Mike Pence Calls for Massive Anti-Stimulus
I’ve made this point before, but Congressman Mike Pence is not a smart man. And really, strikingly so. And you can see this kind of dumbness coming through in this floor speech calling for a “spending freeze”:
One level of dumbness here is the indiscriminate nature. A member of congress who cared about public policy would presumably have some ideas about certain federal endeavors being more worthy than others. But Pence just wants to implement an arbitrary cut (in inflation-adjusted terms that’s what a “freeze” is) in all programs.
A second level of dumbness it his fake-incredulity about how the Democrats passed one spending bill and now they want to pass a second bill. Oh my dears! But the first bill was a stimulus measure, designed at offering a fiscal policy jolt to counteract the recession. The second bill is to fund the normal operations of the federal government. It’s not like there was some sleight-of-hand here and Obama was pretending that the stimulus bill was adequate to fund all the activities of the government. And they’re not coming one after another because the congress is crazy; the timing of the appropriations bill is dictated by the schedule.
But the third, and most pernicious, level of dumbness is its pro-cyclical neo-Hooverite nature. Pat Garofalo explains:
But under the current economic circumstances, this is a far more damaging policy then it was six months ago when McCain was touting it. The economic stimulus package’s main purpose is to close the GDP gap and jumpstart the economy by spurring spending by households, government and the private sector. A spending freeze would act as an “anti-stimulus,” cutting spending precisely when it’s too low and the economy is moving too slowly.
Yessir. Lay off an EPA lawyer amidst full employment, and he’ll find a job in the private sector. Stop pouring concrete on a road amidst robust growth, and the concrete will go to some other project. One can debate whether or not that’s a good tradeoff according to the specific situation. But that’s not the circumstances we face. Companies aren’t hiring. Lay off a government worker, and he’ll just be unemployed. And as an unemployed government worker, he’ll spend less at local stores leading to more layoffs in retail and more excess inventory in manufacturing. This kind of thing is how recessions become depressions.
18 Responses to “Mike Pence Calls for Massive Anti-Stimulus”
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February 25th, 2009 at 10:14 am
“in inflation-adjusted terms that’s what a “freeze” is”
That must make it an increase in deflation-adjusted terms, right?
February 25th, 2009 at 10:26 am
As the son of an EPA lawyer, my basic sense is that it would require more than simply budget cuts to lay my father off – whatever ways there can be to cut costs in the federal budget, laying off high ranking career civil servants is not, so far as I understand it, one of them.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:34 am
“Lay off an EPA lawyer amidst full employment, and he’ll find a job in the private sector. ”
But Matt, you just don’t understand economics. That government job is crowding out more jobs in private sector environmental regulators.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Cat’s dim as a post.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:45 am
His fake incredulity is the worst part. It’s more about taking his audience for being idiots by playing the part of one, though. It’s not like we didn’t already debate whether the stimulus bill and associated measures was worth running a massive deficit. That debate has already occured and Pence’s side lost. There is no new information here to justify an ‘enough is enough’ attitude.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:54 am
really? I don’t suppose this moron proposed any of this stuff when HIS PARTY was in power at both ends of Pa. Avenue and spending like a bunch of maniacs??? once again we see the lack of intellectual honesty on the part of these backward-thinking guys is breathtaking..
February 25th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I saw Bobby Jindal talk about the spending and what the GOP wants. (The GOP wants, to nobody’s surprise, more tax cuts … because we all know that tax cuts are the right thing to do in every fiscal situation that has ever occurred in the past 100 years). He says the GOP wants to give more money to businesses so they’ll create jobs.
He, and the party he represents, don’t seem to understand that there is no incentive for a business to create more jobs unless demand is increased. A business doesn’t say “hey, we have some extra cash, let’s just use it to take on a long-term expense and hire more people.” They hire people when they believe doing so will increase profit. For that, you need an increase in demand. They want to pump up the supply end with absolutely no plan to pump up the demand end.
This certainly isn’t the first example where the GOP didn’t know one end from the other.
February 25th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
The good thing about this “pro-cyclical” idea that MattY keeps pushing is that when the good times roll around again, we’ll have a massive deficit because of all the money we spent when the times weren’t so good, and that will encourage us to work even harder to pay that down, encouraging even more economic activity, leading to boom times for all!
February 25th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
A spending freeze is not a tax cut but a spending cut in inflation adjusted terms.
February 25th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Mr. Pence is fairly new to Republican leadership and has been fairly consistent as a fiscal conservative… so the hypocrisy accusation is a bit weak. Besides, his “spending freeze” is made simply to draw attention irresponsibility on the other side of the aisle. Also, overspending in the last 6 years could not have happened without the complicity (and the leadership) of majority Democrats and “rhino” republicans (including Bush himself).
As for the efficacy of tax cuts, we were in worse shape in the early 1980s and it was Reagan tax cuts that fixed it. Ditto for the early years of the Clinton administration. Ditto for the Kennedy administration. Contrast those situations with the “Depression” of the 1930s that was prolonged and deepened by NOT having tax cuts and by using massive spending as fiscal stimulus instead.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
So the fact that a big chunk of the bill was already tax cuts doesn’t matter?
Oh that’s right, it’s only the tax cuts that the Republicans want that matter. I forget these things. Silly me. We just IGNORE the HUGE tax cuts already implemented because they were pushed through on a party line vote by DEMOCRATS and are therefore irrelevant to the whole discussion.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Things I’ve learned from aaytch:
-Pence is a principled fiscal conservative despite voting for every single one of Bush’s tax cuts and every Iraq war appropriations bill.
-The Democrats have controlled Congress since 2002.
-Bush is a RINO (remember, conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed).
-Reagan and Kennedy did not engage in massive spending.
-Clinton cut taxes in 1993 despite that fact that Republicans have been railing against “the largest tax increase in history” ever since.
-The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression (this one has been so thoroughly debunked that I can’t bring myself to append a snappy retort).
Also note that MattY isn’t accusing Pence of being a hypocrite. He’s accusing him of being a moron.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Wait, didn’t the GOP caucus complain that their staff shouldn’t be cut despite losing 20% of their seats and didn’t the GOP get an increase in the Congressional staff budget? Hmmm…I bet Pence really opposed hiring or keeping those government employees.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Hey, cool tips. I’ll buy a glass of beer to the person from that forum who told me to go to your blog