Matt Yglesias

The Chamber and the Stimulus

Pat Garofalo takes a look at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s take on the stimulus proposal. Basically, they like the corporate tax cuts to which worth projects like mass transit have had to take a seat, but they want even more business tax cuts.

When you talk about bipartisanship, this—the attitude of major business lobbies—is probably more important than what John Boehner does or doesn’t say on Meet The Press. As we saw during the initial TARP vote, corporate America can deliver Republican votes for things the Republicans don’t really want to vote for. Any $800 billion bill split between tax and spending provisions is going to include some stuff people like, and some stuff people don’t like, and therefore a lot of members who could conceivably go either way. Thus one key question is whether in exchange for their business tax cuts, folks like the Chamber are going to need to pony up some bipartisan cover for the bill? Or are they going to be able to get away with a situation in which the administration lards the bill down with “pro business” corporate tax breaks, then the legislators the Chamber most loyally backs all vote against the bill anyway and campaign against its proponents two years from now for undue profligacy? Businessmen and their lobbyists are the quintessential pragmatists, so you can imagine bargaining with them much more easily than with an ideologue like Mike Pence. But being pragmatists, they also wouldn’t give anything away when they could avoid doing so.

Chamber Stimulus

It seems the US Chamber of Congress is getting ready to do its part to keep recession at bay, looking to stimulate the economy with $10 billion in spending to ensure that American labor law remains a bad joke in which companies can break all kinds of laws and stifle union organizing with impunity:

The chamber deployed a network of operatives in a number of key Senate races this year and campaigned aggressively — on the air and on the ground — against the card-check legislation. It will be maintaining those operations, hoping to win over some senators and peel back others, in addition to running TV ads. Last week it released the first in a series of reports refuting what it calls union rhetoric.

In theory, Chamber types hate unions because unionization is bad for business. It’s difficult, however, to see why it is that a union would want to wreck the business model of a firm whose workers it represents. By contrast, it’s easy to see why a union would want to shift the relative balance of compensation enjoyed by top managers versus lower-level employees. And it’s easy to see why Chamber types would be virulently hostile to such a shifting of the balance. Not at all clear why normal people would want to join them in their hostility or treat as credible the view that returning to a higher state of unionization would wreck the economy.