Amusing:

Interesting messaging concept.

Bruce Bartlett has a very nice column on the real lessons of the New Deal:

One reason why Republicans strenuously oppose the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus plan is because it repeats the errors of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To them, the New Deal was mainly about vastly expanding government spending and deficits, which Republicans believe made the Great Depression worse rather than better. Therefore, doing so again in the present downturn will also lead to failure.

The true New Deal legacy, however, is more complicated. Serious mistakes were indeed made. In particular, the National Industrial Recovery Act was fundamentally ill-conceived and retarded economic recovery. But in terms of fiscal policy, Roosevelt’s error wasn’t that he spent too much, but that he didn’t spend nearly enough.

Right. I think the right-wing’s view that the New Deal was, on net, a bad thing is mistaken. But it’s certainly true that the New Deal featured some bad ideas. And the day Barack Obama proposes organizing the economy into cartels that will be able to exercise enough market power to force retail prices up, I hope John Boehner will go on Fox News and ring the alarm bells. But in fiscal policy terms, the best evidence from the 1930s and 40s suggests that fiscal expansion can work—but that when faced with really big problems it needs to be really big in order to work.

Some curious logic from Jim DeMint’s office:

The President has a point that taxpayer money should not be used to pay for Wall Street fat cats to fly to Las Vegas but why is it okay for taxpayer money to be used to help pay for Hollywood elites to get there on a fancy gambling train? And why are we subsidizing leisure in a stimulus bill rather than encouraging work and greater productivity?

Several points. One — there’s no such provision in the bill. Two — there are two million people in the Las Vegas metro area, so it’s not as if taking the train to gamble is the only conceivable use of such a route. Three — lots of people go from L.A. to Las Vegas, it’s not an “elites only” option. I would refer Senator DeMint’s staff to this well-known scene from Swingers:

The larger rhetorical theme here seems to be that DeMint believes there should be no infrastructure projects of any sort in Southern California because any such project would, per se, be a taxpayer subsidy to “Hollywood elites.” It’s a pretty repugnant sentiment. For whatever reason, conservatives are constantly allowed to get away with this business of summarily dismissing vast regions of the country as unworthy and never get called on it. But this sort of thing is leading the movement on a direct (albeit, non-rail) route to a Dixie-only ghetto.

The Washington Post has a decent article by Lori Montgomery making the point that the changes Senate “centrists” made to economic recovery legislation will make the package much more ineffective, costing hundreds of thousands of people their jobs. But as Jon Chait observes it would have been nice of them to make this point back when it could have made a difference:

What frustrates me is that the Post didn’t write this when it could have made a difference. It’s possible that none of the economists the Post consulted were able to make models before today. But I suspect that the story fell victim to the conventions of objectivity. Writing a story that says, “Centrist Changes Hurt Job Growth, Economists Agree” would be partisan.Writing it after the bill is done, and in a context that downplays the specific actors responsible for the changes, is the kind of thing newspapers can do without feeling like they’re being “biased.”

Of course one can’t say for sure why the Post was so slow, but surely inability to model in a timely manner can’t have been to blame. Will Straw published an analysis for CAP on February 10 that had this conclusion. Paul Krugman had similar figures at about the same time.

It’s also worth saying that the “centrists” aren’t the only ones to blame. There are dozens of Senate conservatives who could have said “I don’t believe in the idea of Keynesian stimulus, but as long as you guys want to do a Keynesian stimulus you may as well do one properly, thus even though I’ll vote ‘no’ on the final bill I’ll agree to vote ‘yes’ on cloture if you undue the damage done by Sens. Specter, Collins, Snowe, and Nelson.”

The madness continues on the right-wing’s crusade against a mythical high-speed rail to Las Vegas project that Harry Reid is alleged to have snuck into the stimulus bill. “Tell me how spending $8 billion,” asked House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) on the floor, “in this bill to have a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is going to help the construction worker in my district.”

For one thing, if we stuck by the standard that members of congress should only agree to fund infrastructure projects located in their own districts, then obviously we’d have no infrastructure at all. This is a debate that I thought we settled in the days of Henry Clay. But beyond that there is no such provision in the bill. This, by contrast, is an accurate description of the high-speed rail provisions of the Recovery Act:

The Stimulus Plan includes two provisions modeled after the Act that finance high-speed rail development. First, the Stimulus Plan provides a $2 billion grant for high-speed rail projects that will remain available until September 30, 2011. The grant will be distributed among applicant states, interstate compacts, public agencies having responsibility for providing high-speed rail service and Amtrak for capital projects associated with inter-city passenger rail services reasonably expected to reach speeds of at least 110 miles per hour. The Secretary of Transportation will have discretion to award grants based on an extensive set of criteria, including the legal, financial and technical capacity of the applicant to carry out the project; compatibility with relevant national plans; and anticipated economic, environmental and transportation effects.

In a last-minute change, the total quantity of funds available was increased. But there’s no special plan for Las Vegas. The money will be spread all across the country. As it happens, I think an LA-Vegas HSR line is a perfectly reasonable project. But in practice the areas that will get a leg up should be the Federal Railroad Administration’s officially designated high-speed rail corridors. As it happens, LA-Vegas doesn’t make the cut. But guess who does have such a corridor? Ohio!

Indeed, the existing plan is a bit freakishly Ohio-centric, offering both a Cleveland-Toledo-Chicago line and a Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati-Indianapolis corridor while leaving things like Houston-Dallas and Orlando-Jacksonville (and, indeed, LA-Vegas) off the list. Long story short, John Boehner doesn’t know what he’s talking about and his position on this issue would imperil both short term jobs for Ohioans and an opportunity to substantially improve Ohio’s long-run capacity for economic growth.