Steele Back in Hot Water

“He does now he’s the head of the RNC, right?”
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Now? Know?

He does now he’s the head of the RNC, right?
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Jay Newton-Small:
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Did he not say these things publicly before he became head of the RNC?
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Or is this a typo?

The infallible rule of the internet-If you write mocking someone’s grammar, syntax or spelling you will make a similar mistake within minutes.

Typo fixes, apologies. And, yes, he said them after becoming chairman — the GQ lede:
“I met Michael Steele in his office at the RNC several weeks into his new job…”
JNS

yes, he said them after becoming chairman
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Thank you for fixing/responding, etc, Jay Newton-Small.
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I understand that the piece leads with “after he started” at the RNC, I’m talking about before.
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Has he always been a social centrist (as opposed to a social conservative)? Has he said anything like this before he became chairman, to your knowledge?

While I find his rather public self-destruction fairly humerous, I must say this is very emblematic of the GOP’s short-sighted policies and decision-making capabilities. That is, they picked a ‘charismatic black guy’ to respond to Obama’s election as opposed to, say, a ‘qualified organization-minded administrator with good PR sense’ to rebuild the party.
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There is a HUGE difference between having raw charisma and knowing how to manage the media.
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Although there was a theory advanced on one of the pundit shows that may up the GOP’s judgement in my eyes (while simultaneously shooting their cynicism quotient through the roof): they advance the ‘minority’ chairman, set him up to fail, then swoop in with their Standard Old White Guy and throw up their arms saying “we tried!”
At least in that scenario they actually knew what they were getting into; otherwise their selection of Steele has been an utter “what were they thinking” moment.

At least in that scenario they actually knew what they were getting into; otherwise their selection of Steele has been an utter “what were they thinking” moment.
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Pretty much every moment since at least mid-September has been a “what were they thinking?” moment for the Republicans.

Here’s a question for everyone. What does not recognizing the individual right to control your own body have to do with insisting that government spending is evil? How did allowing corporations unfettered freedom get joined atthe hip to denying individuals the same freedom?
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Why are the platforms of both major US political parties morally incoherent and why are there so few people who seem to notice?
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Just curious…..

People seem to assume that this interview was a gaffe from Steele, but just maybe he’s smart enough to recognize that the GOP has to distance itself from social conservatives if it is going to be able to attract “moderate” voters with its “tax and spend Democrats” argument.
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Much as the “Democratic” base has nowhere to go despite being appalled with DINO control of the House and Senate, social conservatives aren’t going to vote for Democrats anyway… and being from Maryland, Steele knows this from personal experience.

It’s hard to imagine Steele lasting as the chair of the RNC. Some of his views on inclusiveness might be a part of the future of the republican party, but it doesn’t seem to be a good fit with the party as it is currently configured. Pro choice, tolerance of gays and hip hop? Isn’t that three strikes and you’re out? I wonder how many southern conservatives think Snoop Dogg is a spyware program developed by Homeland Security.

PD,
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The platforms are morally incoherent for two main reasons:
1) People are morally incoherent and like having lots of inconsistencies in their beliefs to suit their own biases and prejudgements. (i.e. welfare for middle class homeowners is ok, for poor and unemployed, not so much) Political parties want people to vote for them, so they in turn adopt morally incoherent positions.
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2) No party intellectual on either side even tries to start from a serious moral and ethical worldview then work outwards to their policies from there. Buckley sort of tried this back in the fifties, with a Burkean perspective, but was defined as much by what he was against as what he was for. Obama strikes me as the type who has seriously and honestly confronted this type of intellectual journey, but it’ll be a few years before we know how much, if at all, that personal discovery influences his politics/policies.

Time was, your average Republican would have been down with Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, but that time is long past.

If, otoh, Steele had misidentified the Oak Ridge Boys, there might have been a problem.

PD, in an abortion, you are deciding what to do with somebody else’s body as well as your own.
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As for Steele, he’s already retracted his statement and pronounced support for the Human Life Amendment. He can still save himself. He just needs to THINK A LITTLE. THINK, Steele, THINK. Then go on TV. Great Scott, shouldn’t that be obvious these days?

