Can America spend its way to economic recovery?
Conservatives, resisting big government outlays on principle, begin to build the case for other options.
Shovel-ready: Workers from Millstone Bangert Construction Co. smooth the top of the freshly laid concrete on a ramp onto Interstate 64 in St. Louis. Governors are eager for federal help on such projects.
Emily RasinskiSt/Louis Post-Dispatch/AP
Washington
With the US economy floundering, a massive new federal spending program to avert a deeper fall is gaining momentum, but critics are beginning to mount a resistance.
Skip to next paragraph
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
They concede it will be tough slogging, in part because the “let the markets work” strategy has failed so conspicuously and in part because people don’t want to hear that years of excess have their price.
“The message that things have gone wrong [and] we have to take our lumps is not a popular message,” says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “It’s counterintuitive to say for 15 years that Americans have spent too much and taken on too much debt and then to think the way out of the mess is to have the government borrow some more and spend for us.”
For Washington’s vast retinue of lobbyists and think tanks, the prospect of $1 trillion in new spending is the top issue of the preinaugural season. For many Republicans among them, the notion that government spending at this scale is “the solution” undercuts the core principle they hope to use to rebuild the party brand and work back to power.
Even longtime allies, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and usually reliable conservative economists, were joining the big-stimulus bandwagon.
Last week – following press reports that the Obama transition team could find only one economist opposed to a big stimulus plan – House Republican leader John Boehner sent out a call to economists to make their doubts known. By Monday, 100 economists had responded, say Boehner aides.
“Since putting out the call for outside economists’ opinions on President-elect Obama’s proposed $1 trillion economic ‘stimulus’ spending plan, we’ve been contacted by dozens of economists and academics eager to add their name to the list of stimulus-spending skeptics,” said Rep. Boehner on his leader’s blog.
By the start of the 111th Congress in January, congressional GOP leaders hope to have built momentum of their own for a coherent and credible alternative plan anchored in tax relief and longer-term, pro-growth policies.
Save more, not spend more. Extend the Bush tax cuts, set to expire in 2010.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is expected to lay out a GOP strategy for economic recovery next week.
