Call it what you will, but it's not a stimulus

David Brooks lays out all that is wrong with this turkey of a bill that the House Democrats have put together. There is almost nothing in it that will stimulate the economy now.

The bill has three essential failings. First, it lacks any strategic vision. This $825 billion bill has to be passed within weeks. There’s no time for fundamental rethinking or new approaches. Instead, there’s a sloppy profusion of 152 different appropriations — off-the-shelf ideas that mostly create costlier versions of the status quo.

The committee staff took the kernel of President Obama’s vision — infrastructure programs to create jobs — and surrounded it with an undisciplined sprawl of health, education, entitlement and other spending. There’s money for nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, boatyard support, home weatherization and so on. Eleven of the programs in the bill account for the vast majority of the actual job creation. The rest may be worthy or not, but they have little to do with stimulus. The total package is so diffuse, it costs $223,000 to create a single job.

Second, the bill has relatively modest short-term impact. Many parts don’t even pretend to be stimulus measures, like funding for basic research, or special ed programs. But even the parts of the bill that aim to stimulate will have modest near-term impact. A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010.

According to The Washington Post, of the $30 billion devoted to highway spending, only $4 billion will be spent in the next two years. Less than $3 billion of the $18.5 billion for renewable energy and less than half the financing for school construction will be spent by 2011.

The Appropriations Committee chairman, David Obey, fulminated against the C.B.O. Wednesday, and the uselessness of economists in general, but he had no answer to these findings.

Third, the spending measures in this bill have no sunset. In the middle of the Appropriations markup, the ranking member, Jerry Lewis from California, asked his chairman the crucial question: What happens when the economy recovers? Does this new spending disappear?

Chairman Obey refused to answer, but he didn’t have to. The entire argument for these measures over the previous hours had been that they were good in themselves. The commitments in this bill will constitute the new budget base line. They will contribute to the coming $2 trillion deficits. Worse, these new structures, and the lobbyists they attract, will create more impediments to the innovation that Obama may seek in the years ahead.

So, to sum up, this bill won't stimulate the economy but it will create a permanent new baseline of spending that we'll never get rid of. No wonder that all those high hopes for bipartisan support for the bill have evaporated. Well, what did they expect? The House Democrats got together in secret, evaded the entire committee process, and came up with this 825 billion dollar boondoggle. Now is no time to complain that Republicans aren't on board. And Nancy Pelosi sure isn't concerned. She's vowed to pass the bill next week whether or not Hill Republicans have yet met with President Obama to voice their concerns. She's got the votes and that's that. Obviously, she didn't get the message that the new President wants to get beyond partisan sniping and work together in a new era of bipartisanship. Add in all the plans that House Democrats have to continue investigations into Bush policies and to establish a criminal investigatory truth commission to prosecute Bush officials. Not quite the environment that Obama was talking about.