Obama already failing to live up to hype

More of the same…

Barack Obama, who ran on a promise of post-partisanism and pragmatism, is already showing that those were just slick marketing slogans. Already, he’s decided that he will give few or no concessions to house and senate Republicans with regard to his bloated, trillion dollar-plus economic stimulus package. Just because you can act with disregard toward the minority party does NOT mean you should. Clearly, Republicans have some good ideas about reforming the stimulus package — they want to get the legislation right. GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia argues that Obama’s stimulus bill does not focus enough on job creation, and he’s right.

The stimulus bill, as it’s presently written, is a flaming ball of pork. Politicos know that it will be easy to pass the legislation, considering the economic situation, and so they’re loading the bill with pork that they might not have been able to insert into bills of their own.

The other problem with the stimulus bill is that its effects will not be widely felt for years. Just 20 percent of the stimulus will actually be spent in the next 8 months, and over one-third of it ($291 billion) will kick in at least 21 months from now.

We need something timely, and waiting so long for the proposed stimulus to kick in will not work.

What should congressional Democrats do instead?

They should decide what the top three or five problems with the economy are (or will be) and write individual, comprehensive bills to cure those ills. A bill for small businesses, a bill for employment, tax cuts, the financial system, real estate, et cetera. They should work with their colleagues across the aisle to ensure that spending doesn’t get out of control, and that each provision really targets a problem and uses a method that has either worked in the past, or logically shows promise as a solution superior to past methods. In that way, each problem will be tackled individually, and the opportunity for injecting pork spending into the bills will be lessened, because the bills will be more focused in nature.

Timely? Temporary? – Arnold Kling

Stimulus Now, Stimulus Tomorrow, Stimulus Forever – Reason