Matt Yglesias

One to Watch

The Franken-Coleman race in Minnesota should have us all on the edge of our seats not only because the polling is so close but because the public polling shows such a large third-party vote. Over ten percent of Minnesotans (and in some surveys closer to twenty) are currently telling pollsters they’ll vote for Barkley, but the historical pattern is for third party voters to fade away at the last minute once it becomes clear that their man is stuck hopelessly in third. Will that happen? If it does, which way will his supporters break?

Norm Coleman: Neo-Hooverite

The incumbent in Minnesota has some very odd ideas about the economy:

“I would be very cautious if a stimulus plan becomes another excuse to simply spending more dollars,” the Republican senator said in an interview after a campaign rally Tuesday in Bemidji.

A stimulus plan is not an excuse, it’s an effort to prevent the country from sliding into an extremely deep recession. The evidence suggests that the most effective forms of stimulus are spending-side stimulus. But irrespective of that, the very meaning of fiscal stimulus is that you increase the gap between spending and revenue. Coleman prefers a neo-Hooverite approach of austerity budgeting:

Coleman’s recovery plan includes enforcing spending caps, freezing congressional pay, enforcing pay-go where new spending must be accompanied by like spending cuts, require the president to submit spending cuts to Congress, giving the president line-item veto authority, closing the tax gap of unpaid taxes, closing tax loopholes, making sure Social Security and Medicare are solvent in the future.

Some of these are okay idea for the long-run, others are priorities I disagree with, but in terms of short-run recovery all of them — up to and including gimmicky ideas like freezing congressional pay — would be counterproductive. Like Saxby Chambliss, maybe he can get Ben Bernanke to explain the basics of fiscal policy to him.