“And I always thought Snoop Dogg was—he just reminded me of the fellas back home.”
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Steele grew up among the Nation of Islam? Who knew? How does that compare with your Vietnam-era radical conspiracy, Mandrake?

pluk: It might be a good indicator, and maybe Steele is smart enough to recognize the need to grow the party via inclusiveness–his less-than-shining attempts at message communication seem to tack along those lines–but when you’re constantly forced to retract your own statements not 24 hours later (as he’s already done with the abortion thing, and Rush)…well, you wind up with a net negative in terms of ground gained.
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It’s unfortunate, since the GOP does have some good and valid points on governance when they aren’t taken to their Nth degree. However, in their current incarnation there is just so much toxic waste being spewn by the party that they are just absolutely tainted. Its an intellectual turnoff, and probably one of the single largest reasons for their repelling younger and nonwhite voters.

I agree with those that think that if the GOP wants to become competitive in purple and blue states then it needs to remove being pro-choice as a third rail issue. I understand if the party as a whole wishes to present that as the “official” stance of the party, but it seems as if the GOP has been losing moderates for a long time now. In the last election the GOP lost its last rep in all of New England, and yet many continue to believe that not being conservative enough was the problem.

I don’t actually think that Steele needs to move the Republicans from social conservatism to the social center, because there are distinct regions of this country with huge populations that support social conservatism as a bulwark against the cultural hegemony of the more populous and heterogeneously populated regions.
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What Steele needs to do is convince people like Jay Newton-Small that he’s one of them before he can credibly convince them that a majority of people (with whom they have very, very little experience) nationally, i.e. “The American People” are as socially conservative as the geographic regions the Republicans represent. Elite consensus at the moment is that this is no longer the case, but that can change back again.

Better reporting on Mike Steele can be found here.
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http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/12/steele-pro-life/

you are deciding what to do with somebody else’s body as well as your own
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That doesn’t begin to explain the gay-bashing, the objection to birth control, the objection to sex-ed and the basic desire to insure that everyone shares their misery. The people who object to abortion the loudest have absolutely zero regard for the fate of the blastocyst and are motivated entirely by the ‘ick factor’ that comes from imagining other people’s sexual activity.
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The minority of people about whom what I just said is false, don’t suffer from the moral inconsistency I’m complaining about. They are rare.

uhasan, I’m one of the ones who thinks that the GOP is losing because we’re not sticking to core principles.
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1) GOP Principle: lower government spending. Right. Yes, it’s a time of crisis…but if they had just spent the money more wisely…darn you, Paulson. >_<
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Then there’s the earmarks and the great Republican corruption festival circa 2006. Yup.
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2) GOP Principle: less government intrusion. While I’m pro-life, there’s not many ways you can defend anti-gay marriage.
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3) GOP principle: strong national defense. As our military is still overstretched, and was on the verge of defeat not too far back thanks to asinine war planning, this is a bit of a kicker. In fact, if the Iraq War had gone smoothly, the current President might have been different.

PD, it’s a tangled web and there’s a lot of different motivations. And yes, what you said probably applies to the most annoying social cons…the kind that hire gay prostitutes in their spare time, etc.
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Some problems with sex ed stem from the assumption that abstinence doesn’t really have a place in the curriculum, or giving sex ed too early. I consider those are legitimate concerns. The rest of the reasons are usually crap.

Oops. The ‘are’ is not supposed to be there…

Why is Steele on the hot seat? Did everyone forget when Governor Palin made the same statement in one of her TV interviews? Yet all the Republicans were so giddy about her, they completely missed the statement.

The Republicans have for a long time played fast and loose with the abortion issue. I don’t think they were even anti-abortion in their 1976 platform. They like to keep the issue alive, because they can attract the votes of those who would not vote Republican based on any other issue. However, they are happy that Roe v. Wade has not been overturned and abortion made illegal, because women would turn against the Republican party in droves. So they continue to offer lip service to the issue in order to get votes.

Yoshi,
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Sounds like a description of “Eisenhower Republicans,” a phenomenon I’m just barely old enough to remember. They were (are) people with whom one could have a reasonable discussion in the face of ideological differences. The three point you mention above are perfect examples.

“points,” plural. Cringe.

