Griper Blade: Slowing the Stimulus

There seems to be a little bump in the road to Barack Obama's economic stimulus package. Republicans, for reasons we'll get to shortly, are putting the brakes on the idea, under the flag of caution. It's a whole lot of money, they argue, and you can't just rush willy-nilly into this kind of thing. After having rushed willy-nilly into the invasion of Iraq and the massive bank bailout, it's tempting to give them the benefit of the doubt -- maybe they've learned their lesson. All this willy-nilly rushing often turns out bad.

"As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

But these are Republicans and assuming cynicism in their motives isn't never a bad bet. Many see the concerns over the stimulus as being more about the future of the Republican party than about the future of the nation. Dean Baker -- who I'm really starting to like -- points out that the GOP is starting another round of historical revisionism. In what they claim is "a careful rereading of the history of the New Deal," Republicans say that "President Roosevelt's policies actually lengthened the Great Depression." But it's not a rerun of a history they've completely made up that worries them, it's the history that actually happened. Specifically, after the depression.

[F]rom the standpoint of Republicans, the more ominous lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected.

Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall.

As Baker sees it, Republicans believe they have to burn the village to save it. Maybe this stimulus would save the economy, but Republican ideas are -- in their own minds -- the only moral way to think. Two decades of Democratic rule would be sacrificing American society to save the American economy. It's not about Republican economic ideas, but Republican societal ideas. They see twenty years of abortion and gay rights and evolution education and that crazy, hippy environmentalism stuff. The GOP, with an already shrinking demographic base, sees American society creating even fewer of those base dwellers... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]