Obama gets a whacking today from two NYT columnists: David Brooks and Paul Krugman.
Brooks, normally sympathetic to Obama, thinks the stimulus bill that's emerging from the House is a prime example of the old politics that Obama promised to change:
The bill marked up Wednesday in the Appropriations Committee is a muddled mixture of short-term stimulus haste and long-term spending commitments. It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact... On Tuesday, President Obama was inaugurated and vowed a new era. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee met and showed the old era was very much alive.
Krugman is deeply unimpressed by Obama's inaugural address:
I ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning...
... But my real problem with the speech, on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests. That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.
The fiscal stimulus needed is fast and clear:
massive tax cuts to all taxpayers.
A tax holiday, until there is growth again in the real, wealth creating, non-gov't economy.
With lots of money being printed, not borrowed, to pay for current gov't.
No particular special interests getting any more -- all taxpayers having less being taken.
Won't happen, even if optimal, because too many Dems want to choose who tax, and choose who to bail out -- and their choices will be based on campaign contributions.
Posted by: Tom Grey | January 26, 2009 at 06:05 PM