Conservative Stimulation

What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like?

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Tax cuts for the wealthy and more deregulation. Maybe a return to the gold standard.

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Did you even have to ask?

What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like?
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Don’t forget a funnelling of all FICA taxes directly into the equities market.
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And no-bid contracts all around for private Security forces.

Oh, I saw the headline and thought this was a piece on David Vitter’s sex life…

Blame it on Bill Clinton and the Democrats who held a slight majority in Congress for the past two years. Make the lower tier Congressional Democrats sign oaths of allegiances. Detain Reid and Pelosi. Ship Bill Clinton to the same location that the Gitmo detainees will be going to.
Oh and privatize social security asap. Because your retirement funds will be safe in the stock market!

“What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like?”
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Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You’re a funny man, Joe Klein. Who knew?

I’d like to point out that today was William Kristol’s last Op-Ed in the Times. Just a small statement at the end of the column. Truly an end of a (loathsome) era for the Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/opinion/26kristol.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

“What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like? ”
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Uhhhhh, just like the last 8 years?
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Oh Joe, but the bad news is that most of the stimulus money won’t reach the economy until 2010, or at least that’s what Time magazine reports:
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“Not helping matters is a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that came out Tuesday, which shows that only 38% of the $350 billion in appropriated funds — which includes $274 billion for infrastructure investments — would make their way into the economy within two years of enactment.”
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1873192,00.html

hotbbq, Kristol’s going to the Washington Post.

if consumers, seeing tax increases in their future, rein in spending even more.
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This is the one spot where I think Conservatives miss the boat. The biggest threat facing ‘consumers’ is the imminent loss of their jobs. This has a tenfold more important effect on their spending confidence than their tax rates. If you’re getting a paycheck every week, you know how much to expect and a 3-5% change in your takehome rate, isn’t going to affect you vacation plans all that much. If you’ve just been layed off and have 12 weeks of unemployment checks to look forward to, your spending pattern might be a tad bit tighter.
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People who’s idea of belt tightening is Aspen instead of Switzerland will never understand this basic concept.

“What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like?”
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War with Iran?

Joe’s question seems to imply that a conservative stimulus plan would be based upon a supply alternative = supply side economic stimulus, which typically means monetary policy. Tax cuts are a form of fiscal stimulus, not monetary.
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Since the rest of the monetary tools are gone (interest rates can’t go below zero), some crazy supply sider might advocate reducing the required reserves ratio (the portion of deposits that banks have to hold to back up deposits) that banks hold in order to increase the supply of loanable funds. In that way, the banks could worry less about meeting reserve reqs and perhaps stop calling in so many loans and lines of credit. Go ahead and lend!! The FDIC’s will clean up any mess!

That’s easy:
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During the campaign John McCain several times that Social Security was an abomination, so you can be sure they will end that.
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After that they will end medicare the other abomination.
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Then I suppose they will begin to phase out food stamps, unemployment and aid to education (its not as if they believe in education).
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Heck they don’t believe in science so this would be a good time to get rid of the FDA altogether. They know now that just starving their budgets is no guarantee that all information will be squelched, so given a second chance its best to get rid of it altogether.

Alternatively, conservatives might want to advocate getting rid of trade laws (i.e., anti-dumping regulations, duties). By making goods from China even cheaper, we would spur spending and then the Chinese govt would be forced to buy even more of our Treasury bills in order to prop up the dollar to the yuan. That would majorly increase our money supply and allow us to start creating another bubble to get us out of the bursting of the last one!
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Note to Cinci- I’m not serious.

Joe Klein:
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I can appreciate as well as you do when conservatives are actually capable of any perception of reality at all, but here’s this bit of insanity from the linked piece that just can’t be ignored in all of this congratulatory prose of yours:

More to It Than Meets the Eye
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The hidden coherence of Obama’s recovery plan.
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by Irwin M. Stelzer
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02/02/2009, Volume 014, Issue 19
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The president plans to convene a “fiscal responsibility” panel before he presents his first budget to the Congress, and then move on to an attack on the unsustainable projected costs of Medicare, which is a far bigger problem than getting the Social Security system on a firm footing.
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The outlines of a health care deal seem obvious. The cost of Medicare can be cut by a means-tested system of copayments, to prevent the current overuse of the system by patients for whom a visit to the doctor or some optional
procedure has no cost. Friends living among their retired colleagues in Florida tell me that folks in their community often schedule an away-day to include a visit to some doctor, perhaps en route to a movie. That health care, when it’s a free good to the user, is over-consumed should come as no surprise.
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The copayments will probably be used to fund health care benefits of some sort for lower-income workers now without adequate insurance. Never mind what you think of such a plan, or any of the others that will emerge from the fertile mind of health care czar Tom Daschle. The point is that if Obama succeeds in reducing the level of spending now built into the entitlements system, he will have the cake he has eaten–deficit-increasing stimulus spending–followed by deficit-reducing entitlement reform. A return to the fiscal probity long since abandoned by a Republican administration.

