Here’s the evidence from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. It’s mostly about change Democrats believe in, "social engineering" and fairly dramatic repriortizing they couldn’t sell any other way. It’s true enough, as Speaker Pelosi says, that they won the election, and they get to write the bill. We don’t have much evidence at all so far that our new president is "smart enough" to curb significantly the excesses of his party in Congress. We would have gotten a more stimulating and sensible stimulus from "divided government," although nobody made much of that argument during the election.
So far his management of the plan has been pretty poor--mostly he has seemed feckless to restrain what has become one big spending party without any coherent connection to stimulation. So we're getting neither Keynes or Laffer---just an appropriations frenzy
What? You mean we can't depend on the NEA and ACORN to produce the necessary jobs and growth in the economy to speed along recovery? I'm shocked. What do you think explains Obama's seeming lack of interest in taking charge of this? I'm inclined to think that he is both uninterested in the details and disinclined to get his hands dirty in by picking an appropriations fight. It is better for him only to say that he is interested in "Stimulating" the economy in a broad sense and "Compromise" and bi-partisanship on the specifics. Then he doesn't have to take any specific position and he passes along the blame for what doesn't work (as most of it won't) to others in Congress. Not a bad strategy if you're Obama and you can get away with it. But he did seem to get Waxman to cave on the condom appropriations . . . although those appropriations might have been the only ones in the whole darn thing to do any stimulating at all.