After not hesitating to funnel nearly a trillion dollars to the financial sector with absolutely no oversight, management, nor even suggestion as to how it might be spent, congressional Republicans are suddenly remembering that being conservative is supposed to entail occasionally, well, being conservative. Or, it doesn't, actually—the last president was the most fiscally reckless in history, and we went eight whole years without hearing so much as a peep from the congressional Republicans about Bush's budgets. But the political landscape has changed. There's a Democrat in the White House. It's time to be obstructionist.

This has been a hugely complicated and disheartening 3 weeks. What looked like a surefire success has been killed. What looked like the first good, large project the government had undertaken in my lifetime, what looked like it might actually save the economy and wipe out much of the damage of the last eight years in one fell swoop has been executed, Frankensteined, turned into a murderous, undead parody of its living self.


Here's a basic rundown of what I think was going through Obama's head when he and his team began drafting the stimulus:

[Quote]
We need to pass a stimulus bill. Like, right now. We needed it last year. You know all those social and infrastructural programs that the last president slashed to pieces? Yeah, it turns out that the country needs those to function. We need to pour money into them, to make up for lost time. Yes, the Republicans will call this socialist. They think giving pocket change to the Salvation Army is socialism. But, come on, I mean they just gave a trillion dollars to the banking industry. They couldn't possibly pull out the socialism card right now, could they?

But, hey, let's be nice. Let's compromise. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (and a whole host of others) say that tax cuts do little to stimulate the economy, especially when the economy needs a fast injection of capital, not savings. We need to spend money and create new jobs. Pretty obvious. But, here again the Republicans will disagree. After all, they aren't the type to who like taking advice from informed experts. Let's toss them a bone and throw in some tax cuts. But—here's the kicker—these tax cuts will mostly be aimed towards lower and middle class people, instead of the very rich. That way they'll get spend, not saved. The rest will be spending, and it will be worthwhile spending: money will go directly to states, so that they can stop cutting jobs. We'll renovate 10,000 school buildings and repair the PELL Grant system, which Bush cut to pieces. We'll triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships. We'll spend 360 million on slowing the spread of STDs, enhance the security of 90 major US ports, launch 1,300 wastewater programs, 380 drinking water projects, and 1000 rural and sewer system projects. We'll modernize 75% of government buildings, in the long run saving untold sums of money on heating expenses alone. We can expand the Cobra program, so that the people who lose their jobs will be able to have healthcare for a few more months. We'll start funding rail projects and other forms of mass transportation, to bring us up to speed with the rest of the world. Oh, there's so many more good, positive, common sense uses of this money that I can't even list them all in one paragraph. This is truly the dawn of a bright new day!
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Okay: all those figures in that last paragraph were true. Had the original draft of the stimulus bill passed, all those things would have happened. Much more would have happened, too. This was common sense spending on worthwhile stuff, and you'd think that everyone except severe libertarian retards would support it. And they should have, logically. They really, really should have. But, you see, saying that they should have supported it would assume that the parties involved had in the mind the best interest of the American people. They did not.

From day one, the Republican meme has been obstructionism. Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct: at all costs, no matter what the results, you cannot let this legislation get through. Why? Well, if it works then that's the end of the GOP. The exact same logic was used when the GOP shot down Clinton's health care plan. The focus of the party and its advocates was not the best interest of the country. It was the best interest of the Party. If good things happened to the country under a Democratic president, then well the Democrats would benefit right along with the American people. They couldn't allow that to happen. They had to punish the entire world.

Because of this, all of the Republican arguments against the stimulus have been nothing but a sideshow. I am yet to see a single conservative objection to this bill that wasn't either monstrously hypocritical, in light of the reckless spending of the last eight years, or else based on some indefensible ideological fear. Any and all monies going to prevent treat and prevent STDs was made a fuss over, as if the cash were going to buy dildos for middle schoolers. Rep. David Vitters, a man who campaigns on a family values platform but was caught paying hookers who fuck him while he was dressed like a baby (seriously), went on a long rant about how "immoral" it was to give some stimulus money to ACORN. Because, you know, once those black people start voting there's no telling what could happen! Conservative think tanks put up a list of the most "egregious" bits of spending that had been earmarked—a list that included such horrible waste as Midwestern flood relief and the removal of lead paint from urban homes. Countless others cried socialism, or else fell back onto demonstrably untrue homilies about how spending government money on anything but the military is a horrible, wasteful thing to do.

The complaints were illogical and often nonsensical. That doesn't matter, though, since they're not geared towards any real goal aside from making sure that the stimulus doesn't work.

Congressional Democrats haven't been much better. Instead of standing up for an important, worthwhile piece of legislation, they have capitulated for the sake of political expediency. Ben Nelson, who is an idiot as well as a Democrat, gutted nearly all stimulus spending on education, infrastructure, and state projects. He replaced them with tax cuts. For the wealthy.

The result is here summed up by Paul Krugman:

[quote]
What the centrists have wrought

I’m still working on the numbers, but I’ve gotten a fair number of requests for comment on the Senate version of the stimulus.

The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts.

According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, are even more pessimistic. So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little to demand. The plan should have been at least 50% larger.

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.
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This has been a failure. The only reason it's going to make cloture and get passed is because it has been designed to fail. This will go down in history as a misstep, and it will not unfairly be attributed to Obama. This is Obama's Somalia, in a sense. He's punished for his naivety. His mistake was looking into the eyes of congressional Republicans and convincing himself he was looking at decent human beings, the type with whom compromise and reason would not be futile. They don't care about the American people. They never did and they never will. The Democrats kinda do, a little, but they're much more concerned with scoring political points than with helping anybody, and just like the Republicans they'd club a bag full of puppies to death in exchange for a single consulting contract. Obama is going to have to be harsher with both parties. He's going to have to start being mean, and quick.