The president’s WaPo op-ed has generated some reaction from stimulus skeptics. A round-up. Matt Welch:
Why do people oppose the stimulus? Here are a few actual reasons: There is no strong evidence that stimuli work, and plenty of evidence that they don’t (a relevant consideration, no?). Like the deeply flawed PATRIOT Act, the deeply flawed Iraq War resolution, and the deeply flawed bank bailout, it is being rushed through the legislature in an atmosphere of pants-wetting crisis and presidential warnings of impending doom. It is filled with special interest giveaways, big-government featherbedding, and "Buy American" considerations that have about as much to do with stimulating an economy as playing violin has with putting out fires. By taking from fiscally responsible states (like South Carolina) and giving to fiscally irresponsible states (like California), it violates basic notions of fairness and creates still more moral hazard in an already hazardtastic universe. These will do for starters; there will be more and better reasons in the comments.
The more Obama fear mongers over the economic situation the more wary I become of these stimulus packages. I’ve noted before that this is the standard tactic used by politicians to increase the size and scope of government. We must act now or all will be lost! Failure to act will bring about catastrophic results. The economy will simply up and vanish I guess.
Obama gives no support for the argument that all of the spending in his bill should get passed under emergency conditions, or that any of it will specifically create even one job this year. Obama chants “Now is the time” in five successive paragraphs as if he’s making a campaign speech rather than a cool, calm case for his legislation. He blathers on about how people “voted for change”, but that’s just a slogan, not a policy, and it certainly isn’t an argument. La change, c’est vous, mon President, but that doesn’t make ‘change’ evidence.
In order to “restore confidence” we are alleged to require interventions contained in the deficit spending bill. But the bill won’t clear Congress unless the President succeeds in terrifying the public into clamoring once more for his spending extravaganza kludge. So, the idea seems to be that in order to save the economy, you’ve got to get people to flip out first, so that you can do what it takes to calm them down later. This may seem a bit like dumping gas on a person on fire so that they can more easily burn through the wall standing between them and the lake. But I’m sure this feat of psychological needle-threading can be achieved with laser-like accuracy by deploying the virtuoso mood-management skills of Obama’s first-rate team of applied mathematicians.
The Dish 