The more he speaks the more I do wonder if the republicans chose someone they thought shared their values and would lead them or just picked the only black guy in the room so they could hold him up and say “LOOK WE HAVE BROWN PEOPLE, TOO!” You could almost FEEL Bobby Jindal getting the same treatment, though his tepid non-State of the Union response seems to have resulted in his being benched for the time being. In the meantime, Steele’s latest bout of foot-in-mouth disease may actually result in his ouster if the cultural conservatives are sufficiently enraged.

http://trueblarg.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/foot-in-mouth-disease/

yoshi –

I think you’re losing because the GOP has cognitively dissonant core bumper stickers instead of core principles. When a “strong national defense” is allowed to encompass torture and unrestrained domestic spying it’s hard to make a case for “less government intrusion.” Ditto when two entire wars placed on the national credit card, coupled with tax cuts disproportionately skewed to favor the upper brackets, transfer more and more burdens of government onto the rest of us. Try talking honestly and in depth about how these core principles could be implemented so as to benefit everyone and you might have a shot.

@yoshiattack, I would vote for a party that adhered to those principles, however when the GOP leaders, and I’m including Rush, Hannity, and other pundits, (not sure everyone considers them leaders, but they do reach a large audience) talk about not sticking to its values i believe they solely focus on the fiscal aspect. In truth I don’t believe that the GOP thinks that it has turned away from its social values at all and its hard to imagine the GOP becoming even more socially conservative than it already is.

Whatever anyone thinks of the Bush years. He did deliver quite a lot for social conservatives. Ban on partial birth abortion, a national voice against gay marriage, the stem cell ban, as well as the whole Terri Shiavo fiasco (so much for less government intrusion).

Returning to my point about the GOP not being fiscally conservative, while this is true, it has always been true, its not something that developed only during the Bush years. The problem is institutional. Congress controls the budget and it is a body composed of individuals who answer to a specific constituency not a national one. Fiscal conservatism then is only politically useful policy for someone on the national scale like the president. But McCain harped on it a lot and still lost.

Finally my perspective is that most people want pork in their district and don’t really care about the rest of it. I certainly don’t, it represents 2% of the $410 billion omnibus bill. To me a real fiscal conservative will decrease Defense spending and enact entitlement reform, and maybe even raise taxes so we can pay down the debt, because it will save money in the long run.

It would be a total shock to see Steele last at the RNC past this summer…

http://www.political-buzz.com/

Friar Tuck: exactly. That’s what I think conservatives SHOULD mean when they say the GOP needs to “go back to its roots.” Instead, what I think they mean is something along the lines of bring the culture wars back/more tax cuts for the rich/write the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique in the Army Field Manual.

Man I wish they would rerun that Lee Atwater special that was on PBS. He helped Ronald Reagan win reelection and was the architect of George H W Bush winning. He also was basically the godfather politically of Karl Rove but he was much more innovative and had a lot more sleezy tactics than just about any other strategist ever. In the biography his friends and associates all but admitted that he didn’t have any conviction about abortion but he recognized that he could use the issue to pull in voters to the Republican party so he used it again and again and all of his acolytes continue to do so. Notice that as of yet no attempt has been made to seriously ban abortion or over turn Roe V Wade even though 20 out of the last 28 years we have had a “pro life” Republican President. Yet still social conservatives don’t get that they are being used. There isn’t a chance in hell that any Republican President or Congressmember will ever seriously strike to ban abortion or oveturn Roe V Wade. But single issue voters will continue to vote Republican simply because Democrats are honest about that fact and Republicans aren’t.

Yoshi: Interesting comment at #21. That was basically my grandfather’s brand of Republicanism, which is why he and I could have reasonable discussions about politics even though I’m a life-long Democrat.
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Re your first point, I’m curious if you agree with Keynsians that right now is not the time to reduce government spending, even if that is normally a sensible policy. (You may have weighed in on this before, if so I apologize.)

BTW there is almost zero chance in my opinion that Steele get’s canned before the elections next year. The optics would simply be too bad especially when the guy trying to oust him the most has some race problems in his past. Even the dumbest Republican on the Hill has to know that firing Steele and putting in Katon Dawson is going to hurt their party more than help it. Mind you most minorities I know, myself included, believe that Steele is a total embarrassment. Still after so heavily promoting his election as proving that there is room for everyone in the Republican Party they are kind of stuck with him for the time being.

The currrent battle within the republican party between the social conservatives that are determined to defend their positions at all costs and those who recognize the necessity of moderation isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon. The changing demographics in the country are playing a much larger part in the equation than the base is willing to acknowledge. Steele sees this but Limbaugh doesn’t. Limbaugh’s faction is larger and it’s winning. You see Steele’s group apologizing to Limbaugh’s regularly. When is the last time anyone from Limbaugh’s base publicly apologized to someone from Steele’s? Every election loss seems to push the Limbaugh crowd towards an even more conservative stance. Instead of seeing the losses as a rejection they are interpreting the losses as a reason to move even further to the right. They’re not learning from their mistakes, they’re just compouding them.

