Stimulus package isn't what the doctor ordered
If the man standing next to you keels over with a heart attack, you're going to administer CPR, give him some aspirin or use an emergency defibrillator to get his heart pumping again. You're not going to lecture him about his eating habits, prescribe a battery of medication that he'll take for the rest of his life and shine his shoes. That's because in a crisis you have to act decisively. While the long-term goals may be worth exploring once the crisis is over, the time to do it isn't when the victim is turning blue in front of you.
And yet, while Montanans are watching our economy keel over, the Pelosi-Obey “so-called” Stimulus Package that the House passed last Wednesday was packed full of new government programs, long-term spending and even a facelift for the grass on the National Mall. Ultimately, it did more to stimulate the government than to stimulate the economy.
This bill, and the programs and spending it includes are being sold to Americans on the basis of fear. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” His wisdom applies today as well, although fear has now become the lubricant that politicians use for policies that can’t stand on their own.
That’s why my office has been flooded with calls from Montanans who oppose this bill because they know it won’t lead to more jobs. They understand that our long-term fiscal health is in jeopardy because our growing debt is held by foreign countries. If we continue down this path, the result will be higher taxes, inflation and stagflation. The tab will be due sooner than we think.
As the legislation was being crafted, President Obama solicited input from all sides, urging bipartisanship. House Republicans created a working group to formulate our ideas. We had input from economists and from taxpayers, including a man from Montana whose YouTube comment was featured in a hearing with Governor Mitt Romney and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. We had workable solutions. But our ideas were shut out by House Leadership as the bill was finalized. In the Appropriations Committee, only two amendments were adopted out of nine. In House Ways and Means, only one out of 13 were accepted. We came to the table with reasonable ideas only to find that House Democrats didn’t want to sit at the table at all.
Long before the party-line vote in the House, I laid out four principles for an economic stimulus package. I wanted the bill to be timely, targeted, temporary and transparent. We need to jolt our economy back to life like a defibrillator stimulates a heart beat. That means getting the money where we need it in the short-term, not over multiple years. Targeted means we need to do it in a way that maximizes the tax dollar’s return on investment, by targeting the engine of our economy – jobs created by small business – while avoiding cosmetic projects like resodding the National Mall. Temporary means an economic stimulus package is not the place to create new government programs to further a social agenda. And transparent means that we respect every tax dollar enough to make sure it is not wasted to bureaucratic excess by writing blank checks with no oversight.
America is facing an economic crisis, and like a heart attack, it’s scary. We need to act quickly, but just as important, we need to act wisely. I asked House Leaders to consider breaking this legislation into two parts – one for the economic jolt to stimulate the economy and one for the long-term social agenda being forced through in the name of stimulus. That’s the approach you would take to help a man suffering a heart attack, and it’s the approach that we should take to stimulate our economy.
Denny Rehberg is a member of the House Appropriations Committee