Barack Obama’s courting and compromising and so forth garnered him a grand total of zero votes from House Republicans in favor of his stimulus bill.

I would imagine the crude calculus is something like this. In 1993-94 the GOP minority relentlessly sought to obstruct a new president’s legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral win in 1994. In 2001-2002 the Democratic minority relentlessly sought to compromise with a new president’s legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral defeat in 2002. Simplistic lesson is that there’s no upside to cooperation.

The lesson I would hope the administration learns here is this: He needs to spend less time seeking political cover to mitigate the downside to possible policy failure, and more time trying to implement the best policies he can.

Here’s some video of Mike Pence being an idiot and talking about the joys of Rush Limbaugh:

The most egregious thing here, and I guess this will be the new conservative approach, is that in response to a substantive criticism of Rush, Pence turns around and denies that Rush is a racist. That, however, isn’t the issue. The issue is that Rush has taken the view that his loyal followers in congress ought to be hoping that the Obama administration’s policies fail.

The larger issue, however, is that Mike Pence is a moron, and any movement that would hold the guy up as a hero is bankrupt. You can see my colleague Amanda Terkel for more of the specifics on this, but I would refer you to this post from September about the earth-shattering ignorance and stupidity of Mike Pence. He has no grasp, whatsoever, of public policy issues. And yet I can only gather from the fact that his colleagues have elevated him to a leadership post, that a large faction of them are actually so much stupider than Pence that they don’t realize how dumb he is. But it’s really staggering. In my admittedly brief experience talking to him, his inability to grasp the basic contours of policy question was obvious and overwhelming.

Reader RR writes “Could Matt (or anyone) give some examples of ‘alternative forms of punishment’ that effectively keep criminals off the street and don’t violate the 8th amendment?” I suppose there’s always exile to Australia. But for keeping people off the street, there’s no serious alternative to prison. Even unconstitutional forms of corporal punishment leave people on the street. But nevertheless, we already make plenty of use of criminal sanctions other than prison—parole and probation. The problem is that while prison is costly and inhumane, parole and probation as currently practiced just don’t accomplish much. But prison is much more expensive. Investing resources in building better models of parole—coerced abstinence, for example—would let us get more bang for our sanctioning buck and free up resources for use in other areas.

Justin Wolfers offers up a chart showing economists’ greater interest in research questions relating to monetary policy and remarks:

I’m not sure why fiscal policy is the ugly stepsister. Perhaps the problem is ideology, and pro-market economists don’t like any discussion that gives government a greater role.

This reflects one of the weirdest features of contemporary discussion of the economy, the idea that monetary policy somehow isn’t a “government role” in the economy. To this day I remember when I was in eighth grade and my father first explained to me that there was a man named Alan Greenspan who ran a government agency that watched with an eagle eye for the day when there might be an insufficient number of unemployed people. If too many people had jobs, he was supposed to swoop in, tighten the money supply, and make sure some people lost their jobs. Otherwise, wages might get too high! This was followed by a small disquisition on Marx and the reserve army of the unemployment.

Today, I’m not a Marxist. But I do recognize that public policy has a pervasive impact on the economy, not only through the actions of Congress and the White House but through monetary policy. As you can tell from the name, monetary policy is a kind of policy. And the Federal Reserve is a government agency, even when it’s run by an Ayn Rand acolyte. That doesn’t mean you have to turn into a Communist. But insofar as right-of-center economists are worried that admitting to the efficacy of fiscal policy as a macroeconomic stabilizer will legitimize all sorts of other policy interventions, we need to understand that admitting to the efficacy of monetary policy is just the same from a logical point of view.