American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition,
undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who
flip their houses?
A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.
[ . . . ]
One of the best features of the original plan was aid to
cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick
boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the
centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.
The
original plan also included badly needed spending on school
construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to
the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food
stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan,
with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures
that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.
On
the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the
worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean
Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip
your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money
while doing nothing to help the economy.
If the election was a mandate (it was an anti-Bush mandate certainly, but quite plausibly also a populist mandate), and this is government's response, either politicians will have to start getting it right–soon–or we could be looking at some serious political backlash.
Accidental Blogger 