Politically speaking, both the idea of a fiscal stimulus package in general and the specific stimulus plan working its way through the legislative process are quite possible. Rescuing—or “bailing out”—the financial system is another matter. This is a concept that voters rightly recoil from, because essentially anything you could do flies in the face of intuitive ideas about fairness. And getting down to details doesn’t much help, frankly. You could do things that are less unfair, but they wind up seeming distressingly radical to other people. And they still don’t wind up being very fair. There’s just no way around it.

But as Jared Bernstein was explaining on a call with progressive bloggers earlier today, stimulus and financial system recovery go hand in hand. Bernstein described the relationship in terms of a “chain.” The technical term involves something I’ve mentioned previously, the “velocity of money” — the speed through which economic activity moves through the system. The idea of a stimulus plan is that the government isn’t just engaging in economic activity directly, but that the beneficiaries of that activity will spur additional activity. In other words, you get money via a tax cut or a job on an infrastructure program and you use some of that money to buy groceries, creating jobs for farmers and checkout people who spend their money, etc., etc.

You want the money to circulate smoothly and efficiently from those who have it to those who need it. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to spend the money instantly. But it means that when people want to park their money, those funds should come available to other people who have good business opportunities that could be exploited with the assistance of a little credit. That’s where a healthy financial system comes in.

You may have heard tales from Japan’s “lost decade” in which stimulus measures failed to actually get the economy moving. Part of the problem was somewhat ill-conceived and ill-executed stimulus. But perhaps a bigger issue is that the didn’t actually clean up their banking system. Instead, they put it on life support. And then they used fiscal stimulus to put employment on life support. But we don’t want life support, we want stimulus that actually brings us back to life. And that requires a financial rescue package. Of course it also requires a financial rescue package that works and the jury’s still out as to whether that’s what the administration’s come up with.

A lot of conservative legislators seem to think that giving aid to state governments doesn’t stimulate the economy or help save and create jobs. Well, “fortunately” a good friend of mine was recently put on furlough from his part-time job as an instructor at the University of Maryland so he’s in a position to document the very real impacts of state budget cuts:

In one sense, I resent those Maryland lawmakers who haven’t ponied up the salary they pledged to give back to the general fund as a sign of solidarity with state employees who have been forced to take furlough. Bunch of hypocrites, right? As of this morning, I’m one of those employees facing the furlough. That furlough reduction is money I can’t spend, and no one wants to endure that when higher state servants are sitting pretty.

But transparent political gestures—here I picture Clay Davis clutching Prometheus Bound, wrapping himself in the gesture of tragedy on the steps of the state capitol—won’t actually help the situation. A furlough is no kind of solution to the problems that Maryland and other cash-strapped states are facing. What is needed is more spending to fuel economic expansion, funded by direct financial aid through federal stimulus spending.

I’m an adjunct instructor for the University of Maryland—which Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley asked to reduce its salary and wages budget by $15.9 million. This hit comes on top of a fall 2008 reduction in the university system’s budget by $15 million, which slashed services by implementing hiring freezes, increasing class sizes, and reducing facilities renewal funds. All goals contrary to economic stimulus (and higher education). As I understand it, the university structured the furlough so that the highest-paid employees were among those given the furlough: administrators and instructors whose responsibilities realistically prevent them from taking a furlough day. Elsewhere in the state government, at offices where the mandatory vacation is viable, furloughs tend to erase their own cost savings. People need state services, so employees who remain on are forced to cover for their furloughed coworkers. Furloughed employees who return to work face increased workloads. And benefits and office costs still persist despite wage reductions.

Further, diminishing staffing levels does not diminish fees, which angers customers, who may seek better service elsewhere or skip state services altogether. Furloughs are an interruption for offices that must subsequently depend on some workers being away from the office. This is to say nothing of the psychological toll on the furloughed workers. Furloughs are stressful: They don’t guarantee that there won’t be more furloughs down the road—nor do they forestall layoffs. (Indeed, furloughs haven’t forestalled layoffs in Maryland.) And money that state employees don’t have is money they aren’t spending.

(For what it’s worth, the furlough is not a great burden for me and might even be mistaken, since I am on contract and only a part-time employee.)

The New Hoovers, per Matthew’s coinage, might well greet furloughs as a smart reduction in government size and spending in a time of crisis. But in fact furloughs just make state services more inept, with wage cost savings offset by increased workloads, stressed-out workers, lawsuits, failed services, etc. It’s a “do less with less” mandate at time when states need to increase spending and access to needed services. State legislators should just keep their money.

State governments have no good choices under the current circumstances. But the federal government can and should step in with adequate levels of financial assistance to states.

Alan Wolfe has an interesting essay on liberal hawks (via Jon Chait) that I think winds up going a bit awry by running together humanitarian arguments about the desirability of military intervention in particular (whether or not the arguer wanted to invade Iraq), with national security arguments about the desirability of invading Iraq that were offered by liberals (whether or not the arguer was making any distinctively “liberal” appeals). Thus you get a strange effort to simultaneously treat Samantha Power, who didn’t want to invade Iraq, and Kenneth Pollack, who wasn’t saying anything particularly liberal about Iraq. The fact that Wolfe doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the narrow national security issues would further argue for just leaving it aside.

What I think’s missing from Wolfe’s account of the “humanitarian” case is the extent to which it was an idiosyncratic case. Because the proponents of this argument were influential in the media, lots of people in the media are very aware of it and talk about it a lot. But it’s not as if the world’s major human rights organizations were clamoring for this invasion. Nor is it the case that governments known for their commitment to international humanitarian causes (Norway, say) were pushing for war. You didn’t see international civil society mobilizing for the liberation of Iraq the way you saw people all around the world standing in solidarity with the people of South Africa. And you certainly didn’t see the Arab public sphere praising George W. Bush’s bold intervention on behalf of Iraqi well-being. What you saw was a handful of writers plus Bernard Kouchner making this case. You also saw a lot of people who believed they had independent security-based reasons for favoring war offering up humanitarian rationales as a kind of “gravy” and/or noting the alleged “irony” that liberals who claim to support humanitarian causes were against launching an unprovoked war.

I think that if you look at history, you’ll find that wars of aggression are essentially always cloaked in high ideals. Certainly the classic imperialism of nineteenth century Europe was associated with an enormous amount of idealistic rhetoric about civilizing missions and improving the well-being of the to-be-conquered population. It’s difficult to say, in retrospect, how much of that was sincere and how much merely cynical. But surely it wasn’t all cynical. But sincerity ultimately does you little good—aggressive warfare combines lawlessness, violence, and coercion and that’s not a very good recipe for humanitarianism. It’s one thing to go to war in self-defense or to see another group fighting a war of self-defense and come to their assistance, and another thing entirely to launch a war allegedly on behalf of another population.