CONFUSION OVER THE STIMULUS PACKAGE

22 February 2009

Confusion has abounded about Obama’s stimulus package, but a lot of the confusion is easily dissipated. Is it a stimulus bill or a spending bill? Republicans in Congress made a great to-do saying the latter. Obama easily put them in their place by pointing out good-humoredly and without condescension (though condescension would have been appropriate enough) that a stimulus bill by its nature had to be a spending bill. He did not distinguish between its having to have spending features and its having spending in one way or another as an essential feature; Either would have refuted the Republican objection. But the Republicans, led by Boehner, went on to say that they could not find any stimulating, that is to say, job-creating feature, in the bill. Boehnerdid not explain how it could be that the proposed expenditures on infra-structure would not create jobs; or other expenditures (like assistance to the states) keep present jobs going, with a similar beneficial effect. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee rose above these dubious points to the stratosphere of hyperbolic absurdity: "No government," he said, "has ever created a job." Governments have created highway departments and staffed them with civil engineers. They have gone into the private sector to enlist contractors to build the highways that the engineers have designed. Governments create jobs for inspectors of food safety and occupational health; we may hope that after the drawdown in their numbers under the Bush regime, the Obama administration will create more of them. Is there any point in multiplying examples, which would be child’s play? These Republican statements all fall on their faces as soon as they are uttered in the presence of anyone with even a child’s knowledge of the world. A little trickier to deal with is a logical lapse on the other side: Liberal commentators like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow have mocked what they implied to be the inconsistency of certain Congressmen boasting about having amended the stimulus bill to include certain provisions beneficial to their districts; and then turning around to vote against the bill when it finally came up for a vote. A moment’s reflection shows that strictly speaking there is no inconsistency. If a bill has a chance of passing, then it could be improved even in the eyes of its opponents if it incorporated certain features that they wanted. Their amendments thus tend to minimize the damage that they foresee, but may leave the bill (in their eyes) still damaging overall. This is, to be sure, what logic says, strictly speaking. Neither the Congressmen nor the commentators may be aiming at strictly speaking . It is at least a rough approximation to hypocrisy and discredit, however, having amended the bill, to boast about the benefits of the features put in by the amendments and yet jeopardize those benefits by voting against the amended bill.