The Republican-engineered controversy around the stimulus is a phony.
The stimulus package that President Obama
signed into law Tuesday is a modest effort, actually too modest, at
arresting the free fall of the American economy. It's just not that
expensive in light of the dimensions of the economic crisis, most of it
is quite conservatively aimed at tax cuts for a suffering public and
bailouts for beleaguered state programs, and it pales in comparison
with the trillions wasted on the bloated military budget during the
Bush years.
Furthermore, it is obscene that the
Republicans who created this mess dare question the cost of a stimulus
package directed at meeting a crisis that their radical deregulation of
the financial markets created. While it is true that too many Democrats
went along with the Republican deregulatory zealots, it is the prime
legacy of the GOP going back to the Reagan Revolution that has been
called into question.
The decisive deregulation that opened the
door for the Wall Street swindlers was pushed through Congress by
then-Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican. He was rabidly backed by Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., whose support of deregulation dates back to his
interventions on behalf of the savings and loan hustlers whose
shenanigans foreshadowed the current Wall Street scandals. Yet McCain
now faults Obama for acting boldly to deal with a similar but far
larger mess. It is a tribute to Obama's leadership that he was able to
get a much-needed bill passed in record time, thereby giving the
millions of Americans now hurting a shot at recovery.
Key Republican governors, from Florida to
California, know this, which is why they and many other governors who
actually must address the needs of constituents have rallied to the
president's side. "It really is a matter of perspective," Florida's
Republican Gov. Charlie Crist noted recently after appearing with Obama
in support of the stimulus plan, because it "helps us meet the needs of
the people in a very difficult economic time."
Congressional Republicans, with the
exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three
moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true
national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush's far more costly war
on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise. The financial
impact on Wall Street from al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks is small compared
with the damage done by the bankers whom the Bush administration
coddled and who laid waste to the entire financial system.
The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy combined
with the trillions wasted on unnecessary military spending dwarf the
costs of the Obama stimulus package. The money wasted in Iraq, a
misguided nation-building effort that had nothing to do with the 9/11
terrorist attacks, was supported uncritically by the same Republicans
who now heap such scorn on efforts to rebuild our own nation.
They draw the line at a stimulus bill that funnels $135 billion
directly to the bankrupted state governments to help pay for Medicaid,
education and infrastructure. Yet they cannot account for the far
larger sums wasted in their support of the terminally corrupt
governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was just peachy to run up
immense deficits pursuing irrational foreign adventures, but efforts to
create jobs at home are viewed through a lens of criticism.
Bill Clinton said in a CNN interview: "I
find it amazing that the Republicans, who doubled the debt of the
country in eight years and produced no new jobs doing it, [and] gave us
an economic record that was totally bereft of any productive result,
are now criticizing him [Obama] for spending money."
The irony is that the congressional
Republicans, who at the end of the Bush presidency authored the much
more expensive banking bailout that eventually will throw trillions at
Wall Street, oppose a much smaller stimulus package that comes to the
assistance of ordinary Americans. While approving of $125 billion in
payouts to AIG and tens of billions more to each of the top banks, they
question spending far smaller amounts to aid the victims of bankers'
greed; $2 billion to redevelop abandoned and foreclosed homes, $2.1
billion for Head Start programs for poor kids, $1.2 billion to
construct and repair veterans hospitals and cemeteries and a miserly
$555 million to help defense employees sell their homes.
The only valid criticism to be made of the
stimulus bill that Obama signed Tuesday with deserved pride of
authorship is that it is too small for the enormous problem at hand.
But if it had been up to the Republicans, we wouldn't be doing anything
at all.