FlownOver:
Save the two wars bit, I agree with pretty much everything else you said. Forgot to mention that in regards to the ‘private freedoms’ principle: tapping phones with reckless abandon and no coherent oversight while espousing such a moral is hypocrisy a chimpanzee could detect. A lot of Republicans are completely broke on the torture issue too. There’s no patience for fighting a SMARTER war; instead, it’s phrased something like “this guy beheads babies! JACK BAUER TORTURE!”
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To that extent I do agree with Joe Klein that a “smarter” approach is needed. However, his idea of such an approach seems to be the current foreign policy team telling everybody else that they’re smarter than the last set of guys (while giving their Russian counterparts symbolic gifts with excruciating typos). He also seems bent on pedantic utterances in his foreign policy, like “Ahmedinejad is not the real leader of Iran” – well, duh
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uhasan:
The pundits often overreach, but by no means are any of them the “leaders.” There’s a lot of competition between O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, etc…they do not integrate into a monolithic groupthink entity. And none of them have the national audience required to even be in consideration for the “leader” of the party. Right now, the GOP is basically leaderless. I agree that they usually cause more harm than good, though.
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As for earmarks, I’ve got to disagree there too. They corrupt our legislators, which creates a disproportionate effect far beyond their financial size. They’re among the most tone-deaf government spending efforts as well.

IMHO earmarks don’t corrupt politicians, they just expose the corruption that is already there.

“Sounds like a description of “Eisenhower Republicans,” a phenomenon I’m just barely old enough to remember.”

Friar tuck, there are plenty of reasonable Republicans in Washington, they’re just not elected officials. Most are the consultants the media talks to all day everyday, which is why the msm have such a good relationship with them and buy into their lies so often.
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And we on the left try to call them out for the batsh#t crazies they really are, the msm thinks about the consultants they come into contact with and continue to think we are over the top.

Art:
I understand the position that government spending was what could have prevented the Great Depression, which is the basic thinking behind Keynesians today as far as I can tell. I wholeheartedly agree. But we need RESPONSIBLE spending. I have not seen any evidence of responsibility in this entire fiscal orgy.
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The government is hemorrhaging trillions of dollars to the architects of this screwup, and I’m not exactly sure if it’ll ever be paid back (it better be). Then there’s this complete whale of a stimulus package. Last I checked the economic situation was what needed fixing, not Democratic pet causes.

SG, perhaps, but if you give the power to influence and the power to gain large sums of money (via kickbacks, etc.) to any person, there’s a good chance they’ll be corrupted eventually.

The problem with earmarks is that EVERYBODY does it. For weeks now I’ve been comparing the Federal trough to a lottery pool. Everyone pays into one big pot and then competes to see who can draw the most money back out. If anyone were serious about reducing earmarks, then they would simultanously be favoring doubling State Income or Sales taxes. By acting like a financial heat-sink, the Federal government gets to participate in the sleight of hand that allows people to think that they’re getting something for nothing.
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The only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Republicans howl about the process while the Democrats simply shrug their shoulders and proceed.
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Guess which approach is more dishonest?

yoshiattack, I’ll concede the point on Hannity and Beck, but its all really a matter of semantics, call them leaders or people of influence, it really doesn’t matter. Rush is a whole other story however, he got the head of the RNC, as politically inept as he may be given this blog post, to apologize to him. That’s power you can’t buy.

As for pork, perhaps i was being too lackadaisical in my statement when i said I don’t care about pork. While I do consider it a problem and would be happy with it gone, it just seems that it gets a disproportionate coverage compared to a more serious problem like the rising cost of medicare. As for the corrupting influence of it, i have to admit i never thought of it that way, however i still consider it a minor evil compared to the greater corrupting power of lobbyists.

Yoshia
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Doesn’t that accurately describe every elected position in Washington even without earmarks? If thats the case each and every one should be corrupted (and I know there are some who believe they all are).
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By the way can you describe some of the Democratic pet projects in the stimulus that you object to or don’t think are stimulative?

McCain is pretty honest about his position, unlike a certain other person who ran for President who just signed about 9,000 earmarks into law. On-the-job training mistake, I hope. HOPE. Democrats whine about this stuff too, come election season. A politician complaining about special interests while supporting something like the EFCA is a ridiculous sight.
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As for the rest of the Republicans, yeah, a lot of them are hypocrites. I can’t defend people who are simply wrong.

