Don’t know what it’s like wherever you’re reading this, but in this neck of the woods we’ve been bombarded by Republican political ads that all seem to start with a very grave male voice saying “Pelosi and (fill in the Democratic candidate)’s FAILED Stimulus program . . .” In fact, I’ve about decided that in Republican lexicon, the word stimulus cannot be written or spoken without appending the word failed to the front of it.
There’s nothing wrong with beginning an argument with a value judgement if that judgment is incontrovertibly true: “Raw sewage is noxious,” for example, is a value judgment that probably doesn’t require proving.
To refer to the stimulus package as failed, as though that were a given, isn’t quite in the same category. If you see it as a program that did not keep unemployment at the 8% level Obama said it would, then it’s a failure. If you see it as a program that prevented unemployment from exceeding 12% (or as much as 15% by some estimates), then it’s a success.
If you look at it as a program that has not boosted GDP to the 3.5% to 4% per annum that most economists regard as the minimum needed for a truly healthy economy, it’s a failure. If you see it as a program that prevented GDP from slipping into negative numbers, then it’s a success.
The Republicans of course trumpet the “failure” view as loudly as possible, because it fuels their argument that the Democrats have had their chance to solve the problem and failed; ergo, we should return to power the Republican party—even though it’s the party that spent and deregulated us into this mess in the first place. Certainly can’t fault that logic!
Here is where the cynicism comes in: the stimulus package that Obama got is the stimulus package the Republicans allowed. Let’s assume for a moment that the Republican men and women in Congress aren’t stupid. (Some of them clearly are, but that’s true of Democrats as well) When the stimulus bill was being debated, almost every reputable economist was saying—very loudly in some cases—that to truly stimulate the economy was going to require a massive infusion of capital on the front end, but that the result on the back end would be economic growth that would negate the size of the stimulus. The figure economists advanced was roughly twice the size of what was actually passed. Had that original package, or something similar to it, been enacted, economists say unemployment today would at 8% or lower and GDP would be increasing at 3% to 3.5% per year.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but if you look at the debates that went on over the stimulus program, they consisted of the Republicans repeating the word NO until the package finally got small enough that two Republican senators agreed to vote for it. When the Republicans continually insisted on a program roughly half the size economists said was needed—again, assuming they weren’t stupid—they had to know that they were insisting on a bill that would at best half do the job. They knew that, but they insisted on it anyway.
Fast forward a few months to the start of election season and the Republicans begin nearly every ad with a reference to the “failed stimulus bill,” a bill they themselves had engineered to do just enough to keep the economy from imploding, but not enough to actually stimulate it. That pretty clearly suggests that the Republican mantra is, “damn the country, give me an attack ad issue I can use to get elected.” And that, to me, is political cynicism in its ugliest form.
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