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“Friends living among their retired colleagues in Florida tell me…”?
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Wow.
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I guess that it’s just too much to expect a complete bout of honesty or self-awareness from this guy.
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At least he’s (as you correctly point out, Joe) being honest about the true problem with entitlements being rooted in the hyper-inflation of health care costs making Medicare unsustainable in a couple of decades (if the rest of the government is also way in the red).
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The problem, of course, is that conservatism as an ideology has no realistic lens through which to accurately observe and note the failure of markets to provide an efficient system of pricing with respect to certain necessary goods and services.
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“Reforming” the price of keeping one’s elderly self (or spouse, or beloved family) alive by raising the cost to those on fixed incomes even higher than its current hyper-inflationary levels (and therefore reducing demand –and, subsequently price– in Irwin M. Stelzer’s theoretical, market-solves-all dream world) is ludicrous at best, euthanasia at worst.
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The problem with the price of health care being hyper-inflationary isn’t that people consume too much, it’s that markets can’t adapt to the special nature of health care, i.e. discipline often means suffering and death, and that we’ve allowed interested actors in a failed marketplace to perpetuate a model that doesn’t work for the rest of us.
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Unregulated markets aren’t able to correct for wildly, socially inappropriate swings or trends in the prices of certain, often necessary goods and services (the current, apparently unsolvable, free-fall deflation of housing prices comes to mind). Blaming anecdotal elderly Floridians is par for the course when it comes to rank fools who inhabit Irwin M. Stelzer’s social bubble, but it should have nothing whatsoever to do with any responsible solution put forward by the Obama administration.
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It is incumbent upon you to point out this unfortunate obstacle to a truly bi-partisan solution to the government’s (and the American people’s, by the way) financial woes, isn’t it, Joe Klein?

Nora O’Donnell was just once again flogging the non existant CBO study. The otherwise very underprepared Congressman Chris VanHollen at least called her on that bullsh!t.

“Joe’s question seems to imply that a conservative stimulus plan would be based upon a supply alternative…”
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Worse, it assumes that Republicans have any motive or intention to govern responsibly and that you can use the words “full-blooded” “conservative” and “stimulus” all together without laughing.

In JK’s defense, he doesn’t sound like he’s expecting an answer to his question any time soon. And I think this is the correct response. What ideas does the GOP have to offer other than the same stuff that hasn’t worked for 8 years? If they can answer that question honestly, we can have a real policy debate.
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I’m not holding my breath; but as far as I’m concerned, the GOP can join the reality-based community whenever they wish.

By the way, about those millions to go to contraceptives that John “men give me a” Boehner keeps referring to, its not of course what he is making it out to be.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_01/016613.php
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T]he family-planning program that Pelosi supports expanding in the stimulus bill was created in 1972 under the leadership of Republican president Richard Nixon.
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What’s being proposed is an expansion in the number of states that can use Medicaid money, with a federal match, to help low-income women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Of the 26 states that already have Medicaid waivers for family planning, eight are led by Republican governors (AL, FL, MS, SC, CA, LA, MN and RI — a ninth, MO, had a GOP governor until this past November). If this policy is truly a taxpayer gift to “the abortion industry,” as John Boehner and House Republicans claim, where are the GOP governors promising to end the program in their states?
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Additionally, the process of obtaining a waiver for Medicaid family-planning coverage is extremely cumbersome. A letter written by Wisconsin health regulators in 2007 noted that some states have had to wait for as long as two years before their request was approved. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that eliminating the waiver requirement would save states $400 million over 10 years.

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Funny how the media folks are flogging a nonexistent CBO report while totally ignoring a CBO report that actually exists. Imagine that.

What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like?
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1. Strip mine the West. All of it. Those goddamn hippies have held us back for too long. Might as well knock the Appalachians down while we’re at it.
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2. Sell all that mineral wealth to China and Russia to pay off our debts to them.
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3. Re-borrow a couple more trillion dollars from them and use it to invade Iran.
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4. Blame the Mexicans.

Cliff-

Don’t forget about funding off-shore drilling in the Alaskan wildlife preserve, and while you’re at it, get rid of the EPA and those pesky labor laws that make our workforce more expensive than the 7 year olds making sneakers in Asia.

lk – good point. In order to stay competitive with the Mexicans (whose fault this all is) we need to get our kids back to work. This will also help shrink the government because we won’t have to spend anything on education!

The conservatives aren’t going to provide any alternatives. They’ll just point out why any plan Obama or the democrats advocate won’t work. They’re more like over-educated film critics. They’ll endlessly nitpick and criticize without ever producing anything of their own.

[...] Joe Klein praising Irwin Stelzer on his article in the Weekly Standard praising the general outlines of the stimulus package. “Stelzer makes this point: if the Republicans really must exercise their reflexive political impulses, it’s best not to tinker around the edges with their criticism. They should provide a supple alternative. What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like? Go on, John McCain and John Boehner, make my day.” [...]