From Reason to the "o"

Your policies are increasingly unpopular because they are no good. Take the $787 billion stimulus package. Fifty-six percent of Americans now oppose the stimulus, with only 42 percent supporting it. A year ago, those numbers were reversed. The American people have learned what economists such as Robert Barro and Valerie Ramey could have told you a long time ago: that a dollar increase in government spending results in no more (and almost certainly less) than a dollar increase in economic activity. Your estimates about how many jobs would be "created" by the stimulus package—a term of art later modified to "saved or created," then downgraded further to "funded"—have been slippery, unconvincing, and wildly off-base. The same goes for your estimates on the unemployment rate, still in double digits and not improving despite confident predictions that the stimulus would cap the bleeding at 9 percent.


The stimulus is not unpopular because of evil lobbyists or hypocritical Republicans (many of whom voted for George W. Bush's forgotten and equally ineffective 2008 stimulus); it's unpopular because it transfers money from Main Street to Wall Street (despite your many protestations to the contrary), and it's unpopular because it doesn't work. It can’t work, because government can only spend money by taking it from the current or future economy. Not only that, the artificial props of federal spending puts off the day of reckoning for the very sectors of the economy that melted down in the first place: Housing, mortgage finance, and banking. The best thing you can do for the economy right now is give it a break from some sort of real or imagined "transformational" program that requires continuously increasing debt ceilings.

Your spending priorities are less than compelling. You campaigned on a promise to enact a "net spending cut" in federal outlays, a commendably (if unconvincingly) plain-spoken vow after the brazen irresponsibility of the Bush years. Yet the first big spending bill you signed last March helped set what in the most hopeful case will be the equivalent of Bob Beamon's Olympic long jump of 1968—a record for spending that won't be touched for decades. Despite your promise to cut earmarks, the bill was packed with more pork than the Oscar Meyer WeinerMobile, which is only one of the reasons why overall federal spending in fiscal year 2009 increased 32 percent over the previous year.