@yoshi,
So you think he should have vetoed the omnibus bill?
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Really?

yoshia
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What was President Obama dishonest about wrt earmarks?

Paul D
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Give me a minute, please

Yoshi–not all earmarks are bad. Most are actually very helpful to communities/states/industries they target.
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Yes, some are absymal vanity projects or just not worth the cost (Bridge to nowhere!), but many also provide key funds for needed programs. A blanket “no earmark!” stance is too draconian; however there is plenty of room to regulate and find middle ground.

SG:
Millions of dollars for condom distribution, power plants, Coast Guard equipment, golf carts, and whatever else was included in the thousands of earmarks included with the bill.
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Other than that – forcing a ton of education and healthcare spending into something that’s supposed to stimulate the economy. I can understand handouts intended to shore up schools, some of which are suffering enough to cut Monday/Friday from the week (!), but much of the other initiatives have nothing to do with the economy. I’m not going to call any of the investments right or wrong outright (okay, maybe flushing cash into Medicaid), but creating jobs should be the point – and it’s not. Such initiatives should have been saved for later bills that actually address and reform institutions (especially in the medical field), instead of being cooked up in around a month. NOTHING smart can be done in that time.
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As for politicians, no, I don’t believe all of them are corrupt. Even if the majority are, we should be trying to remove the possible avenues of corruption whenever we can instead of putting up with a system that continues to deliver garbage.
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uhasan:
Yes, it’s true that health and energy reform are bigger issues than pork. At the same time, however, pork can potentially complicate the legislative process in a number of ways, and particularly in areas like defense, it causes gigantic amounts of waste (uncompetitive contracting). Anything that makes members of Congress unnecessarily beholden to specific interests has to go.
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Off the top of my head, a general example is California. Their budget used to be around $100 billion, yet now it’s ballooned to $140 billion thanks to influences from so-called “special interests.” Meanwhile, revenue hasn’t been growing as steadily.
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In regards to Rush: he does have a lot of power, of course. But it’s a toss up as to how much of that is due to the power of the bluff. Looking at the general election, he was dead set against McCain the entire primary. He’s a loudmouth, and they tend to be more bark than bite. Steele would have been perfectly within his boundaries to defend his ‘ugly’ comment, as there are a lot of Republicans who don’t agree with Rush on his tactics.

yoshiattack:
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I understand the position that government spending was what could have prevented the Great Depression, which is the basic thinking behind Keynesians today as far as I can tell. I wholeheartedly agree.
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You’re the first conservative or Republican I have read with this level of reality-based thinking. Accepting the consensus premises of post-19th century economics seems to be beyond the ability of a majority of movement conservatives.
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Since the principal objection to spending as stimulus from movement conservatives is that the Keynesian theory is wrong, and that it didn’t work last time it was tried in a great crisis, and that applied stimulative spending causes Great Depressions, when we hear more talk about “pork”, we are forced to note that, for the most part, the conservative movement is not reality-based, and would object to any stimulative spending on ideological grounds.
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If movement conservatives would join the reality-based community as you have, then we could actually move on to a discussion of what is truly stimulative, and what should or shouldn’t be a part of government spending. I wholeheartedly agree that “we need RESPONSIBLE spending.“, and I’m not at all confident that this is taking place, either. The problem is that people like Michelle Malkin and Brett Hume don’t concede that their premises are untrue, they simply move on to an easier political argument –and that’s really, really dishonest and in bad faith of them.
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The government is hemorrhaging trillions of dollars to the architects of this screwup, and I’m not exactly sure if it’ll ever be paid back (it better be).
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I’m with you, and I’m mad as hell.
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Your position is very close to the liberal position (as opposed to the centrist position) as expressed by Duncan Black:
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Financial Intermediaries
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I know I’ll make this point a billion times before this is all over, but there’s a difference between thinking that well run financial intermediaries (which, in theory, competition will create) are necessary for a modern economy and believing that the semi-oligopolistic system of financial intermediaries which have demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that they’re at best incompetent and most likely some combination of incompetent and incredibly corrupt should be maintained at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars (optimistically) in taxpayer money.

