via Can Congress And The White House Come Up With An Effective Stimulus Bill?.
The unprecedented global economic crisis has provoked unprecedented levels of doubt: Are Congress and the administration competent to write an innovative and effective stimulus bill?
Not when the Republicans in the House are acting like spoiled children who were used to getting everything they wanted under Bush. The Democrats may have put some small issues in the stimulus package, but the Republicans have not come up with a single idea other than tax cuts. We’ve all seen how well they work.
Harvard economist David Laibson points out, “The age of deregulation has ended. This is probably a good thing, but it is nevertheless a two-edged sword. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that a heavy-handed regulator is going to prevent future financial crises. All of the Wall Street banks failed to anticipate the current storm. It is unlikely that an activist government regulator would have done much better. It is naive to believe that our regulators will be smarter than our bankers. Indeed, usually things work out the other way around.”
President Obama with House leaders
It is also naive to think that without the heavy handed regulator, if the markets were once again left to regulate themselves, there will be no greed of biblical proportions as it was during Bush. Bush himself said that Wall Street acted like they were drunk. Oversight on the investment bankers should be just that – oversight – not some watered down version.
In this case a heavy handed regulator is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe there would have been some control on how they bundled bad mortgages then sold them as valuable. I am not very informed on economics but I do know that if someone had been looking over their shoulder, and if the bankers had felt the heat, if they knew they would have been held accountable for their fraud, then maybe they would not have gotten so drunk.
If you listen to John McCain and John Boehner all the country needs in more tax cuts.
Matt Dowd – former Democrat, former Republican, and now independent political consultant believes in party unity but brushes aside the possibility of effecting stimulus through cutting taxes: “The strategy of [the GOP] of trying to stay together is always better than getting into a bidding war [with Democrats] to get a little of this, a little of that.”
At the same time, Dowd argues, the Republican call for sweeping tax cuts, instead of supporting the Democratic bill, was a mistake. “The argument for [tax cuts] is long past, it’s an old Republican argument that no longer resonates.”
Long past. I like the sound of that. Actually the Republican theory of “give to the rich and the poor are on their own” is also long past. A more effective message would be to call this thinking “dead in the water”.
Democratic political operative and strategist Joe Trippi takes a different tack in assessing the House Republican strategy. Instead of “a goose egg” [a zero] in the Republican column, he says, a far more effective approach, with a high chance of paying off down the line, would have been to permit a small percentage of House Republicans, say 10 to 20, to vote for the bill. That would have diminished the hard-line partisan appearance of the vote.
“It was a mistake to make it zero,” says Trippi. “People don’t want to see polarizing politics right now. A strong ‘no’ vote with modest dissension would have achieved the same goal while making is look less like “a crass political move. This is clunky. I don’t think Newt Gingrich would have done it this way.”
I’m glad that someone has taken a few minutes and thought this through. The House Republicans danced and got drunk when they thought they had hit a home run with their negative solidarity. The Republican leadership in the House wanted to show everyone how ineffective Obama is and all they proved was how pig-headed and out of touch they themselves were.
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