The Clean Up Crew

by digby

I’m hearing all over the TV today that the stimulus didn’t help anybody and it’s a big fat waste of money and shouldn’t be repeated. (Presumably, we should enact more tax cuts for millionaires so they can provide jobs for artists who’ve been dead for three centuries.)According to polling, the American people think t=it hasn’t worked and they are pissed off.

But that’s just because the stimulus mainly kept things from getting worse and it wasn’t big enough to get much political bang for the buck. That doesn’t mean it was useless. Let’s just say that without the federal aid for my state that we would be living in a dystopian nightmare far worse than people could imagine — and believe me, people are imagining the worst here. It was one of the good things the administration accomplished in the first year, even though it was less than we might have hoped. (The other was the 2010 budget, which was by all accounts the most liberal budget in recent memory — and which passed without a single Republican vote.)

These two things, inadequate and imperfect as they may have been, were the most important economic initiatives the administration undertook and probably have provided the most tangible federal relief and support to people throughout the country. And, as usual, they are being denigrated and dismissed because when it comes down to it, they are unpleasant cleaning jobs required after the frat party binging of the Bush years wrecked the place. Nobody ever appreciates the maids and janitors.

Seriously, click that link to the California recovery sight and see where that money is going: education, transportation, public safety and yes, even the vaunted tax cuts. (Indeed, if you want to criticize the stimulus, I’d say that devoting 30% of it to tax cuts after Bush had already run a round of tax cuts that didn’t work, was the real waste of money.) This state is still badly hurting but there is no doubt it would have been even worse without it. And it’s a symptom of our dysfunctional government both here in California and in Washington that there’s no chance to build on it for a sustained jobs program.

Sadly, the stimulus was always likely to be a one shot deal. We knew there was little hope they’d ever get another chance in a country where government spending, even in an emergency, is considered a form of satanism. And they made a huge mistake in allowing the Maine twins to take a dull hacksaw to the bill and cut out some of the most useful items. But the nation is indisputably better off than it would have been without it and this villager nonsense today, aided and abetted by their preening, unctuous GOP patrons, is sickening.

And if what we’re seeing from the administration is any indication, we’re not going to see a decent jobs program for 2010 because of it. Robert Kuttner points out that while Obama’s new tone regarding the banks (and the apparent ascendancy of Paul Volcker) are welcome, his backing of Bernanke somewhat diminishes the populist message:

Even more ominously, Obama thus far is on the wrong side of the deficit-versus-jobs debate. Budget Director Peter Orszag and other deficit hawks in the administration have long been urging Obama to support a proposed fast-track commission that would bypass usual legislative procedures and compel an up-or-down vote on a compulsory deficit-reduction package designed to slash Social Security and Medicare spending.

This is, of course, appalling politics. It signals: we had to spend a ton of taxpayer money to rescue the banks and prop up the ruined economy. Now, gentle citizen, though you have paid once through the reduced value of your retirement plan and your house, you will pay again through cuts in Medicare and Social Security.

[…]

The politics of the deficit commission are all tangled up with the politics of how much to spend on a new jobs bill. In December, the House, with no assistance from Obama, narrowly passed a $154 billion jobs will, which also provides fiscal relief to the states and extends unemployment and health benefits for jobless workers. But the word from the White House is that Obama will not support that high a number, and will give more prominence to deficit reduction. So despite the rhetoric about Obama getting past the health-bill morass and emphasizing jobs, jobs, jobs, he hasn’t yet put his money (ours, actually) where his mouth is.

You can only assume that the administration believes they did the best they could to clean up the mess, they have no more room to maneuver and now it’s time to pull back — and pave the way for the Republicans to reap the electoral rewards. The irony is that if the Republicans come back into power with the economy still weak, they’ll have no trouble blaming the Democrats for everything from the Taliban to male pattern baldness for the next quarter century while insisting that the only possible solution to all of it is to cut more taxes for the wealthy. And so it goes.

.