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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

"Why Does Obama Keep Telling Reporters There are 'No Shovel-Ready Projects'?"

Another "unforced error" from the administration:

Why does Obama keep telling reporters there are 'no shovel-ready projects'?, by Ezra Klein: Perhaps I should've written this post before interviewing Jared Bernstein, the vice president's chief economist, on the same subject. But if you read that interview closely, you'll see a White House that doesn't exactly know what to do with the president's comments. The administration doesn't think the stimulus failed. At the end of the day, the law met its spending targets. As promised, it dispensed with 70 percent of the funds within two years. Most of the remaining money will pay out when projects that are underway reach completion. Today, the White House released a video in which Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, argues that the intervention saved the job market (though by looking only at private-sector jobs, he stacks the deck, as the public sector is where recent job losses have been concentrated).
So why did the president tell Peter Baker -- and before him, David Brooks -- that there are no "shovel-ready programs"? Those were three of the most important words used to sell the program -- and the president's decision to walk them back is giving plenty of ammunition to his enemies. And shovel-ready is not a controversial concept...
Over the past two years, the stimulus has funded more than 15,000 transportation projects. In total, it's funded more than 75,000 projects. Those efforts weren't ready for shovels the morning after the bill passed, but it didn't take more than a couple of months to break ground on many of them, and all of them hit within the stimulus's two-year target range.
And even if the president was disappointed by the progress, why is he giving ammunition to the stimulus's critics only weeks before the midterm election? ...
The big news on the stimulus going into November should've been this report from the Center for Public Integrity pulling together the many, many letters Republican lawmakers sent asking the administration to use the stimulus to fund projects in their district and saying, forthrightly, that those projects would create jobs and improve the economy. Obama should be going around the country, setting up a podium at each of those projects and making clear just what it is the stimulus did, and just what it was that Republicans opposed. Instead, he's telling reporters that the foundational phrase of his sales pitch for the stimulus was a mistake, which implies to voters that the Republicans are right when they say the stimulus didn't work. File this one under "unforced errors," I guess.

One thing I wrote and then edited out of this post about the dissatisfaction with the stimulus package among the general public is that the administration has spent very little effort explaining how typical households will benefit from various infrastructure projects funded with stimulus dollars (this is also true for other things the stimulus was used for, e.g. most people do not know that they received a tax cut as part of the stimulus package). Selling the benefits of of its policies has not been a strong point for the administration. It has, however, done a pretty good job of handing ammo to its detractors.

    Posted by on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 01:00 PM in Economics, Fiscal Policy, Politics | Permalink  Comments (38)


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