NOT LEARNING FROM A NEIGHBORING COLUMNIST

10 Jan 09

David Brooks, on the Newshour yesterday evening, once again gave the ideological blindness of the Republicans an urbane face, but one that fell short of being even plausible. "No stimulus package has ever worked," he intoned more than once. He had just cited the call by "his Nobel-prize winning colleague" Paul Krugman’s for a stimulus package much bigger than Obama’s current proposal, but ignored the implication that his Nobel-prize winning colleague did think that a stimulus package might work if it was big enough.. Brooks was running against history, too: World War II was not heralded as a stimulus package, but it was, and at last a big enough one to restore full employment and prosperity in the United States. Earlier "stimulus packages" put forward by the New Deal, moreover, had done something to increase employment and achieve worthwhile objectives in public works. The effectiveness of a stimulus package was not the only point on which Brooks’s ideology defied the opinion of Krugman and other economists. Brooks declared, with unqualified confidence, that tax cuts were the best way to assist economic recovery. He did not pause to recognize that it was at least controversial to say so, or again, that his Nobel-prize-winning colleague thought otherwise, favoring direct expenditures on employment. Evidently Brooks does not take the trouble to learn from a columnist who is a colleague and a neighbor at the Times.