national Republican voters punishing them for it. So the real lesson here is how decrepit the national Republican Party has really become, that in order to succeed internally, Republican governors must sacrifice the people of their states on the altar of ambition.

I do hope, however, that the DNC and various state Democratic parties make a point of connecting the actions of Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford to their naked political ambitions and, by extension, the national GOP.

Technorati Tags: Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin, stimulus

First of all, the obvious connection between Governors Jindal, Palin, Barbour, and Sanford is that they’d all like to be President, and are all clearly convinced that opposing the stimulus is your best bet in the Republican Party. And I’m sure that’s a wise calculation, but there’s a bit of a difference between opposing the bill and actively turning down money for your state. As I noted the other day, national politics is relatively short on governors who served during economic downturns, mostly because it’s hard to accumulate a list of accomplishments to run on as a result. You get to cut spending on state services, and that’s a hard sell to make down the road, even to the national Republican Party. So I suppose these governors are trying to distinguish themselves, but it seems a little odd all the same.

For one thing, they’re taking an awfully big gamble. Congressional Republicans opposing the stimulus bill makes sense; if it works you’re not going to get credit regardless, but if it fails, or is seen to have failed, you can gain from having opposed it. Now that it’s passed, any governor actually thinking about turning down the money is betting on an awfully big stretch; that their state’s economy will do better than the rest of the country without the money. That’s the only way this can really work out as a positive for them, and the only way they could really sell this nationally. Obviously that’s quite a bit unlikely, and the downside is much starker; the national economy recovers, at least somewhat, while your state continues to suffer, or even to recover at a pace slower than the national average. In that case you’ve not only hurt your own personal political career, you’ve provided an incredibly stark, side by side comparison of two competing worldviews, and if you bust you’ll have a hard time defending your entire ideology for a generation or so. It won’t be an abstract debate over competing economc theories, it will be an objective assessment of the two theories played out in real time.

Of course, it’s also possible that the governors are trying to short circuit the plan. That theory would be bolstered by what has been refused so far; Jindal wants to refuse additional millions for unemployment insurance, and Sanford is going to refuse money to make buildings more energy efficient. These are not only some of the most popular aspects of the package, but also among the most stimulative. The wrench in this view, I think, it that it’s just hard to see how refusing money to be spent in Louisiana or South Carolina is going to have a huge ripple effect on the national economy. Neither state is all that big, and there’s nothing particularly special about either state that gives it a disproportionate impact on the national economy. So the most likely outcome is that these state economies lag behind the rest of the country, which is bad for the citizens in those states, but also bad for the governors managing the situation as well.

It is, in other words, totally crazy.

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin, stimulus

Clive Crook wants to be serious:

I do try to be reasonable, which I know can be infuriating, but as it happens I don’t think that “being reasonable means declaring, in all circumstances, that Democrats and Republicans are equally in the wrong”. Each side is usually somewhat wrong, I find, but the proportions do vary according to topic. I am very much in the Democratic camp on the stimulus, for instance. I think it is unreasonable, on the other hand, to regard everything Republicans say as definitionally wicked or stupid or both, which is the organising principle of everything Paul [Krugman] writes in the NYT.

I don’t know if that’s really the underlying assumption to everything Krugman writes, but Krugman’s point in the larger discussion going on, that you simply can’t ”seriously engage” with Republicans on the stimulus because there’s nothing to engage with, is pretty sound. Forget, for a second, the “economic theory” of modern Republicanism. Forget grave intonements about spending, and deficits (all of a sudden) and the preferability of tax cuts, and their hand-wring over “Europe,” and just consider the following.

Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is the ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee. He was also the chief agitator for including a $70  billion AMT patch in the stimulus bill. Many, many people pointed out that this was both wasteful and pointless; on the one hand it would mostly be targeted at upper-middle class earners who hadn’t lost their jobs, meaning there would be little stimulative effect, but that also, rightly or wrongly, Congress would no doubt have done it anyway at some point, so there was no reason to put it in this bill. Nevertheless, Grassley got what he wanted, and school construction, aid to states, and so on were cut in favor of Grassley’s AMT patch.

Now, after being placated to the tune of 9% of the entire bill, what did Chuck Grassley do? He voted against the final bill of course. Along with all but 3 Republicans in the entire Congress.

Put the economics aside for a second, and ask yourself what, exactly, there is to “engage” in such blatantly craven political positioning?

Technorati Tags: Paul Krugman, stimulus

Via Steve Benen, I see that the “moderates” in the Senate are taking a, um, hard line in regards to their brokered Senate deal:

Once the Senate holds an official up-or-down vote on the stimulus Tuesday, the bill will go to conference, where differences between the versions passed by the two chambers of Congress will be ironed out. That could mean funding that was cut as part of the Senate deal will end up in the final legislation.

Already, both Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the architect of the compromise, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), one of three Republicans whose support was crucial on Monday, have come out to say they won’t accept a bill that’s much different from the one they voted for.

