THE U.R. VS THE DEMOCRATS:

Congress Is Divided Over Competing Stimulus Bills (DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, 2/08/09, NY Times)

[T]he competing bills now reflect substantially different approaches. The House puts greater emphasis on helping states and localities avoid wide-scale cuts in services and layoffs of public employees. The Senate cut $40 billion of that aid from its bill, which is expected to be approved Tuesday.

The Senate plan, reached in an agreement late Friday between Democrats and three moderate Republicans, focuses somewhat more heavily on tax cuts, provides far less generous health care subsidies for the unemployed and lowers a proposed increase in food stamps.

To help allay Republican concerns about the cost, the Senate proposal even scales back President Obama’s signature middle-class tax cut. The Senate plan also creates new tax incentives to encourage Americans to buy homes and cars within the next year. [...]

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was in Williamsburg, Va., on a retreat with her fellow House Democrats on Friday, called the emerging Senate cuts to the stimulus program “very damaging” and said she was “very much opposed to them.” But after the Senate reached a deal, Ms. Pelosi expressed resolve to complete the legislation in the days ahead.

Mr. Obama, who has made the economic recovery effort the centerpiece of his agenda, is expected to take a stronger hand in the negotiations and will embark on an aggressive public lobbying campaign.

He will hold a meeting in Indiana on Monday, followed by a formal White House news conference, the first of his term, in prime time on Monday night. He will pitch the plan again on Tuesday in Florida and on Wednesday in Virginia.

Assume for the moment that President Obama were capable of making a compelling case that the Senate bill represents a responsible compromise with moderates and Republicans. Now he enters negotiations with House Democrats in which any compromise represents a departure from that "responsible" position and a yielding to the liberal extreme of his own party. The staff who are letting him descend into this muck and wasting so much of his political capital to plump for a bill no one's going to like are really doing him a disservice.

MORE:
Democrats Try Trickle-Down Economics: Growing government won't stimulate the real economy. (Karl Rove, 2/05/09, WSJ)

Mr. Obama has only his own lack of engagement and leadership to blame. He outsourced the drafting of the bill to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey through inaction. He refused to get his administration's hands dirty in crafting the legislation by laying out a detailed plan in December. Then saying he looked forward to Congress passing a bill for him to sign on Inauguration Day was an invitation for liberal spenders to roll him. They did.

The package's size is disturbing. The federal government's discretionary, nonsecurity spending was $391 billion in fiscal 2008 and $393 billion was requested for this fiscal year. H.R. 1 contains $317 billion in additional fiscal 2009 discretionary nonsecurity spending. If passed, this 81% increase would be history's largest.

Nor will Democrats treat this additional spending as a one-time expense. They'll simply start next year's budget writing with a new baseline of $712 billion for the federal government's discretionary domestic budget, nearly doubling it in just a year. This is only part of the Democrats' spending damage. In H.R. 1, they also add $308 billion in new "mandatory" spending (for entitlement programs), which would help produce a 25% increase in 2009, the largest increase in mandatory spending in more than three decades.

There is also the question of timing. H.R. 1 spends $170 billion in fiscal 2009, $356 billion in fiscal 2010, and $293 billion in fiscal 2011 and after. Spending more in 2011 and beyond than this year tells Americans H.R. 1 is a mammoth spending bill, not a stimulus or jobs package.

White House adviser Larry Summers argued that any stimulus must be "targeted, timely and temporary." This bill does the opposite. Mr. Obama pledged to "scour our federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts." His cuts are unspecific and fanciful, while Congress's spending will be real and record-setting. Discretionary domestic spending will have nearly doubled by the time Mr. Obama stops dithering and starts scouring.

Democrats are betting that Americans now embrace centralized, top-down government and are willing to pay for it. They are wrong and will suffer politically for their misjudgment.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The clash of the stimuli. (slate.com)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2009 10:40 AM