David Boaz

The lobbying frenzy to get each interest group’s agenda into the kitchen-sink stimulus bill continues to accelerate. Veterans groups want subsidies for veterans. The Creative Coalition, an association of people who have made millions by producing profitable art, argues that taxpayer-funded subsidies to unprofitable arts will produce another Orson Welles, Saul Bellow, or Burt Lancaster. One prominent actor, Patrick Swayze, is understandably more concerned that the bill include “maximum funding” for cancer research. Energy billionaire T. Boone Pickens wants energy subsidies in the bill. “The Water & Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association is urging congressional leaders to dedicate funding for water and wastewater projects.” Religious liberals are pushing for hikes in welfare spending. Florida congressmen want more spending on space programs. I cited more examples a week ago:

“A Republican [in Ohio] called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” “Cities, towns ready to vie for stimulus funds.” “Road Builders Compete for Slice of Stimulus.” “West Michigan’s stimulus wish list.” “A State with a Wish List for Stimulus Spending.” “Steel industry lobbyists seem to have persuaded the House to insert a “Buy American” provision in the stimulus bill it passed last week.” “JetBlue Goes to Washington to Discuss Economic Stimulus Plan.”

As with the TARP bailout, the lobbying will only heat up if and when the bill is passed. At that point, instead of trying to get your favorite line item into the bill, the challenge will become finding a member of Congress to pressure the bureaucracy to agree that your project meets the criteria for funding laid out in the bill. Considering that the headline summary of the bill runs 13 pages, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a provision to cover just about anything. And then, instead of productive activity, yet more money and talent will be directed to seeking subsidies from government. That’s no way to stimulate actual economic growth, though it will certainly stimulate the economy of Washington, D.C., and its prosperous suburbs.

Folksinger Tom Paxton received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award Sunday night. He’s probably best known for his antiwar and civil-rights songs from the 1960s and 1970s. But on this blog he’s most celebrated for “I Am Changing My Name to Fannie Mae” (originally written in 1979 as “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler.”) You can hear Paxton sing it here. Those who think Tom Paxton is a better songwriter than singer can hear Arlo Guthrie’s version instead.

If only they’d let him sing “I Am Changing My Name to Stimulus” at the Grammys: “When they hand a trillion grand out, I’ll be standing with my hand out.” Or maybe even “The Ballad of Ron Paul“!

The Washington Post praises the “attempt to rise above the partisan squabbles that too often have paralyzed Washington” that led to agreement on a massive spending bill. Denouncing “the old ways” and “the customary blame-gamesmanship,” the Post editorializes:

The gang of 20 or so moderate Democrats and Republicans, led by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), heeded the president’s call for bipartisanship and hunkered down to produce the bill announced Friday night. Though the details of the package still need to be examined, the senators’ effort was an admirable one.

Being respectful and working together are very nice attributes. But the bottom line must be whether the country is better off with the product of the bipartisanship. And in this case the core of the controversy is whether a government running a $1 trillion deficit should spend another $820 billion (which willl almost certainly be more after it emerges from conference committee) that it doesn’t have. The Post asserts that the bill is “aimed at providing the quick and large injection of funds into the economy experts say is necessary.” But the Post knows very well that many economists disagree with that claim.

The Democratic and Republican senators who have made possible the passage of the largest spending bill in history have done the country no favors. The Post’s editors may disagree with that assessment. But the issue should be freedom, economic recovery, and the morality of piling more debt on our children, not process and politeness.

As 200 economists said in the New York Times, ” More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s.”

And it looks like Times reporters can confirm that:

Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.

Headlines today tell us that Senate centrists are trying to trim the massive spending bill that President Obama is pressing for. They may even have found as much as $90 billion in cuts already. But remember: This snowballing kitchen-sink bill has already grown by more than $100 billion since it left the House. A cut of $90 billion would be less than 10 percent of its now gargantuan girth. It would leave the bill larger than the $819 billion monstrosity that passed the House, which would already be the largest spending bill in the history of the world. (Barney Frank may be right that the total cost of the Iraq war will end up being more than the cost of this liberal wish list — though right now it looks like a close race — but there were actually many separate authorizations for the war, so this remains the largest single spending hike.)

Can we afford this bill? No we can’t.

P.S. Don’t miss Charles Krauthammer, “The Fierce Urgency of Pork,” today:

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

David Friedman raises a very good point:

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them? Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education.

And “economic stimulus” is a classic example.

Everyone—including Obama, back when he was running for President—is against deficit spending. Relabel it “stimulus” and everyone is for it. The label neatly evades the question of whether having the government borrow money and spend it is actually a way of getting out of a recession—a claim for which evidence is distinctly thin. It is stimulus, so obviously it must stimulate.

So what should we call it? President Obama’s spending proposal? The deficit-spending package? I think we’d have trouble getting the media to call it the Big Boondoggle. Maybe the government bailout, following the Wall Street bailout and the auto bailout?

Alas, we’re probably stuck debating the “stimulus.” But that means the battle was half lost before it began.