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We’re not socialists, yoshiattack, we’re liberals –no matter what the centrists and conservatives say about us. We believe in a free-er market than unregulated oligopoly and corrupt elite practices allow for.
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Hell yeah, let’s have that conversation about what makes for best, good, bad and worst spending in a f*cking crisis, yoshiattack, and then let’s pressure our representatives to do the same –but first we (including the conservative movement) need to concede reality, like you have just shown the capacity to do.

yoshia says
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Millions of dollars for condom distribution, power plants, Coast Guard equipment, golf carts, and whatever else was included in the thousands of earmarks included with the bill.

And yet there is no condom distribution in the bill nor any earmarks. I am talking about the stimulus bill here, you realize that right? You don’t think power plants are stimulative seeing as how somebody has to work to build them and work in them? Golf carts? Not sure where you got that one from. Perhaps you could provide a link. Coast Guard equipment is not in the stimulus bill either. The health care provisions in the stimulus bill will save tons of money. The education money in the bill is for rebuilding schools. And they certainly aren’t going to rebuild themselves.
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You know you don’t actually have to get second hand information on whats in the bill. Its actually posted online for you to go through for yourself.

yoshi –
Good on ya for the engagement and rational discourse, even if there are some irreconcilable clashes on the basics. I can’t understand why hallucigate doesn’t grasp the diff between your approach and his digital Tourette’s.

Hammerlock, I understand that a lot of respectable services are due to earmarks. (for the same reason that ‘special interests’ and their accompanying lobbyists are legitimate, necessary components of our democratic process) Yet, what kind of regulation could control their influence in Congress?
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Urgh, correction to my last post. The condom stimulus was taken out of the bill. Not so with its counterparts, though.
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PD:
It seems that Obama should have maneuvered more effectively in the time before the bill made it to his desk. It might have helped not to impose such a ridiculous timeline, either. In any case, the fact remains that he was jerked around by the congressional establishment, leading him to go against his campaign promises. Should he have vetoed the bill? At that point, I’m not sure it would have done much, but I would have supported him if he did. After all the spending we’ve done over the past few months, one more trillion can wait a bit.
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SG: Remember when he promised to go through the recovery efforts “line by line” to prevent waste? Yeah, I do too.
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This led to a particularly hilarious moment a few weeks ago or so when he professed the bill contained no pork even as he promised a highway would be handed out to the Indiana constituency he was speaking to.

I agree with flownover in that I am very impressed with the level of discourse. I will remember this day and tell my grandchildren about the time i had a rational discussion…ON THE INTERNETS!

yoshia
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So its pork to work on a highway? Maybe I have the wrong definition of pork. As for the recovery efforts, the omnibus bill wasn’t a part of the recovery effort. It was a spending bill from last year. And in the budget he just submitted he did go line by line through looking for fraud and waste. Maybe you didn’t notice that he is ending the no bid contracts that the last Republican President was so fond of. The person who talked about vetoing a spending bill with earmarks was John McCain not President Obama. Funny how McCain can’t even get the junior Republican Senator from his own state to stop earmarking though. Very curious.

The problem with limiting “special interests” is that for every time you whack that mole, it finds another hole to pop out from.
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That said, we could probably do a lot to make life more difficult for lobbyists–Obama’s made some inroads with that in his admin…unfortunately for him most people who have experience in governance also do the lobbying gig (its good money, apparently) so they’re either disqualified or need to get a waiver.
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With Earmarks themselves, there are ways to make them less easy to tack onto random bills; the actual legislative process can be codified and regulated effectively. Influence peddling and lobbying…not so much.

One of the reasons that we know who got what earmarks in the omnibus bill is because of earmark reforms that have already taken place. They can only take up a small part of the bill, everyone has to put their name on it and put it up on the web, and they have to reduced to I believe 2004 levels. More reform will come but the omnibus bill itself was a reduction historically when it comes to earmarks. They made up less than 2% of the bill.

SG:
Yeah, realized my mistake about the $350 million birth control fund, which was taken out under pressure of outrage. And yes, if you’re parsing the definition of earmarks, there are none in the bill. Yet, projects that at any other time would be defined as “earmarks” ARE in the bill. Case in point: the highway Obama was referring to. As for the golf carts, those were Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, which look like futuristic golf carts. Incidentally, this link about GOP stimulus myths explains it: http://www.factcheck.org/politics/gop_stimulus_myths.html
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In the meantime…
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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090209/D968BMTO0.html
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“For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other “priority procurements” by the Coast Guard.”
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Remember, there were thousands of such requests in the bill. Yes, they would employ somebody to build them, like ANY pork project. Are they meaningful? No. This is exactly the kind of “throw money!” philosophy that wastes tons of money. How many of these projects do you suppose entered competitive bidding? (Obama has only asked Congress that competitive bidding be implemented in all proposals.) Responsible? Yeah, right.
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SZ:
It’s just too bad that the movement you speak of won’t gain traction until everybody realizes the monumental excess of this spending orgy. Question, though: how is refusing to excessively fund incompetent entities liberal? Sounds like free market to me.

