Stimulus bill brought out the worst in partisanship

Stimulus bill brought out the worst in partisanship

The stimulus bill that President Barack Obama will sign tomorrow is not a perfect bill by any means, but neither is it as bad as some of its harshest GOP critics have painted it.

In one fell swoop the bill will add $800 billion to the projected deficit, and, eventually to the national debt. We’re not happy about that. But we weren’t happy about more than $4 trillion that President George W. Bush added to the national debt, and most of that was done while Republicans were in firm control of both the House and the Senate.

President Bush’s supporters will cite the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to excuse some of his budget deficits. That is fair to a point. Just as it is fair to acknowledge that President Obama is reacting to a fiscal emergency that equals terrorism as a threat to the national well-being.

The GOP says Obama’s stimulus package lurched into the realm of social engineering, causing every House Republican and all but three in the Senate to vote against it.

Divide and conquer

During the week that the bill worked its way between the House and Senate, critics of the administration adopted a death-by-a-thousand cuts strategy. They put the spotlight on individual sections of the bill that they assumed would offend various constituencies. Some said they were for a stimulus bill, just not this stimulus bill. Others said no stimulus was needed. One poll asked people if they were opposed to the stimulus package in whole or in part. Not surprisingly, a high percentage reported being opposed. If you put the Bill of Rights in front of a thousand people and asked them if they opposed it in whole or in part, you’d get a high number. Some people love the 2nd Amendment, but don’t like the 5th Amendment, others may swear by the 1st Amendment, but are wary of the 2nd.

The stimulus bill was an 1,100-page package and no one is going to be thrilled with every page. But on the whole, the bill deserved more bipartisan support than it got.

Jobs are disappearing by the thousands, and they will continue to disappear until people have more money to spend and are willing to spend it, until businessmen have reason to invest in producing goods and services that people will buy, and until the logjam in the nation’s credit markets is broken (which is a different area of legislation and a subject for another day).

New and improved

As passed, the stimulus bill was trimmed by more than $100 billion and earmarks were removed. It continues to contain spending for infrastructure and for development of green technologies that will produce jobs. It has billions of dollars that cash-strapped states can use to keep employees on the payroll rather than the unemployment lines. And it has billions of dollars in tax cuts, some of which will go to every taxpayer, some of which will be aimed at encouraging home purchases, home improvements and new car purchases. It spares about 24 million middle-class taxpayers from increases they were due to be hit with from the Alternative Minimum Tax, a good idea from 40 years ago that was overtaken by time and inflation. It allows small business to cut tax obligations by using losses to offset profits in the previous five years and encourages capital improvements by allowing accelerated depreciation.

Obama and congressional Democrats looked at the economic reality facing the nation and took a gamble that their plan will provide the stimulation needed to avoid a deeper recession. Republicans, by taking a unified stand against the stimulus bill, are now politically invested in its failure. That is an unfortunate and dangerous political dynamic.

The first major legislative initiative unveiled by President Bush in 2001 was his No Child Left Behind plan for redefining public education. In the House, the bill was sponsored by John Boehner, R-Ohio, and 83 other Republicans. Certainly the bill did not appeal to some of the strongest Democratic constituencies, and yet it eventually passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. It is unfortunate that Boehner, now the House minority leader, apparently forgot what he learned about bipartisanship and chose, even before Obama met with House leaders to discuss the stimulus bill, to begin building an opposition front.