What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care, and undermines schools, but offers a $l5,000 bonus to affluent people to flip their houses?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Jim HIgjhtower, the Texas columnist, once wrote that “there is nothing in the center of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
Paul Krugman, the Princeton Nobel prize winner, put it a little more diplomatically in his Monday column in the New York Times, “The Destructive Center.”
He led off his discussion of the Obama stimulus plan with this lead:
“What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, and undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?
“A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.”
“Even if the original Obama plan–around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts–had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.
“Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.”
Krugman rightly criticized Obama for offering a plan that was “too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts” because he “wanted the plan to have bipartisan support and believed that it would.” Krugman rightly criticiazed Obama for not doing something “cruciall important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead he let conservatives define the debate…” And so Obama “was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists.”
Krugman asked the critical question: “So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.
“For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. ‘Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,’ he decalared on Saturday and ‘the scale and scope of this plan is right.'”
Krugman’s summing up, “No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.”
Thank God for Paul Krugman. B3
Click here to read Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman’s Monday, February 9th article in the New York Times, The Destructive Center.
Click here to read a CNN report on “What got cut from the stimulus bill.”