From your link
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THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill.

BTW do you understand why we are in an economic crisis? Its not because of supply. Its because of demand. People aren’t buying stuff. So the goverenment is STIMULATING the economy by patronizingn some industries so that they can stay in business while also doing things like switching out gas guzzling cars that waste money with more fuel efficient vehicles. The point of the stimulus is to create or save jobs. I know that most republicans say that business tax cuts are more stimulative but if anything the last 8 years showed us thats not true. People were losing their jobs long before the market tanked and thats because businesses don’t HAVE to add jobs just because they aren’t tax at a higher rate and most of them didn’t. If you don’t want the governement spending money to build a road, which most economists agree IS stimulative, exactly what would you want them spending money on?

Hammerlock:
Indeed, making it more difficult to tack on earmarks seems like a good idea. Yet, Congress isn’t the greatest body in the capacity for regulating itself. I worry that meaningful reforms would be lost in the chaos of the process, and essentially that Congress would end up hoodwinking the general public by dropping a few convenient loopholes into their codification.
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SG:
Remember the Bridge to Nowhere?
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In any case, I was just poking around on the “where is your money going” component of recovery.gov, and they only have the most general facts laid out. I imagine it’ll be a few months before the public can actually go “line by line” through the bill, unless there’s some other place I can get it.
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How do you reason that the spending in healthcare and education will save money? Particularly, in regards to your other post, there is money specifically set aside to “rebuild” schools, as you put it. There is also a lot of money that has nothing to do with that.

How do you reason that the spending in healthcare and education will save money?
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How many small businesses have trouble attracting and keeping talent because they can’t afford to provide health insurance?
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How does helping business mitigate their employee expenses help them hire employees?
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Some questions just answer themselves.

Yoshia
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Understand that while the bridge to nowhere was a boondoggle there WERE actually people getting paid to do the the work. JOBS. Thats the buzz word for the stimulus. The recovery.gov website is about tracking the money as it is sent out.
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here is the bill
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http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h1enr.pdf

SG:
I had already mentioned the “earmark” issue, which is a great example of semantics. As for the actual requests themselves, of course they’ll create jobs. Most pork projects do. Who would build that Woodstock museum my two fine senators from New York were proposing? The question is whether they are a RESPONSIBLE use of the money. Should we shut down the F-22 production line because Gates says we don’t need anymore? Such an effort would mean layoffs. Let’s take that one step further and speedily award all sorts of defense contracts (which is essentially what is being done…) I’m sure you know the waste that can produce. Uncompetitive bidding, underplanning, bloated budgets, etc. So how do we weed out the waste? By allocating time to GO OVER IT. Did we have time? HECK NO.
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And I’m not a big proponent of the upper-crust tax cuts. Eliminating them doesn’t solve anything, not by a long stretch, but IMO, at this point they aren’t right in the first place.

PD:
“trouble attracting and keeping talent?” You mean the problem is that people of talent are being selective about their jobs in this economy?
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And to my knowledge, that’s far from the only spending item in the medical section of the bill.

Question, though: how is refusing to excessively fund incompetent entities liberal? Sounds like free market to me.
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yoshiattack:
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“free market” is liberal.
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Liberals are huge free-marketers, as opposed to socialists. Liberals are only communitarian by way of a pragmatic perspective with respect to the goal of maximum liberty, and normal national and familial loyalties.
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Liberals are for an expansive view of the rights that enable freedom for individuals. A free market is the best structure to promote individual freedom. A free market can only be kept free, however, by counter-balancing forces, so that over-domination by specific interests cannot occur. That means that we treat corporate power the same as any other power, e.g. labor or state power, in as much as we seek to restrain its capacity for market dominance.
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Unlike fake “free market” conservatives, who turn a blind eye to the evils of corporate control of markets –they simply wish it away or apologize for it– liberals seek to enhance the balancing power of other forces, be they the state, individuals, communities or labor. In such a manner liberals seek to protect individual liberty from systemic threats. We just see corporate power as another threat to our liberty. What’s the difference between the state and Citi, really?

