AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2009 > February > 20
Friday, February 20, 2009
Did we move too fast on the stimulus package?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
De facto GOP Leader Rush Limbaugh took a lot of flack when he admitted that he hopes the Obama presidency fails. Yet after listening to the foot-stamping tantrums of elected Republicans the past few weeks, it’s clear that they’re taking Rush’s obstructionist attitude one step further: they want you, the American people, to fail. They want you to lose your job, not be able to find another one, and wind up cursing Hope and Change from your bed on the sidewalk.
Harsh words, indeed. Yet I promise you, I didn’t move too fast towards this conclusion. I first noted that many GOP strategists join the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl in promoting the fact that “the economy is still going to be there next week.” What an interesting defense of inaction. Sure, the economy will “be there” but in what form? Couldn’t we just keep saying that, week after week, until one day we wake up in Hooverville?
The stimulus plan isn’t perfect, but there’s no perfect solution here. One thing is certain —by the time the precise course of necessary action is known, it will be too late to make a difference. So why not follow the lead of the man we elected to address the crisis just three months ago?
Ah, but then the GOP would have to compromise. Instead, they offer up an alternative bill that relies exclusively on tax cuts, then complain of being “shut out” when their plan isn’t adopted. Other demonstrations of compelling leadership? Representative Eric Cantor’s YouTube video (before it was taken down after a copyright infringement claim) gleefully boasts of the Republican’s zero house participation while Aerosmith screeches “Back in the Saddle” again.
Back in the saddle, maybe, but finding no trail out of this mess. “You can’t approach something this big with nothing but rhetoric,” Joe Scarborough chided his peers the other day. Unfortunately, reasonable views like this within the party are being drowned out in a chorus of “Yes We Can Obstruct!”
Still, maybe we should have spent more time trying to bring a seemingly intractable GOP team to the table. After all, we’re searching for a plan designed to save a dying economy.
I mean, it’s not like this is a war in the Middle East or anything. Now that’s something you rush into….
Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
The “stimulus package,” passed in a panic, is a bad combination: the most expensive and least understood special appropriations law in history. In attempting to help the economy, it makes radical policy changes that lawmakers would never have approved if they had taken a triage approach and passed the most urgent pieces first, then taken more time to understand others. For example, President Clinton’s welfare reform, lauded as one of the most effective policies of our generation, will be effectively eviscerated by the new methods of a bill passed in three weeks.
Anyone with Capitol Hill experience knows that large, urgent legislation typically passes in a “fog of war” scenario, with exhausted staffers drafting hundreds or thousands of pages of legislation, and other legislators exercising an extreme Ievel of trust that someone relatively smart understands each piece of it.
Congressional lawmakers and staffers had just hours to review the 1,000 page stimulus package. Leading democrat Charles Rangel was quoted in “Politico” ruefully laughing that Senate Democrats “don’t know everything that’s in the bill.” In essence, our leaders didn’t lead: they gave into public panic and threw $787 billion in spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it would stick, instead of spending a few more months to fully develop the less-urgent policies.
We’ve been in this same economic situation before without lawmakers panicking this way. In 1989 to1992, for example, we had the same burst housing bubble, S&Ls and banks failing every day, and hundreds of thousands rapidly losing jobs. The unemployment rate was, like today, passing 7 percent (it was even higher during the 1980s), and the sense of urgency led my Senate Banking Committee bosses to work around the clock to get relief and reform passed. And yet, if memory serves, the quickest bill was passed in six months and the longest took more than a year — and was (at around $250 billion) nowhere near the cost of this initiative.
The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl explained in an interview that, “We are creating a permanent redesign of the government and economy due to a temporary recession, passed by lawmakers who haven’t even read it. Why do we have to pass this whole thing before Presidents Day? The economy is still going to be there next week.”