President Obama's stimulus package had the Republicans hopping mad, despite his bipartisan overtures and gestures. In the end, however, this bill will likely be good for America because the cost of doing nothing - as the GOP wanted - was far too high a price to pay.
The stimulus bill is imperfect, but it was far better than doing nothing. Indeed, a majority of Americans - some 61 percent - supported the stimulus because they felt it necessary that the government do something to get us out of the current financial crisis. We know that when the entire economy is stalled - when consumption, investments and the balance of trade are all in decline - doing nothing to reverse trends in those indicators will contract our GDP even further, leading to higher unemployment and further prolonging economic recovery. According to many economists, including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, the only surefire way to increase GDP under this climate is to drastically increase government spending in the hopes of achieving a multiplier effect on the economy. This is precisely what the stimulus does. It's the "People's Bailout."
It is quite hypocritical, to say the least, for the Republicans to bemoan the largesse of this latest stimulus package. A large portion of the very same GOP now opposing $787 billion on economic stimulus was more than willing to help former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson pass the ultimately feckless $700 billion TARP bailout for Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and a host of other financial institutions.
Furthermore, the same Republicans who whined about several million dollars here and there for various projects in this stimulus bill did not object when former President Bush requested scores of billions of dollars in "emergency appropriations" every 6 months to conduct the Iraq war, and when billions more appropriated simply "disappeared."
Sudden concerns over "too much spending" cannot possibly be serious. If they are indeed serious, then where was the GOP outrage against their own profligate President? Why was it okay to spend $2 trillion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $700-plus billion on banks, but not $787 billion on domestic government spending, infrastructure improvement and middle class tax cuts? Why is it acceptable to build schools in Baghdad with federal tax dollars, but not in Brooklyn or in Baltimore? (A question that ought to be answered by those GOPers who demanded a cut of $25 billion in school construction funds). This bill spends government dollars in America on projects that will benefit Americans, sustaining and creating jobs for American workers.
This also wasn't just a "spending bill." About 36 percent of this bill was composed of tax cuts, although they're tax cuts to middle class workers whom the Republicans claim "don't pay any taxes." But people who don't pay income taxes do indeed pay other taxes, such as payroll tax, sales tax, and a host of other "fees," "tolls" and "surcharges" which amount to a comparatively onerous taxation burden given their low incomes. Tell someone renting an apartment in New York State, for instance - where Gov. David Paterson just recently announced 88 new taxes and fees on everything from iTunes purchases to diet soda - that "they pay no taxes" just because they don't pay federal income tax, and that they thusly don't deserve stimulus payments, while claiming in the next breath that Bank of America, AIG, Citigroup and General Motors are deserving of large sums of federal money without oversight. The GOP simply fails to grasp the flaw underlying that logic, and it only adds to the perception that Republicans are the party of Big Business and Welfare for the Wealthy.
Was the stimulus perfect? No, it was not. It should have included more on infrastructure spending, to be sure. However, Republican objections to it were largely disingenuous, and they failed to offer a single credible alternative.
If the stimulus helps the economy recover, then voters should harshly judge the GOP for its logically inconsistent, obstructionist, pessimistic and hypocritical bet on economic failure.
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