So much for the non-ideologue, the eclectic and bipartisan President-elect. That persona is just for dinner parties. The one who seeks to govern apparently is an unalloyed liberal with little interest in crafting bipartisan, practical legislation. In devising his signature stimulus-piece he set the House Democrats loose and ignored the Republicans. The result: a $825B pork-filled monstrosity, containing no redeeming features for Republicans (e.g. tax rate cuts, significant military spending). Republicans were understandably horrified:
Republicans suggested the greater danger was the level of spending in the bill itself. “Oh, my God,” Minority Leader John Boehner (R- Ohio) told reporters in a hastily called press conference. “I can’t tell you how shocked I am at what I’m seeing.”
California Rep. Jerry Lewis, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations panel, said, “We have serious concerns about its size, scope, and astronomical cost. This legislation appears to blanket government programs in spending with little thought toward real economic results, job creation, or respect for the taxpayer.”
“Pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into government programs and saddling future generations with this tab will exacerbate our nation’s economic challenges, not solve them. If we fail to protect the interest of the taxpayer and make funding decisions based on campaign pledges and political games, the results will be disastrous.”
Just how bad is it? Well, Megan McArdle, no Republican partisan, observes the President-elect didn’t even keep to his tax cuts for 95% of taxpayers. Then the rest is just awful:
The rest of the bill is about what you expected–a lot of probably useless green energy spending that I fairly confidently predict will come to nothing, some stuff we should have done anyway, and a bunch of pandering, porky highway spending. The better the projects are, the less likely they are to be stimulative, because they’re complicated and time consuming, like healthcare IT and high-speed rail. If we do them on a stimulus timeframe, we’ll screw them up, waste an enormous amount of money, and likely make American voters worse off in the long term by locking them in to bad solutions–we won’t get a second bite at high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco. Mostly, Democrats took their wish lists, called them “stimulus”, and look set to inflict them on the American people in badly done drag.
I’m not sure what the game-plan is here. If the President-elect hoped to lure Republicans, provide some cover for Democrats and get some insurance (via meaningful tax cuts) just in case his Keynesian feast doesn’t work, he and his Congressional allies entirely missed the mark. I sincerely doubt it will attract any more than a handful of Republican votes in its current form. And it shouldn’t.
Some conservatives will be gleeful. This will “highlight the differences” between the parties and “force Democrats to take responsibility for the recession.” Perhaps, but it is also dreadful policy, highly unlikely to ameliorate the recession and certain to explode our debt. Moreover, it reeks of Old Politics: The Democrats have the votes? So jam the measure through. The Republicans want to offer amendments? Change the rules so they can’t.
It is unfortunate that the President-elect’s soothing rhetoric isn’t yet being implemented in his first concrete domestic policy move. We may be catching a glimpse of the chasm between talk and walk. The President-elect talks about change in national security but sets a policy course eerily similar to Bush’s second term (e.g. “close Guantanamo” but just only by the end of the first term if at all, “engage” on the Middle East but not with Hamas, “end” the Iraq War but only according to the Bush timetable). He talks bipartisanship and moderation on the domestic front, but favors a mega-New Deal spending bonanza that incorporates no conservative ideas. We won’t know for some time whether this dichotomy — some would say hypocrisy — is the Obama modus operandi.
For now, Republicans should make clear just how bad a piece of legislation this is and just how partisan was the method by which it was produced. That will, if nothing else, test the President-elect’s seriousness about listening to his political opponents.