"Stimulus Plan"--A New Definition of Insanity?

Stimulus—it’s a wonderful word. Wonderful concept, political and economic panacea. Let’s see, didn’t we have a big stimulus plan last spring designed to jog the consumer into high buying gear? I think I recall a few hundred bucks coming our way last summer. We spent it.
But somehow consumer spending is down at unprecedented levels. All sorts of consumer oriented emporiums are going out of business. Chain stores, chain restaurants, local stores, all going bust. So what happened to the promised stimulus?
Then came the banks, hat in hand. Billions more for stimulus—get the banks lending again; make it easier for those with insecure (or no) jobs to borrow more freely. Help businesses that are already drowning in debt borrow more; get business back on its leveraged feet.
It’s harder to borrow now than it was before the lending institutions were bipartisanly stimulated. So what did all that stimulation accomplish? (Would it be morbid to remind those who favor yet another trillion or so worth of stimulus that dead frogs react to stimulus more actively than this economy has to the previous two attempts at economic stimulus?)
Obama is telling us that HIS stimulus plan is URGENT. We must pass it RIGHT NOW or permanent damage will be done to the economy. That was the same argument Paulson used last fall. Bush used the same argument last spring. For all those urgently (and quickly) passed stimulus bills, this looks like a pretty much bunged up economy to me.
What about stopping to think this time? Oh, Obama would say, but my advisors spent the last six weeks mulling over the plan. How about a little broader base? Might even a few Congressmen and Senators have some good ideas? Some scholars? Even some people outside of government.
I con’t help being reminded of former Soviet Premier Gorbachev’s plaint as the Soviet economy collapsed around him. “I have a hundred economic advisors; one of them has a good idea. But I don’t know which one.” How about trying to figure out which one—rather than redoing the same package that didn’t work the last two times?
We aren’t quite at the point Roosevelt found the country at in 1933. People aren’t quite ready to literally starve to death if we don’t feed them this second. (No unemployment insurance, no federal welfare, no food stamps in those days.) We have a few moments to think this over.
The last two stimulus packages just plain didn’t work. What’s the point of a third package with more of the same? (If yelling “Boo” didn’t scare the bear away the last two times, why do we think he’ll be frightened if we yell one more time?)
I just listened to a Congressman tonight saying on MSNBC that the present stimulus package “guts” infrastructure reconstruction in favor of more tax cuts and more money for failing businesses. (Business Week defines many such companies as “zombies”—you can’t bring them back to life, but they consume vital resources as they keep hobbling around. So your bailouts actually wind up hurting healthy businesses that could make constructive use of the resources.)
One thing Roosevelt’s New Deal did for the country that is still paying major dividends today is to build infrastructure. It gave people work (it did not cure the Depression, mind you), and it made a lasting contribution to our well being. Obama talks that line, but his new Stimulus Package doesn’t actually do it.
(It’s almost as if he’s trying to pacify tax cutting Republicans—who don’t seem capable of imagining another solution to a major economic collapse than to cut more taxes—rather than do any original thinking. He told the Republicans today, “I won”, but he doesn’t act as if he believes it.)
In the end this new, hugely expensive Stimulus Plan HAS to remind us of the old definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over again—and expecting a different result.