Stephen Pearlstein Suffers Tragic Abacus Accident
Can you imagine a better way to undercut public support for fiscal stimulus and deficit spending than to report out an omnibus spending bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion?
Yes, I can. You could rail about it in a syndicated business column running in one of the country’s major dailies, without pointing out that it’s 1.5% of the entire federal operating budget for the rest of the year.
But, of course, that is just what the Democratic Congress has done. Americans don’t need to be lectured by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on the spending prerogatives of Congress. What they need are leaders who can demonstrate, in ways symbolic as well as substantive, that they know the difference between spending that is crucial to the country in times of crisis and spending that is not.
And there’s one more thing that proves how supremely unqualified you are for that very job: government spending isn’t a zero sum game, as long as it’s stimulative (basically, it creates jobs) and as long as you still need to do more stimulus (by all rational accounts, we do). The more spending, the more bang you get in the form of employment and economic growth. There is no, “spending that is crucial to the country in times of crisis and spending that is not,” every dime spent stimulating the economy in any way is important based on its stimulative effect, not whether it comes from an earmark. Another concrete lesson, as if we needed any, that those whom we entrusted to inform and lead us, were never even half up to the job.