People like Robert Reich, who try to back up the claims of President Obama and Vice President Biden that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan,” have managed to come up with two names of economists who support the stimulus plan and would not be regarded as left of center: Martin Feldstein of Harvard, a former top economic adviser to President Reagan, and Mark Zandi of Moody’s, who was an adviser to John McCain last fall. And now the Washington Post has blown both of those names out of the water. Leaving — by my count — exactly zero libertarian or conservative economists on that much-touted spectrum. As the Post notes this morning:

Democrats lost Feldstein on Thursday when the Harvard professor published a Washington Post op-ed declaring the House bill “an $800 billion mistake” laden with ineffective provisions.

As for Zandi,

The 49-year-old economist is a Democratic dream, a former adviser to GOP presidential candidate John McCain who advocates spending over tax cuts as the best way to deliver a quick jolt.

And Democrats have touted him a lot:

In floor speeches and news conferences, Democratic lawmakers confer on Zandi an authority once bestowed on Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman.

“I’m just saying what Mark Zandi from Moody’s, an adviser to John McCain, is saying: You have to have a package of this robustness if you’re going to make a difference,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a recent news conference. …

“I think [he] is a Republican. I am pretty sure he is,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said of Zandi after a recent meeting. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Zandi on Fox News as a “conservative Republican.” Defending the bill’s sizable spending during a recent CNBC interview, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) responded: “I think if you listen to economists like Mark Zandi, who was the economic adviser to John McCain in the presidential election, he has said this is the right mix.”

But wait! Post reporter Shailagh Murray actually asked Zandi about his politics.

“I’m a registered Democrat,” he acknowledged.

He signed up with McCain when Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the candidate’s chief economic aide and a longtime friend, asked him to join the campaign’s diverse economic advisory team. “My policy is I will help any policymaker who asks, whether they be a Republican or a Democrat,” Zandi said.

So . . . the count of Republican or conservative or libertarian economists who support Obama’s biggest-spending-bill-in-world-history stands at . . . zero. And hundreds of economists have declared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other papers that they don’t support the plan. It’s time for politicians, pundits, and journalists to stop making this claim.

At RealClearPolitics I wrote about the vast army of lobbyists jockeying for money from the TARP bailout and the stimulus bill:

The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), better known as the Wall Street bailout, was cooked up mostly in secret by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board. But the bill was no sooner proposed than lobbyists started flooding Capitol Hill and the Treasury to get a piece of it.

Every company and industry wanted to be sure that it would be eligible for some of the money, and members of Congress worked to slip their constituents and campaign donors into the bill’s 451 pages. By the time it passed, it included special provisions for Puerto Rican rum producers, auto race tracks, and corporations operating in American Samoa (such as Starkist, which is headquartered in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district). It required that insurance companies pay for mental health benefits and granted tax benefits for victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and makers of children’s wooden arrows….

Next up is the nearly-trillion-dollar stimulus bill. Don’t expect anything different. Already senators are pushing to get their pet projects and home-state interests into the measure. “It’s very intense right now,” one Washington lobbyist told U.S. News. “I’m working late every day, until 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock. Every imaginable client has been calling me with ways of how their business, or their projects, should fit into the economic stimulus package. It’s wild. No idea is too far-fetched for people.”

No sooner was the article published than more examples fill the media: “A Republican [in Ohio] called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” “Cities, towns ready to vie for stimulus funds.” “Road Builders Compete for Slice of Stimulus.” “West Michigan’s stimulus wish list.” “A State with a Wish List for Stimulus Spending.” “Steel industry lobbyists seem to have persuaded the House to insert a “Buy American” provision in the stimulus bill it passed last week.” “JetBlue Goes to Washington to Discuss Economic Stimulus Plan.”

When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And this is the biggest picnic in the history of pork-filled picnicking.

Remember that Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker that showed Manhattan’s view of America — just a vague grouping of place names between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean?

On Sunday we got a glimpse of how the Washington Post views the sprawling diversity of America. In an article on Cobb Island, a waterfront community about 90 minutes from Washington, the Post commented:

Cobb Island has always attracted a variety of people, from government workers to politicians.

Robert Reich joins President Obama and Vice President Biden in claiming that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan.”

Now, President Obama and Vice President Biden probably aren’t reading whole newspapers these days, and like their predecessors they don’t talk much to people who don’t agree with them. So they may have genuinely believed that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for a massive stimulus program.

But Reich doesn’t have that excuse. He’s a professor at Berkeley. He has full access to newspapers, email, the Internet, and the help of grad students — and so he cannot be unaware that lots of leading economists oppose the Obama plan and similar massive spending programs. But then, as I’ve noted before, he’s often been at wide variance with the facts. This time, knowing that his claim might be doubted, he cited the one conservative economist who has famously endorsed a large stimulus — Martin Feldstein of Harvard — but didn’t quite acknowledge that Feldstein has called Obama’s plan “An $800 Billion Mistake.”