At Slate, Dave Weigel writes, Did the stimulus bill fail? Not really, but that may not matter anymore:
Veterans of the stimulus wars talk about it that way—as a war. They lost. The implication of the loss is that Keynesian economics are, arguably, as discredited with voters as neoconservative theories were discredited when the invasion of Iraq failed to turn its neighbors into vibrant democracies, highways clogged with female drivers.
This week, we got a concrete example of what it meant to lose. The Weekly Standard published a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin analysis of the seventh quarterly report on the stimulus, stipulating that every job created by its spending has cost $278,000. Republicans, who'd previously said the stimulus created no jobs, immediately started repeating the $278,000 figure. They kept doing it even after the magazine followed up, suggesting that the cost-per-job could have been as low as $185,000. $278,000, $185,000. $0.00? It didn't really matter, because the White House and liberal response was perfunctory. As the stimulus winds down, with most of the money spent, everyone knows that it failed.
President Obama meets with Susan Collins as
part of his efforts to get Republican support for
the 2009 economic stimulus package.
(Photo: Pete Souza)
This is a little strange. Yes, the economy is rotten, so voters can be excused when they pan the government's response to unemployment. But there's a lot of data that isn't terribly hard to read suggesting that the stimulus did create jobs. The analysis that the Weekly Standard tore apart found that the stimulus increased employment by about 400,000 jobs in the first quarter after it went into effect, and increased it by about 2.7 million at its peak. If you're deriding the price tag for those jobs, you're acknowledging that the jobs exist.
Did the stimulus do less than President Obama said it would? Absolutely. In the first months of 2009, when the president sold the bill, got it passed, and defended it, he tossed off predictions for job growth that got progressively higher and were never matched. At his most optimistic, he said the stimulus would be a success if it "created or saved" 4 million jobs. It fell far short of that. But ambitious, expensive bills have fallen short before, and it hasn't discredited their reasons to exist. George W. Bush's tax cuts were supposed to balance the budget by 2010.
That hasn't happened, obviously, but tax cuts have not been discredited—in fact, they're central to the discussion about how to dig out of the recession now. Tax cuts are popular. When CNN polled public opinion of the stimulus in January 2010, it found that 56 percent of Americans flat-out opposed it, and 63 percent of them thought most of the funding had been included for "purely political reasons." A little while later, a CBS poll found that only 6 percent of people thought the stimulus created any jobs.
The people who wrote and defended the stimulus blame bad messaging.
"The president was never able to explain to the public that the debt and deficits being run up were not an accident," said [former chairman of the House Appropriations Commitee David] Obey. "It was purposeful, but the administration never took on the core debate of why we had to borrow money in the short term, even though in the long term we had to pay it back. They didn't explain it, which led people to believe we were throwing money at a wall and seeing what stuck. The country needed to be re-educated about the Great Depression and the role deficit spending played in getting out of it. It needed to be told the story of 1937, when FDR prematurely pulled back from stimulating the economy." ...
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
I always believed that the Right's constant attack on Hollywood was more ploy than principle. But Steve Gilliard has a great post on the Right's conniption on hearing that Oliver Stone will make a 9/11 based "rescue" movie and, this is really interesting, real concern about a Spielberg project on the Israeli huntdown of the terrorists behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre—apparently Spielberg will portray some "questionable" tactics used to track them down.
As Steve says, Stone seems to have in mind some standard Hollywood fare here. Moreover, as Steve notes, hate Stone's politics and views, but you can't say he is not a gifted filmmaker. Gawd knows I detest his BS with regard to the dictator Castro, and there is little doubt he played fast and loose with history in JFK. But not a great filmmaker? Come on. Platoon? JFK? Any Given Sunday? Stone is a great filmmaker.
Attacking Stone seems second nature, but Spielberg? That seems like a bad calculation to me. It's not like you can call the director of Schindler's List a self-hating Jew. Paranoia indeed.
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