TRB: In Defense of Waste

Note to Republicans: The whole point of the stimulus is to spend money!

Jonathan Chait,
The New Republic
Published: February 12, 2009

Republicans like to accuse Democrats of wasting taxpayer dollars and being condescending eggheads. But if President Obama's economic stimulus fails to prevent a depression--and I'm not saying it will--it will be because he didn't waste enough money, and didn't spend enough time being a condescending egghead.

Let's start with the egghead part. The stimulus bill is based on Keynesian theory, which I'll briefly explain in the condescending manner we liberals so enjoy using. When we're in a severe recession, good productive capacity goes to waste. Autoworkers sit home unemployed because nobody has money to buy cars, and cooks sit home unemployed because nobody has money to go out to dinner. The first thing for government to try is to reduce interest rates, to encourage businesses to borrow money to hire more workers and buy equipment. But, if interest rates hit bottom, then the government has to shock the system back to life by spending money directly. Say, Washington hires construction workers to build something, and those workers start buying cars and going to restaurants, and, after a while, the economy is running again.

So Obama decided to spend a lot of money. The Republicans' hoary opposition technique is to boil any legislation down to one or two silly-sounding expenditures that Joe Sixpack can understand--Midnight basketball! A bear DNA study! Obama anticipated this critique and tried to eliminate all waste from the bill. He kept earmarks out and focused the spending on public investments like energy efficiency and education. The logic went beyond just politics. If you're going to spend a lot of money, you might as well get something useful for it.

Yet a few downsides to this clever tactic have emerged. First, a stimulus can shock the economy back to life if it happens quickly, but there are only so many useful projects you can spend money on really fast. Mass transit and new electrical grids take years to plan and build. There are worthwhile programs you can fund right away, but the list runs dry after a few hundred billion dollars. So the stimulus is less than half the size of the projected drop in output. It might be enough to stave off disaster, but then again, it might not.

(More here.)