Soccer Dad

When hope sounds like cynicism

In an op-ed addressed to the American people governing class in Washington, President Obama writes (via memeorandum):

This 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. And it's a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

However Michael Hirsh writing in Newsweek (defending the President and attacking Republicans) observes (via Chicago Boyz via Instapundit):

When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

And of course the transparency thing seems a lot less credible when the administration just nominated a number of officials who, it appears, were trying to get away without doing their patriotic duty of paying their taxes.

The President goes on to describe some of the specifics of his stimulus package:

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

These all sound great and noble, but how does improving education spur the economy quickly? These sound like elements of a wish list that the President is using the financial crisis to justify. It sounds like the President doesn't want a good crisis to go to waste.

Because according to the Wall Street Journal the stimulus package also includes:
We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

In the end the Journal concludes:

In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make "dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy." Well, you be the judge. Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren't likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President's new budget director, told Congress a year ago, "even those [public works] that are 'on the shelf' generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy."

The President concludes:

So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

I wouldn't define progress the same way the President would, so I think it's good that Washington is blocking progress as he defines it. That's what checks and balances are all about. And if the President can't pass the bill right now, it's because there are a number of Democrats who are opposed to it too. In fact, it is opposition that is bipartisan!

The economic crisis was not caused by a lack of government spending, so it's hard to see how an increase of government spending will solve it. And for all the President's talk of hope and change, this bill seems more like government business as usual and his defense of it, cynical.