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I'm of mixed feelings on the stimulus bill: The passage of the legislation is heartening, but the specifics of the compromise are depressing. So too was the demonstrated power of the centrists and the effortless unity of Republican opposition. The process did not bode well for more controversial priorities like health care and cap-and-trade. Perhaps most galling was the shell game of the AMT patch. $70 billion for an upper class tax break. 99.5 percent of the benefits go to the richest 40 percent. And this one provision comprised almost a tenth of the bill. It may be good, or at least popular, tax policy. But it's not stimulus. And Noam Scheiber passes on this bit from Senator Tom Harkin explaining why:
Mr. Harkin said he was particularly frustrated by the money being spent on fixing the alternative minimum tax. “It’s about 9 percent of the whole bill,” he said, “which we were going to do later this year in a tax bill. Why is it in there? It has nothing to do with stimulus. It has nothing to do with recovery. This makes no sense whatsoever.”As Scheiber says, "At the very least, shouldn't we call it a $719 billion bill rather than a $789 billion bill?" Probably. But this also got to one of the other problems with the bill: So many of the provisions were politically vulnerable in isolation that you couldn't pick through them one by one. It would have meant passing the legislation late next year. The imperative of speed forestalled a thorough analysis. Many on the right thought this was something the left liked about the stimulus bill: It was a way to ram through a lot of spending very quickly. But it was actually the opposite: It meant there was little ability to affect the overall mix of spending. And so we got a lot of tax breaks and highway construction and housing rebates -- all of which will cost money and constrain thoughtful and priority-driven spending in the later years of Obama's first, and even second, terms. (In this way, I think the stimulus was something of a subtle victory for the right, or at least heralded a subtle structural advantage, but that's a different argument.) It was a mixed bill that was constructed in a disappointing way. The left bought into the theory of stimulus spending, which included speed, and many hoped that the spending side would be built to accomplish an array of long-term priorities in areas like transit. That proved, if not wrong, then not right, either. The final bill included a lot of spending -- most of it genuine stimulus -- but much of it was very different from the sort of spending that the left wanted. If you think of the stimulus bill as having had two questions -- how much spending, and what sort -- I'd say that liberals should feel good about the first and ambivalent about the second.
