February 20, 2009
Huffington Post Ismael Hossein-zadeh Herbert Hoover Copycat
How the Current Financial Rescue Schemes are Following the Failed Model of the Hoover Administration
Faced with the financial meltdown of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that poured taxpayers' money into the coffers of the influential Wall Street banks in an effort to save them from bankruptcy. Like today's Bush/Obama administrations, the Hoover administration used the "too-big-to-fail" scare tactic in order to justify the costly looting of the national treasury. All it did, however, was to simply postpone the day of reckoning: almost all of the banks failed after nearly three years of extremely costly bailouts schemes.

February 13, 2009
The Weekly Standard Irwin M. Stelzer An Unstimulating Stimulus
If, like John Maynard Keynes, you believe that spending, any spending, will revive a flagging economy, the freshly minted, 1000-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, calling for $504 billion in deficit-financed spending is for you. Well, not quite. . . . If you have not jumped onto the new Keynesian spending bandwagon, but believe with Christina Romer, chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, that tax cuts are more effective in turning an economy around than spending, you should love this bill, with its $286 billion in tax cuts and credits. Well, not quite. . . . If you are a supply-side enthusiast, a reading of this massive bill will add your personal depression to the national recession.

February 14, 2009
New York Times Frank Rich They Sure Showed that Obama
Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate. But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again. 

February 13, 2009
Huffington Post Dean Garfield Doing What Works for the Short and Long Term
Congress should be commended for passing a plan that has the potential to be stimulative as well as smart. Investments in Information Technology (IT) will help lead the way to economic recovery. Critical investments in America's digital and scientific infrastructure will spur immediate and significant job creation and provide our nation with both a near-term stimulus and long-term competitive advantage. The data clearly support this: the Information Technology Industry Foundation (ITIF) has determined that an investment of $40 billion in America's IT network infrastructure in 2009 will create approximately 949,000 U.S. jobs, more than half of which will be in small businesses.

February 13, 2009
New York Times Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R) Thirty Years Later, A Return to Stagflation
CONGRESS has made a terrible mistake. Amid a rhetorical debate centered on words like “crisis,” “emergency” and “catastrophe,” it acted too fast. While arguments were made about the stimulus bill’s specific components — taxpayer money for condoms, new green cars and golf carts for federal bureaucrats, another round of rebate checks — its more dangerous consequences were overlooked. And now the package threatens a return to the kind of stagflation last seen in the 1970s.

February 13, 2009
Wall Street Journal 1,073 Pages
So much for Democratic promises of a new era of transparency. Only this Tuesday the House unanimously approved a resolution promising 48-hour public notice before holding a roll call. Even better, the bill could have been posted on the Internet, as candidate Barack Obama suggested during the campaign. Let voters see what they're getting for all this money. Not a chance.

February 11, 2009
CBS News Declan McCullagh Pork and Pet Projects
During his first press conference as president this week, Barack Obama seemed irked that most congressional Republicans remained opposed to the so-called stimulus legislation.
Obama attributed it to philosophical differences, saying: "Some of the criticisms really are with the basic idea that government should intervene at all in this moment of crisis."  Not really. It's possible to want the government to take quick steps to turn around what has become an unusually sharp and severe recession -- while believing that the current proposal is not the best way to do it.
 
February 11, 2009
National Review Jonah Goldberg On Stimulus Bill, Centrists Are Over the Line
I’m with the liberals on this one. They’re fuming at the self-proclaimed “centrists” in the Senate who’ve taken it upon themselves to trim the stimulus bill at the edges. Led by Republican Arlen Specter, the centrists have boldly cut (perhaps temporarily) $100 billion or so from the stimulus package, in the name of fiscal discipline. But, as liberal critics such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman rightly point out, they’re cutting it to prove their “centrist mojo,” not because they have real concern for public policy. If the bill had started out at $1 trillion, then $900 billion in porcine outlays would be deemed the “responsible” amount to spend.

February 10, 2009
The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman The Open-Door Bailout
Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

February 11, 2009
The Wall Street Journal Peter Farrara Reaganomics vs. Obamanomics
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." Or as administration spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said in January, the touchstone is, "What will have the biggest and most immediate impact on creating private sector jobs and strengthening the middle class? We're guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests."
Unfortunately, this rhetoric is not true. Mr. Obama's economic policy is following not what has been proven to work but liberal ideology.



Time Magazine Michael Duffy What Will Obama Learn From The Stimulus Saga?
The question now is what Obama and his team learn from this experience. As he tries to maintain the consensus for another bank bailout, entitlement reform and perhaps health care reform, will he build his legislative coalitions from the left, as he did with the stimulus? Or construct them more with a centrist audience in mind?

Wall Street Journal Naftali Bendavid Partisan Divide Haunts Obama's Push on Policy
The partisan divide marking the economic-stimulus debate in Congress shows the difficulties facing Barack Obama's grand vision of bipartisan governing, and suggests that he is destined to battle for his programs the old-fashioned way -- hoping to win near-unanimous votes from his own party and just enough from the opposition to squeak through.

Washington Post Robert O'Harrow Jr. If Spending Is Swift, Oversight May Suffer
The Obama administration's economic stimulus plan could end up wasting billions of dollars by attempting to spend money faster than an overburdened government acquisition system can manage and oversee it, according to documents and interviews with contracting specialists. 

The New York Times Paul Krugman The Destructive Center 
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses? A proud centrist.

Huffington Post Drew Westen Change vs. Bipartisanship: What happens When You Throw a Bipartisan Party and Half the Guest List Stays Home
But a failure to distinguish alternative meanings of bipartisanship, an apparent miscalculation about the political and ideological extremism of the Republicans left in Washington in the wake of the Democratic landslides of the last two electoral cycles, and an unwillingness to fight back when attacked led the Obama administration unwittingly to participate in a setback to both change and bipartisanship, as they urged Democratic lawmakers to cut and paste elements of the conservative ideology that has unhinged our economy into a package designed to resuscitate it and emboldened the Republican leadership in a way that has sown the seeds of renewed partisan polarization.


February 10, 2009
National Review Online Alexander Benard & Anthony Dick Illiberal Stimulus
As President Obama chides Congress for its delay in passing a $900 billion stimulus bill, the largest lump-sum government expenditure in U.S. history, the country would do well to reflect on one of the basic lessons of human experience: Any excessive concentration of power in the hands of government—not just political or military, but also economic—is a threat to the precious and fragile liberty that we have so painstakingly achieved.

February 10, 2009 
 Wall Street Journal Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy There's No Stimulus Free Lunch
How much will the stimulus package moving in Congress really stimulate the economy?
The evaluations to date have been incomplete, so we looked at the likely stimulative effect from the spending parts of the House and Senate bills -- over $500 billion -- and assessed the quantitative effects of four basic factors.