from the Daily Dish:

This much is now clear. Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one. There are legitimate debates to be had; and then there is the cynicism and surrealism of total political war. We now should have even less doubt about what kind of people they are. And the mountain of partisan vitriol Obama will have to climb every day of the next four or eight years.

It’s worth remembering where Ben Nelson and Mike Johanns fell in the battle between legitimate debates and political opportunism.

In response to news that Ben Nelson won’t vote for a stimulus package that differs much from the “compromise” he brokered:

The House bill, in addition to being more stimulative, is also cheaper. So if Pelosi wins in conference, and Arlen Specter drops out, the question is whether Snowe and Collins and, I suppose, Nelson, will accept a slightly higher spending to tax cut ratio (about two-thirds vs the current 55-or-so percent) in exchange for a stimulus bill that’s even leaner than their peculiarly stitched together plan.

If not, that pretty much obviates their main pretense for their “compromise”–that the Senate bill had become too expensive–and demonstrates, for all intents and purposes, that they were only ever concerned with a). showboating, and b). making the legislation more regressive. This is what I’ve suspected all along, of course, and I also suspect that the media will continue to fawn over them, even if their once-veiled opportunism becomes totally naked.

Ben Nelson seems quite content playing the fool. Via Ezra Klein at American Prospect:

$800 billion, I joked, was calculated using the famed Nelson output theorem, which is not at all reliant on symbolism or a preference for achievable round numbers. Rather, it’s reliant on old-fashioned Nebraska values.

The joke, it turns out, is on me. Or more precisely, all of us.
[…]
“Well, y’know, I don’t know where he’s from, but I’ll tell you, in Nebraska, $60 billion for education on top of $40 billion, that’s a pretty big commitment to education nationwide.”

And thus life imitates snark: Ben Nelson’s economic theory is based on a survey that Nelson has not conducted on Nebraskan attitudes towards education funding. Meanwhile, this is, as you’ll note, utterly non-responsive to the question at hand.
[…]
Confronted with Krugman’s argument that Nelson’s cuts did not display “any coherent economic argument,” Nelson offered no coherent argument — economic or otherwise — in response. And this is the guy deciding the size of the stimulus package. He’s cutting 500,000 jobs from the stimulus based on some fake poll he mentally conducted of Nebraskan preferences. He doesn’t even bother to justify his actions on the merits. It’s appalling.

from the Center for American Progress:

The consequences of this lower job creation go beyond the immediate impact of the recovery plan to the labor market. The recovery and reinvestment legislation as passed by the House was designed not just to create jobs through spending but also to put the economy on an upward trajectory where the private sector is once again creating jobs without the aid of intensive government intervention. The compromise necessitated by conservative influence in the Senate weakens the ability of the package to achieve that aim.

from yesterday:

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.
[…]
All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

Krugman also puts the DeMint price tag at $3 trillion, which was the “conservative” alternative to so-called big spending and big deficits.

from Swampland:

Meanwhile, Ben Nelson is out gutting the stimulus of the most stimulative spending. So if you’re on that green curve up there, don’t worry — there might not be enough money for food stamps or unemployment insurance, but you’ll get a nice fat tax break if you want to buy a new house.

UPDATE: For some real doom and gloom, check out Paul Krugman’s latest blog, “What the centrists have wrought.”

The short answer: to appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts.
[…]
Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.

I’ve decided to change the way I share the rejects, given that so many of the ideas are so outdated by the time I do a year-end countdown. So in order to make sure these rejected sketches are appreciated better closer to their proper temporal context, here begins what I hope will be a monthly process of counting down the Top 10 Rejects of the Month.

#10.

#9:

Continue reading →

Take it away, Steve:

“This is not a stimulus plan, it’s a spending plan,” Nebraska’s freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, “won’t create the promised jobs. It won’t activate our economy.”

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

Meanwhile, Nebraska’s other senator, Ben Nelson (D), was heading up a centrist group that was determined to cut $100 billion from the stimulus bill. Among his targets: $1.1 billion for health-care research into what is cost-effective and what is not. An aide explained that, in the senator’s opinion, there is “some spending that was more stimulative than other kinds of spending.”

Oh really? I’m sure they’d love to have a presentation on that at the next meeting of the American Economic Association. Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.