Fiscal Stimulus: doubling down on disaster

We really need a balanced budget amendment. The central problem is that the costs of big government and deficit spending are long term and have only a vague link to any specific program, while the benefits of specific programs are usually concrete and immediate. Its sort of like dieting: I know that I need to eat less in order to lose weight and get healthier, but the impact of any given snack or second helping on those long-range goals is minimal. The benefits of eating an extra cookie are immediate: I feel hungry and it tastes good. The cost of eating it is infinitismal - one cookie won't make me fat or make any noticeable difference in my weight unless I also forgo extra food on numerous future occasions. So losing weight takes a lot of willpower, and most diet plans aim to put some sort of artificial limit on eating.

Cutting government spending has the same problem. An extra billion or even a hundred billion won't make a huge difference in the national debt, so the incentive to rally against it is minimal. But the spending will provide tangible benefits to those who receive the funds, and perhaps to those who use whatever is built by them. All the meaningful incentives weigh towards spending the money.

A balanced budget amendment would change the dynamic because spending more money on one project would mean either raising taxes or cutting spending somewhere else. If the teachers' union wants another $50 billion for schools, they'll have to fight the construction industry that wants to spend it on roads, the AARP that wants to expand Medicaire, etc., not to mention taxpayers who would like a tax cut. Downside would be that it would make it difficult to cut taxes and could lead to tax increases, but that is one area where we have made a great deal of progress over the past 30 years. Its sort of the equivelant of beriatric surgery, but I think we need it. 

Conflating the long-term goal of shrinking government with the current stimulus debate/shenanigans is counter-productive. The time for conservatives to rally to the banner of shrinking the government was January of 2001. We blinked and missed an opportunity.

Credible plans to actually shrink the government, as opposed to posturing about it, will require planning, foresight and a generational commitment to the objective. If we are really serious about making government smaller perhaps we should start small. What would be required to actually end the federal role in education in America, for example?

Prerequisite would be a thorough analysis of the current role including all the direct and indirect inputs. Plans to build elective consensus around the goal including honest and detailed cost/benefit analysis would be needed. Further, specific plans to unwind all the inputs would be required along the way as a significant cost will be disruption of the current systems.

In short, even this somewhat modest goal would require a huge effort. To tie such aims to the debate about the stimulus does not seem serious to me; in fact, it sounds like johnny-come-lately posturing.

Americans are a can do people who are willing to make big investments for big payoffs.  We bought Alaska, went to the moon, built the interstate system, and have the most expensive military on the planet (by a big factor).  What you call

 simply throwing more money at problems

is American investment in the future.  Not all investments pay off.  Much military spending is wasteful. 

As it happens, most ecoomists think the stimulus will help a lot, and will pay for itself in the long run.  This cannot be said of the Bush tax cuts, which put the country into debt without getting much for it.

You said:

Democrats don't seem interested in any idea beyond "throw more money at it", and Republicans don't seem to have any ideas at all.  Unfortunately, neither of them has a significant, immediate incentive to behave any other way.  That means our government is only capable of change when we actually run off the cliff.

Countries make mistakes.  What is saddens me is that most of the people in the US are sober, center-right citizens.  Most people live their lives conservatively and productively.  But they've been bullied into accepting the Left's narratives or just simply bought.

But, what to do?  Without some great organizational efforts protest loudly (like the Left has done for the last many decades) there is little hope.   If the right could stop quibbling over arguing over differences within their own ranks they might have a chance. 

Once in a socialist system other countries seem to have a hard time liberalizing themselves.  I take that to mean that living off of other peoples money and letting other people make the decisons is a pretty comfortable life.   Which means in turn that a chunk of people are already pretty comfortable.

We also have to recognize the reality that Obama won with an vast money advantage, a huge media advantage, and a financial crisis to boot.  Yet he did not win in a landslide. 

The Left and the media will always try to smugly portray Liberalism as historical inevitable. 

Basically, we have to stand up for the much maligned middle class.  The rich will do quite well under Obama.  The politically connected will do quite well.  The poor will get some stuff and a lot of attention.  We have to say explicitly these things.  We have to use phrases like politically connected.  We have to say that the poor will get attention, but not much else.  

We have to say that the standard of living is much less in the EU than here.  France has $32K gdp  per capita vs. $48K for the US...that's quite a hit to take so that the Pols and the Left can feel good about America.

We have to speak truth to power, the fakery of the Left should be hammered.