Today, I have a quickie comment on US politics. Ryan Lizza had a striking profile on Rahm Emanuel in the New Yorker, which among other things recorded Rahm’s reactions to some critics of the Administration’s efforts on the stimulus package. Lizza puts things this way:
““They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?””
Rahm further amplifies this point of view by offering more words to the same effect; and, no doubt, this kind of argument has been used by many practical politicians in responding to critics who have criticized them for doing too little, and, no doubt also, the argument sometimes has much to commend it. But what it amounts to in this case is a failure to address the view being stated not only by Paul Krugman, but also by Joe Stieglitz, Robert Reich, Jamie Galbraith, Robert Kuttner and many, many other economists. The issue they raise is a practical one: whether the stimulus, along with the other Administration measures to shore up the Banks and alleviate the downward spiral in housing will be enough to propel recovery any time soon, or whether the size of the stimulus should have been more in the neighborhood of 1.4 – 1.6 $Trillion. Rahm didn’t address this issue explicitly, though he indicated that Krugman, “as an economist is not wrong.”
But, if Krugman is not wrong, then the fact remains that the legislative part of the job of facilitating economic recovery remains undone. And whether or not it wasn’t practical, as Rahm suggests, to pursue a more robust stimulus package during the past few weeks, the White House and Rahm had better find some way to get the additional stimulus done in the future, or millions of Americans will pay the price in unemployment and family hardship, and many more millions across the world will have to find a way to adjust to the sustained weakness of the American consumer for some time to come.
Since Rahm claims that the advice of Krugman and the other economists could not be followed because it wasn’t practical to follow it, I’ll end with a word or two about that specific argument. Even if one agrees, for the sake of argument, that it was impractical to get the full stimulus needed for recovery right now, surely this impracticality exists because of the need to get 60 votes in the Senate for any major piece of legislation. Because 60 votes were needed to pass stimulus legislation, the Administration proposed and accepted a package that, if its own calculations are right, will produce 3.5 – 4 million less jobs than would have been the case if it had been practical to propose a 1.4 – 1.6 trillion package containing a much higher percentage of direct Government expenditures.
In short, the ability to filibuster has already cost a projected 3.5 – 4 million jobs during this administration. How much more will it cost as the President continues to trim the sails of his legislative program in order to practice the “art of the possible”? And how practical is it to proceed along this path of case-by-case wheeling and dealing with the few who stand at the fulcrum of a super-majority, rather than just using the nuclear option and establishing a procedure faithful to the constitutionally specified majority vote needed for the Senate to pass a bill?
To Be Continued