Shame on every single Republican House member for their root-and-branch opposition to a fiscal boost. Shame on the root-and-branch opposition to a fiscal boost by Republican Senators Alexander, Barrasso, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Corker, Cornyn, Crapo, DeMint, Ensign, Enzi, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johanns, Kyl, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Murkowski, Risch, Roberts, Sessions, Shelby, Thune, Vitter, and Voinovich. Put country before party once, guys.
But shame also on Republican senators Collins, Snowe, and Specter and Democratic senators McCaskill and Nelson for making the Obama fiscal boost bill materially worse just to burnish their own reputations as "centrists." It was always going to be that the sixtieth senator would determine the shape of the fiscal boost program--better to run it through now in a timely fashion than to take the extra four to six months needed to do it with fifty senate votes in the reconciliation process. But the candidates for the sixtieth senator didn't have to work so hard to make the bill worse: they could have talked to some real economists like Mark Zandi in crafting their amendments. They didn't.
And with that we turn the microphone over to 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. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.... [T]he centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.
One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending. The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.
On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy. All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering...
