‘Have We Learned Nothing?’
The Dems' Christmas-tree bailout pitch isn’t going anywhere, but tells us a lot about what we might be headed for.
In 2009, Republicans successfully branded President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill as a dog’s breakfast of traditional big-government spending—including “sod on the Mall,” “smoking cessation,” “herpes prevention” and other line items that didn’t even make it into the final bill. Now some former Obama aides are afraid congressional Democrats might be walking into the same “Porkulus” trap. Obama’s $800 billion Recovery Act helped end the Great Recession, but Republicans hammered away at its laundry-list optics so relentlessly that within a year, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created jobs was smaller than the percentage who believed Elvis was alive. Like Winston Churchill’s apocryphal pudding, the Obama stimulus lacked a theme, and Democrats seem to be repeating their public relations mistakes.
“Have we learned nothing?” asked Jared Bernstein, who worked on the Recovery Act as chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama White House.
It’s not just that the House bill veers away from the pandemic or even the economy. The bill simply reads like a typical congressional appropriations bill, with plus-ups like $100 million for NASA construction and environmental compliance and the Legal Services Corporation, as well as $300 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The only real difference is boilerplate language justifying most of the plus-ups “to support activities to prevent, prepare for and respond to coronavirus,” from the $20 million for the Bureau of Reclamation to the $33 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Congressional leaders didn’t use the House draft as the basis for the stimulus deal they struck early Wednesday morning, but they did fund quite a few of its provisions—from modest items with little connection to the pandemic, like $12.5 million for the Bureau of Reclamation or $25 million for the Kennedy Center, to $25 billion for ravaged transit agencies. And Congress is expected to pass more stimulus bills in the coming months, so the House proposal still bears a very close look as a preview of how Democrats plan to use their leverage. It also gives Republicans some talking points about the random taxpayer-funded goodies their opponents are pushing during a crisis.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/0...ats-148512
The Dems' Christmas-tree bailout pitch isn’t going anywhere, but tells us a lot about what we might be headed for.
In 2009, Republicans successfully branded President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill as a dog’s breakfast of traditional big-government spending—including “sod on the Mall,” “smoking cessation,” “herpes prevention” and other line items that didn’t even make it into the final bill. Now some former Obama aides are afraid congressional Democrats might be walking into the same “Porkulus” trap. Obama’s $800 billion Recovery Act helped end the Great Recession, but Republicans hammered away at its laundry-list optics so relentlessly that within a year, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created jobs was smaller than the percentage who believed Elvis was alive. Like Winston Churchill’s apocryphal pudding, the Obama stimulus lacked a theme, and Democrats seem to be repeating their public relations mistakes.
“Have we learned nothing?” asked Jared Bernstein, who worked on the Recovery Act as chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama White House.
It’s not just that the House bill veers away from the pandemic or even the economy. The bill simply reads like a typical congressional appropriations bill, with plus-ups like $100 million for NASA construction and environmental compliance and the Legal Services Corporation, as well as $300 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The only real difference is boilerplate language justifying most of the plus-ups “to support activities to prevent, prepare for and respond to coronavirus,” from the $20 million for the Bureau of Reclamation to the $33 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Congressional leaders didn’t use the House draft as the basis for the stimulus deal they struck early Wednesday morning, but they did fund quite a few of its provisions—from modest items with little connection to the pandemic, like $12.5 million for the Bureau of Reclamation or $25 million for the Kennedy Center, to $25 billion for ravaged transit agencies. And Congress is expected to pass more stimulus bills in the coming months, so the House proposal still bears a very close look as a preview of how Democrats plan to use their leverage. It also gives Republicans some talking points about the random taxpayer-funded goodies their opponents are pushing during a crisis.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/0...ats-148512
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