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Paul Krugman was full of insight in his most recent column about the problems with the Senate version of the stimulus plan, and the President's rhetoric about the plan.
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses? A proud centrist.
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One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.
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All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.
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All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.
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I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.
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Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.
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“Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” (President Obama) declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right. No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.
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