Electric City Weblog

4 Part Stimulus

Congressman Denny Rehberg had a guest piece in the Tribune today (reproduced in full, below) wherein he outlined his thoughts on what a stimulus bill needs to contain:

Long before the party-line vote in the House, I laid out four prin­ciples for an economic stimulus package.

I wanted the bill to be timely, targeted, temporary and transpar­ent. We need to jolt our economy back to life like a defibrillator stimulates a heart beat.

Timely means getting the money where we need it in the short term, not over multiple years.

Targeted means we need to do it in a way that maximizes the tax dollar’s return on investment, by targeting the engine of our econo­my- jobs created by small busi­ness- while avoiding cosmetic projects like resodding the National Mall.

Temporary means an eco­nomic stimulus package is not the place to create new govern­ment programs to further a social agenda.

And transparent means that we respect every tax dollar enough to make sure it is not wasted to bureaucratic excess by writing blank checks with no oversight.

Rehberg makes legitimate points. As Lawrence Lindsey  wrote: “Some of the longer-term investment projects proposed are quite worthy; some are not. Either way, they are not stimulus.” The pork-laden bill recently passed was, frankly, beneath President Obama, or at least beneath what I thought we could expect from President Obama.

Rehberg’s piece, in full:

Economic jolt needed, not long-term projects that waste money
By DENNIS REHBERG

If the man standing next to you keels over with a heart attack, you’re going to adminis­ter CPR, give him some aspirin or use an emergency defibrillator to get his heart pumping again.

You’re not going to lec­ture him about his eating habits, prescribe a battery of medication that he’ll take for the rest of his life and shine his shoes.

That’s because in a cri­sis you have to act deci­sively. While the long-term goals may be worth exploring once the crisis is over, the time to do it isn’t when the victim is turning blue in front of you.

And yet, while Montanans are watching our economy keel over, the Pelosi-Obey “so-called” Stim­ulus Package that the House passed on Wednesday was packed full of new government programs, long-term spending and even a facelift for the grass on the National Mall.

Ultimately, it did more to stim­ulate the government than to stimulate the economy.

This bill, and the programs and spending it includes, are being sold to Americans on the basis of fear.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” His wisdom applies today as well, although fear has now become the lubricant that politicians use for policies that can’t stand on their own.

That’s why my office has been flooded with calls from Mon­tanans who oppose this bill because they know it won’t lead to more jobs.

They understand that our long-term fiscal health is in jeop­ardy because our growing debt is held by foreign countries. If we continue down this path, the result will be higher taxes, infla­tion and stagflation. The tab will be due sooner than we think.

As the legislation was being crafted, President Obama solicit­ed input from all sides, urging bipartisanship.

House Republicans created a working group to formulate our ideas. We had input from econo­mists and from taxpayers, including a man from Montana whose YouTube comment was featured in a hearing with Gov. Mitt Romney and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

We had workable solutions.

But our ideas were shut out by House Leadership as the bill was finalized. In the Appropriations Committee, only two amend­ments were adopted out of nine.

In House Ways and Means, only one out of 13 were accepted. We came to the table with reason­able ideas only to find that House Democrats didn’t want to sit at the table at all.

Long before the party-line vote in the House, I laid out four prin­ciples for an economic stimulus package.

I wanted the bill to be timely, targeted, temporary and transpar­ent. We need to jolt our economy back to life like a defibrillator stimulates a heart beat.

Timely means getting the money where we need it in the short term, not over multiple years.

Targeted means we need to do it in a way that maximizes the tax dollar’s return on investment, by targeting the engine of our econo­my- jobs created by small busi­ness- while avoiding cosmetic projects like resodding the National Mall.

Temporary means an eco­nomic stimulus package is not the place to create new govern­ment programs to further a social agenda.

And transparent means that we respect every tax dollar enough to make sure it is not wasted to bureaucratic excess by writing blank checks with no oversight.

America is facing an economic crisis, and like a heart attack, it’s scary. We need to act quickly, but just as important, we need to act wisely.

I asked House leaders to con­sider breaking this legislation into two parts- one for the economic jolt to stimulate the economy and one for the long-term social agen­da being forced through in the name of stimulus.

That’s the approach you would take to help a man suffering a heart attack, and it’s the approach that we should take to stimulate our economy.

Dennis Rehberg is Montana’s sole representative in the U.S. House and a member of the Appropriations Committee. Write to him at 516 Cannon Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20515

Posted in Economy, National Politics | 4 Comments »