So let’s unpack this a little bit. The legislative process is not over; bills have passed both houses, but they have to be reconciled in conference. That is to say that there’s more negotiating to be done. But the self styled “moderates” in the Senate have decided that they’re done negotiating, even though the legislative process isn’t over, and that they will accept nothing but “their” bill. Am I the only one seeing the disconnect between this rhetoric and their centrist preening? Isn’t that as stubborn as anything “partisan?” Doesn’t it sort of bely the idea that the Nelson-Collins axis is some sort of nonpartisan pragmatist wing? And considering that the House version of the bill is both more stimulative and cheaper, what exactly are the “moderates” moderating by insisting on their larger, more wasteful, bill?

Technorati Tags: Centrists, stimulus

Daniel Drezner makes the fairly ridiculous assertion that “Keynsians” are becoming the new neocons, and that Krugman, specifically, is reminding him of Richard Perle. I suppose I should point out that this is basically just another invocation of “the Shrill One” and doesn’t actually contain any sort of substantive rebuttal to Krugman, but in the spirit of comity and seriousness I’ll give this a bit more thorough unpacking.

First, it’s worth keeping in mind that the underlying circumstances Drezner is comparing are about as far apart from one another as night and day. In retrospect, one of the most appalling things about the neocons in the run-up to the Iraq War was the way they shamelessly exaggerated the threat Iraq posed. I mean, senior administration officials right up to the President actually said, repeatedly, that there was a risk Iraqi Predator drones might disperse a chemical agent over a U.S. city sometime this decade and warned, “the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud.” It’s sort of hard to remember that now, mostly because subsequent discoveries have demonstrated just how ridiculous the idea was, and I suspect most of us just want to forget that we actually fell for the bullshit.

On the other hand, I very much doubt that anyone really thinks we do not, in fact, have a dire economic situation on our hands. I mean, we lost 600,000 jobs last month, unemployment is at a 16 year high, and is likely to crack double digits by mid-year. It’s right in front o our faces, in other words. Indeed, even the biggest right-wing critics of the stimulus bill aren’t denying the existence of a problem so much as they’re trying to blame it on Democrats.

Secondly, I suppose it’s just me, but if anything I think Drezner is painting with an overly large brush by invoking the specter of “Keynsians,” in the sense that he seems to be implying that Krugman, and others, have a knee-jerk, ideological, favor for massive fiscal expansion in the face of economic downturns. But that’s not really true, of course, and Krugman has written before that, usually, the best cure for an economic downturn is monetary policy. But every recession is not created equal, and in this unique situation that’s not an option. It’s a strategy of “fiscal policy of last resort” so to speak.

Finally, I don’t really think Krugman is wrong to treat stimulus opponents so dismissively, and Drezner doesn’t really outline why he should. To wit, neither the Republican opposition nor the centrist trimmers are actually providing any sort of rationale for their positions and, when they do, the nonsense borders on comical. How, exactly, are you supposed to substantively engage with a party whose chairman is on national television arguing that a government job, or a job contracting for the government, isn’t really a job and that the problem with the stimulus bill is that it just “makes work?” I’m not saying that bona fide detractors shouldn’t be engaged with in a serious fashion, but for the most part there aren’t bona fide detractors in this sense. You have, on the one hand, a bunch of wingnuts (yes wingnuts) running around saying ridiculously absurd things on a daily basis and, on the other hand, a group of “centrists” looking for a chance to preen for the Broders of the world. That’s not a recipe for any sort of substantive debate, and treating either of those as intellectually serious positions would be insulting.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Drezner, Paul Krugman, stimulus

On centrists, Jon Chait writes:

They took a $900 billion stimulus and decided to knock off a nice round hundred billion dollars because that shows they’re centrist. If the House had passed a $1 trillion bill, they would have decided $900 billion was the perfect figure. This is essentially the same way they operated with the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, when Senate centrists did knock down the cost of the Bush tax cuts a bit, and thus declared that centrism has prevailed, Republicans just turned around in conference committee and made the spending cuts meaningless. For technical reasons, I don’t think Democrats can do the same thing this time. But I do think they can reverse the state budget aid cuts, which is the most damaging cut the centrists imposed, and swap it for something else. In fact I think a conference committee could undo a lot of the damage, and probably bring the price tag up a bit.

The thing to pay attention to now is the Congressional wrangling over the conference process. The Senate wants the House to pass their bill in full, and the House wants to go to Congress, where Pelosi will likely stuff the negotiating team and demand more, well, stimulus. I suspect that some of the more egregious cuts; aid to states, school construction, and food stamps, will get back into the final version and some of the more odious ta credits will be removed. The centrists may not like that, but I just don’t see what they’re going to do about it. See, for example, this:

In other words, there’s really no constituency for opposing the stimulus bill. The American public, by and large, want the government to pass something, the business community, certainly not looking forward to a prolonged recession, wants the bill to pass, and wingnuts listening to the radio, and journalists yapping on teevee, are a rather small group of people to pander to. So I just don’t see the Collins-Nelson-Specter axis actually opposing the bill at the end of the day, certainly not if it means the bill actually fails, and they have to take the fall for defeating it.

Technorati Tags: Centrists, stimulus