“I don’t need a tax cut – I need a job.”
One frustrated commenter on CNN’s Web site exemplified the whole stimulus debate. The partisan bickering over the stimulus has, without a doubt, cast a shadow on Obama’s hope for the “new politics” so powerfully articulated throughout the campaign. It has also shown a significant turning of the political tables: Republicans, after eight years of running up unprecedented debt, have parroted a new religion of “fiscal conservatism;” Democrats, after eight years of railing against deficit spending passionately clung to the argument for aggressive stimulus expenditure.
It seems one thing is clear: Both parties are more comfortable spending taxpayers’ money if they trust the guy who’s responsible for spending it.
Nonetheless, I must sympathize with Democratic frustrations. I, like many Democrats under Bush, was incredibly irritated by the size of the deficit being run up by the administration and its audacity to demand our support for war and then refuse to ask corporate taxpayers to cover the costs, choosing instead to borrow. Democrat complaint about the deficit, in what were relatively decent economic times, no less – 2002 through late 2005 – was even dismissed by Bush’s chief economic advisor Glenn Hubbard as a “Democratic fixation with deficits,” “nonsense,” and “Rubinomics,” in a sarcastic jab at Clinton’s former treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, who presided over one of the most productive economic periods in American history.
That being said, I also sympathize with the Republicans. The outrageousness of their own spending hopefully represents to their leaders a sad departure from their fiscal conservative roots that they now, justifiably, are trying to correct. Where these “fiscal conservative roots” stem from is somewhat of a myth. Reagan, like Bush, spent the nation into one of the largest debts in American history, Nixon imposed price controls, and Eisenhower built the federal highway system, one of the most extensive public spending projects in American history.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate the Republicans’ sudden – although much too late – concern for the debt my generation and that of my children will be forced to pay.
The problem now, though, is that the context has changed. We face a recession of historic proportions, which some economists believe might actually rival the Great Depression by the time the dust clears. Worse yet, no legitimate economist believes cutting government spending – or worse, raising taxes – is a smart idea in a serious recession. This economic reality leaves only one pitiful option: deficit spending. And on top of the already massive debt the Bush Administration’s borrow-and-spend war-financing strategy left behind, this option is hardly palatable. In fact, it might be ruinous.
So, then, here we are. On one side is a rock of more deficit spending and on the other, a hard place, with higher taxes or government layoffs. We are tangled by circumstance into a hopeless situation where there is no “good,” only a “necessary.”
So Obama has tried to take a page out of the Portland playbook to answer this problem – offset the payments on the debts you’re racking up by turning those debts into investments in natural resources that lead to economic strength later.
It is important to realize the conversation intending to “balance economic growth with environmental protection” is like talking about balancing the condition of my car with the condition of its muffler. Put simply, if the car doesn’t run, the quality of its muffler is irrelevant. The economy relies entirely on natural resources for its strength, so any attempt to save our natural resources is an attempt, albeit indirectly, to strengthen our economy.
This is the logic behind the aggressive environmental policies of many cities, and in many cases they are just now beginning to pay off. While many communities suffer rising costs and environmental degradation, others are better off, using technological innovation to do more with less rather than economic exploitation to do less with more.
In essence, this idea that the “green infrastructure” spending in the Obama stimulus is thrown-away money simply does not hold economically. The objective is to hire people right now through deficit spending, getting them back to work and off the unemployment rolls – rolls that are costing the government more and more each day as more Americans are turned away by employers at the time clock. This spending is also focused significantly on a more efficient, renewable-ready electric grid and “greening” public buildings – or, essentially, lowering their energy demands so they’re cheaper to run in the long-term. Yes, this might be an irresponsible deficit, but with the economic problem of being unable to raise taxes or lower spending, it is frankly our only real choice. The only question that remains is not whether or not we should spend, but how we should spend: Should it be on wars and tax cuts, as we have done for the last eight years, or on public infrastructure that lowers government costs on energy in the long-run and helps preserve the natural resources critical to the economy? I argue for the latter, and if for no other reason than to suggest that we’ve tried the former, and it doesn’t appear to have worked.
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