Robert J. Samuelson isn’t a right-winger… which makes his criticisms of the stimulus all the more useful (politically). It has FAILED its original purpose… there is NO DENYING IT at this point.
It’s not surprising that the much-ballyhooed “economic stimulus” hasn’t done much stimulating… The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.
There are growing demands for another Obama “stimulus” on the grounds that the first was too small. Wrong. The problem with the first stimulus was more its composition than its size. With budget deficits for 2009 and 2010 estimated by the CBO at $1.8 trillion and $1.4 trillion (respectively, 13 and 9.9 percent of gross domestic product), it’s hard to argue they’re too tiny. Obama and congressional Democrats sacrificed real economic stimulus to promote parochial political interests. Any new “stimulus” should be financed by culling some of the old.
Here, as elsewhere, there’s a gap between Obama’s high-minded rhetoric and his performance. In February, Obama denounced “politics as usual” in constructing the stimulus. But that’s what we got, and Obama likes the result. Interviewed recently by ABC’s Jake Tapper, he was asked whether he would change anything. Obama seemed to invoke a doctrine of presidential infallibility. “There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he said.
via washingtonpost.com.