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Before we get to the trainwreck known as the stimulus package, let’s enjoy thinking about the airliner wreck where everyone walked away. The UK’s Independent has some of the interview with US Air Captain Chesley Sullenberger.
He may have sounded matter of fact on the radio to traffic controllers but as his aircraft lost every ounce of power on 15 January just after take-off from La Guardia airport in New York, Captain Chesley Sullenberger was suffering intense inner turmoil, ranging from denial to physical nausea.
In his first formal interview since the incident, Captain Sullenberger admits to an interviewer on 60 Minutes, the CBS news magazine that will be broadcast tomorrow evening, that his first thoughts were not, as she suggests to him, “how do we get out of this”, but rather, “this can’t be happening”.
“I knew immediately it was very bad,” describing his first thoughts after the so-called double-bird strike that instantly disabled both engines on the Airbus A320 aircraft at about 5,000ft less than three minutes after its departure. “My initial reaction was one of disbelief”. …
Most of our favorites have comments on the vanishing Obama magic. Mark Steyn first.
… A president doesn’t have to be able to walk on water. But he does have to choose the right crew for the ship, especially if he’s planning on spending most of his time at the captain’s table, schmoozing the celebrity guests with a lot of deep thoughts about “hope” and “change.” Far worse than his Cabinet picks was President Obama’s decision to make the “stimulus” racket the all-but-sole-priority of his first month and then outsource the project to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reid.
Appearing on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings – one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California – and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom – she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to $850 billion of bailout they couldn’t afford and didn’t have enough time to keep an eye on, and now, four months later, they’re going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it’s the taxpayers who’ll get stuck with the diapers. …
… the foreigners made the mistake of actually reading the “stimulus” bill, and the protectionist measures buried on page 739 subsection XII(d) ended, instantly, the Obama honeymoon overseas. The European Union has threatened a trade war. Up in Canada, provincial premiers called it “a march to insanity.” Wait a minute, I thought the Obama era was meant to be the retreat from insanity, a blessed return to multilateral transnational harmony.
As longtime readers will know, I’m all in favor of flipping the bird to the global community. But at least, when Rummy was doing his shtick about “Old Europe,” he did it intentionally. To cheese off the foreigners entirely accidentally before you’ve even had your first black-tie banquet is quite an accomplishment. Protectionism is serious business to the Continentals. Oh, to be sure, if the swaggering unilateralist Yank cowboy invades some Third World basket-case they’ll seize on it as an opportunity for some cheap moral posturing. But in the end they don’t much care one way or the other. Plunging the planet into global depression, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. …
It is amazing how quickly this new president has come unglued. Our favorite Davids have comments. Mr. Warren from Ottawa first.
A fortnight is a long time in politics. It corresponds most recently to the time between Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, on the final crest of the “politics of hope,” and his definitive exploitation of the “politics of fear” to get a near trillion-dollar stimulus package through the U.S. Senate.
In an article he at least limned and signed, for the Washington Post on Thursday, Mr. Obama supplied a memorable quote: “This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose five million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Compare, if you will, another Democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office under considerably grimmer circumstances — at the very bottom of the Depression — in 1933: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” … … For all retrospective disagreements with that genuinely great president, I will not confuse the liberalism that animated his judgment, with the sound-bite gliberalism that characterizes his current successor. …
David Harsanyi from Denver next.
In a Washington Post op-ed this week, Obama, who has quickly transformed from an inspirational candidate to the Pessimist-In-Chief, admitted that his spending plan “is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.”
Well, then, it is not a stimulus bill. It is a left-wing omnibus bill to restructure the economy without much debate. Unless you believe $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities” — or any of the everlasting partisan pork in the bill — can save a job. …
… Then again, what could possibly be more reckless than spending $1 trillion, you don’t have, on a plan that you have no evidence will work?
What could be more irresponsible than doubling the generational debt for your partisan pet projects in a time of crisis?
And what could be more selfish than stifling debate by deploying fear to induce voters into supporting it all?
Charles Krauthammer has his way with the bill.
… And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said. …
Jonah Goldberg too.
… The stimulus bill was a bridge too far, an overplayed hand, ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag. The legislation’s primary duty was never to stimulate the economy, but to stimulate the growth of government, the scope of the state.
By spending hundreds of billions on things that have absolutely nothing to do with providing an immediate stimulus for the economy, Democrats hoped to make a down payment on their dream government. The billions for student aid, expanded welfare and health-care benefits, and bailouts for profligate state governments; the hundreds of millions for better museums and prettier government buildings; and the millions for smoking-cessation programs and bee insurance aren’t just items on crapulent Democrats’ wish list. The budget bloating was deliberate.
Remember what passes for a “cut” in Washington. Any decrease in the rate of increase counts as reduced spending. If you spend 20 percent more this year than you did last year, that’s a spending increase. But next year, that additional 20 percent is part of the baseline. And if your budget grows by “only” an additional ten percent, you’ve just “drastically cut” spending!
The stimulus bill was designed to give Democrats maximum maneuvering room. It would increase non-defense discretionary spending by more than 80 percent in a single year, in a single bill! Moving forward, they could grow government by smaller percentages while seeming to be responsible budget balancers. By putting chips on every square of social spending, they could let it ride for years to come. …
WSJ Editors sum it up.
… Speaking to a House Democratic retreat on Thursday night, Mr. Obama took on those critics. “So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That’s the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That’s the point. (Applause.)”
So there it is: Mr. Obama is now endorsing a sort of reductionist Keynesianism that argues that any government spending is an economic stimulus. This is so manifestly false that we doubt Mr. Obama really believes it. He has to know that it matters what the government spends the money on, as well as how it is financed. A dollar doled out in jobless benefits may well be spent by the worker who receives it. That $1 of spending will count as economic activity and add to GDP.
But that same dollar can’t be conjured out of thin air. The government has to take that dollar away from someone else — either in higher taxes, or by issuing new debt in the form of a bond. The person who is taxed or buys the bond will have $1 less to spend. If the beneficiary of that $1 spends it on something less productive than the taxed American or the lender would have, then the net impact on growth will be negative. …
Gingrich says Obama reminds him of Jimmy Carter. Sam Donaldson agrees, kind of. Politico has the story.