What the Left is Thinking

The piece laments Obama's loss of control, but the real juice is about the spendulus:

Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. 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.

Unthinking.

UPDATE: President Obama writes in the Washington Post, trying to rally support for his deeply unpopular spendulus:

By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression.

Blame Bush! is the very first sentence of his spiel. "It's not my fault."

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives -- action that's swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

As the man said, pick two.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 09:14 AM

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