As you may know, Obama called for a new, much smaller ($50b) jolt of stimulus spending over the weekend. It's probably not going anywhere, for the obvious reasons, which the Washington Post goes into today.
But Congress-indifferent-to-president's-idea is not exactly huge news, under any president, so that's not what this post is about. It's about what I suspect is a hidden GOP agenda at work here.
John Boehner said this in response to Obama:
"Fact is that the spending spree in Washington is continuing to run unabated," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "The American people are screaming at the top of their lungs, ′Stop′! And to move this without finding other offsets in spending, I think, is irresponsible."
I have no doubt that Boehner is being sincere here. He doesn't like spending. His base doesn't. And polls are showing that people are concerned about the deficit. That's all fine. And it's not only Republicans who talk like this. In the WaPo piece you'll see Ben Nelson quoted to similar effect, if put less grandiosely.
But I think Republicans actually understand enough about economics to know that stimulus spending helps create jobs (yes, the last one did, or prevented far worse job losses if that's how you'd rather look at it). So there's a little bonus built into their posture here for them. Oppose spending not merely on principle but because you secretly know that it's more likely to keep unemployment high, slowing the recovery and hurting Obama.
Obama's going to lose this stimulus battle, I would imagine; there's no stomach for more spending on the Hill right now. He's getting to be in a real box on unemployment. I mean, given, it's terrible substantively, for actual human Americans who are out of work. But I mean politically. Some experts think unemployment may stay above 9% for this year and into next, and this will certainly affect Obama's numbers if that's how the dice roll.
