Sunday, February 15, 2009

$787 Billion Mistake Was Politically Unavoidable

– Posted in: Current Touts

“They know that this bill is not stimulus. They know that this bill will not do anything to create long-term, sustained economic growth.” Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Illinois), quoted in the New York Times, referring to his constituents.   Is this so? Do voters in fact “know” what many politicians are evidently afraid to admit – that the nation is about to squander $800 billion of precious capital on the biggest piece of pork ever to work its way through Congress’s perennially irritable bowel? Our guess is that, yes, the average voter – even the voter who fervently supported Obama in the November election – is skeptical that the stimulus bill will put the economy back on track. But if Americans appear to have suspended their disbelief about this for the time being, it is only because the news media have set aside the legislation’s many unsettling details so that they might trumpet the President’s recklessly unrealistic goals with the same unquestioning zeal that they brought to his message of “change” and “hope” during the campaign.   Could it have been just two weeks ago that the news media were zeroing in on such alarming facts as that each job created or saved by the bill will cost taxpayers $275,000? So much for yesterday’s news. Whatever misgivings we may have had a week ago, we are now being asked, simply, to believe. Although we doubt that Congress is any more believing than the voters, we can sympathize with the Democrats who had to enact the measure at the point of Nancy Pelosi’s gun. Virtually all of them voted for the bill, creating a legislative phalanx that shattered nearly unanimous Republican opposition. The bill garnered a total of three Republican votes, all of them in the Senate, but we doubt the Republicans