By PAUL KRUGMANPublished: February 8, 2009
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.
Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.
Read on...
Peacenik read a lot about the stimulus plan on the weekend. Peacenik read a list of the stuff that the republicans insisted on stripping out. It was all mildly progressive, good stuff, like food stamps and health care and assistance to students. No one wants financial armageddon. Not even Peacenik. But when you read about the process and you read about the special interests and how they still wield influence it is very difficult to cheer for the success or survival of these cretins. The political process in the U.S. is so broken that it is now counter-productive. The compromise stimulus will fail. The original stimulus might have failed. Do not look in the black hole of debt. Peacenik looked.
