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Here is an astounding statistic from Sen. David Vitter on Laura Ingraham’s show two days ago. He said one way to understand the size of the proposed stimulus bill was to imagine that if every DAY since the birth of Jesus we spent a million dollars, the total would not equal the $820 billion of the bill. Thinking about it later, the thought came to mind he really meant every year. But banging on the calculator proved he meant EVERY DAY! So when Jesus was three years old the spending would equal $1,095,000,000 or 1,095 millions. Two thousand years later the spending of a million dollars a day would total $730 billion; quite a bit less than the proposed stimulus package.
The Corner shows us just one of the ridiculous items in the bill. Milwaukee, which has a declining school population and 15 empty school buildings, gets $89 million for new schools.
John Fund says Rep. Jim Cooper might have committed the unforgiveable Washington sin; telling the truth.
Is President Obama already playing “triangulation” with the Democratic Congress? Some circumstantial evidence surfaced yesterday when Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee — a prominent Blue Dog Democrat — told a liberal radio network that the Obama White House quietly encouraged him to reject the stimulus package pushed through the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the end, every Republican opposed the measure along with 11 Democrats. Mr. Cooper was also one of 55 Democrats who wrote a letter to Ms. Pelosi criticizing her for suspending normal debate on the $819 billion package.
“Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I actually got some quiet encouragement from the Obama folks for what I’m doing,” Rep. Cooper told the Liberadio network. “They know it’s a messy bill and they wanted a clean bill. Now, I got in terrible trouble with our [Democratic House] leadership because they don’t care what’s in the bill, they just want it passed and they want it to be unanimous. They don’t mind the partisan fighting ’cause that’s what they are used to. In fact, they’re really good at it. And they’re a little bit worried about what a post-partisan future might look like — if members actually had to read the bills and figure out whether they are any good or not. We’re just told how to vote. We’re treated like mushrooms most of the time. . . .”
Well. If the definition of a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, Mr. Cooper committed a gaffe of mega-proportions. …
Daniel Henninger wonders just what Congress is stimulating.
Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus “package” is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years.
For starters, notwithstanding the new president’s high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous.
Then after Tim Geithner scampered through the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off, laying open for public view the world of Washington’s pay-for-favors that makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo-Peep.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just now. The party’s crypts are opening.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio ads against 28 House Republicans. The theme of the ads is “Putting Families First.”
Families first? The only family standing at the front of the stimulus pay line is the federal family. Read the bill. …
John Stossel says we can’t spend our way to prosperity.
… We should be suspicious when politicians, economists and the media declare a “consensus” and marginalize dissent. President Obama says, “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”
That’s not true. Last week, the Cato Institute ran a full-page newspaper ad signed by more than 200 economists, including Nobel laureates stating:
“We the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s … Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
Let’s hear no more about “everyone” agreeing that politicians can spend the economy into recovery.
Jennifer Rubin has stimulus thoughts.
An illustration of how long it takes for facts to get in the way of fanciful notions, is the continuing idea of FDR as the president who conquered the great depression. In fact, his policies did just the opposite. We have a couple of items today to illustrate the point. Amity Shlaes is first with a WaPo Op-Ed.
One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
William’s father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he’d suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William’s older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn’t nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family’s apartment had been shut off for half a year. Harold told a New York Times reporter that both hunger and modesty had driven William to act. “He was reluctant about asking for food,” read the headline in the paper.
The surprising part of this story is not that it happened; most Americans know that after the 1929 stock-market crash, hard times sometimes led to suicide. The surprising part is that William Troeller killed himself not in 1930, when Herbert Hoover was president, but in 1937, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term. The New Deal was almost five years old, but the economy was not back. In fact, the country seemed farther from recovery than before. A new sense of futility was overcoming Americans. The British magazine the Economist sneered that the United States “seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, how to grow.”
The date matters, because our new president has made it clear that his model is Roosevelt. …
And a WSJ Op-Ed on how the government prolonged the depression.
The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a “new” New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR’s policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.
The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn’t restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39). Private hours worked were even lower after FDR took office, averaging 27% below their 1929 level, compared to 18% lower between in 1930-32.
Even comparing hours worked at the end of 1930s to those at the beginning of FDR’s presidency doesn’t paint a picture of recovery. Total hours worked per adult in 1939 remained about 21% below their 1929 level, compared to a decline of 27% in 1933. And it wasn’t just work that remained scarce during the New Deal. Per capita consumption did not recover at all, remaining 25% below its trend level throughout the New Deal, and per-capita nonresidential investment averaged about 60% below trend. The Great Depression clearly continued long after FDR took office. …
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