How do you reason that the spending in healthcare and education will save money?
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Some of the money is simply to keep state governments functioning, as they simply don’t have the means to ride out a revenue decline the way the feds can. The term “stimulus bill” strikes me as an oversimplification. Not all the money is for creating new jobs; some of it will prevent layoffs.

yoshia
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So on the one hand you are saying we should continue to build a fighter plane that we no longer need but on the other hand we shouldn’t be building roads and bridges? Help me understand where you are coming from here. I mean its one thing to say you are a conservative or a Republican but you still have to have a coherent and consistent response on the issue. As for “pork” again what part of STIMULUS do you not understand. Explain to me where the money should have gone. Hell YOUR PARTY including McCain endorses infrastructure spending. They said if anything there wasn’t ENOUGH. Of course they were talking out of both sides of their mouths on the issue because on the one hand they wanted more infrastructure spending but on the other they kept complaining because the stimulus bill wouldn’t be spent quickly enough. Maybe you don’t get this but our economy went off a cliff last year. Yeah we could wait to act but that means more people getting laid off, more people losing their health insurance, more people losing their homes and more people drawing unemployment. If you want to do some figuring as the Republican party is so fond of doing these days divide 650,000 by 30 to see how many jobs we are losing every day. Thats not even counting the people not drawing unemployment. Hell yes we had to act fast and its kinda silly to be upset about them having done so. Its not like he didn’t call for this stimulus bill before he got into office. The Congress had enough time to put together the bill but the Republicans instead used that time to lie about the proposal and keep pressing for tax cuts. If you want to be upset be upset with them for not actually trying to have an honest debate over the bill. You yourself linked to just a few of their lies over the bill so evidently you are at least somewhat aware of the kind of shenanigans that were going on.

SZ:
That is an interesting philosophy. Thanks for explaining. It seems that it lines up with most conservative thinking on the subject. Of course, it would matter what constitutes “balance” and how action regarding that is taken.

No, I haven’t expressed support for the F-22 line. My point is that with such a short timeline, anything short of murder could be tacked onto a bill with little or no explanation or debate. Just by that process, it’s easy to see how the government could, once again, waste tons and tons of money in wasteful proposals. By the criteria proposed (e.g. anything that creates jobs), ANYTHING could be funded and carried to fruition. Couple that with the short deadline, and waste is the rule and not the exception. This is the central problem.
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A hypothetical: infrastructure repair would possibly prove more helpful and less wasteful, yet of course the ribbon-cutting projects are what the pols are all about, especially given the circumstances.
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Shoring up the states is obviously a necessary component as well, and as arbitrarystring pointed out, some of that lies in healthcare spending. To pretend that the healthcare section only included that, however, would be wrong.
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Yes, the Republicans projected a lot of crap about the bill…but the Democrats didn’t exactly do a great job with their steamrolling either.
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Remember, there WILL be a morning after for any spending we do.

The bridge to nowhere became an easy slam, but it had a serious purpose. Digby points out Somerby’s explanation.
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Two years ago the small Alaska town of Ketchikan, where five generations of my family have lived, became the poster child for all that is wrong with the United States government. We wanted a bridge to connect us to our airport, which is on a different island from our town. The bridge had been promised to us 30 years ago when the government chose—over the objections of many in this community—to put our new airport across the narrows from Ketchikan. Unfortunately, when it finally arrived, the money for that bridge came in the form of a congressional earmark.
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But the politics of earmarks didn’t mean much to us up here in Alaska. We were too busy focusing on the need for a bridge to get to our airport. Then somehow our bridge became known as the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
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To us, the name seemed odd. Ketchikan was never “nowhere.” It is 90 minutes north of Seattle by plane. The rest of Alaska, including Anchorage, with a population approaching 300,000, lies to the north—well beyond “nowhere.” The media reports never seemed to mention that Ketchikan has a year-round population of 14,000—making it the fourth-largest community in the state. And they forgot to account for the more than 250,000 people who pass through our airport every year, and the nearly 1 million visitors who come here each summer, mostly on cruise ships.
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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/he-said-earmark-by-digby_11.html
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This may or may not have won in a competitive process, but it was far from the nonsense that it was portrayed.

It seems that it lines up with most conservative thinking on the subject.
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yoshiattack:
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Well…not so much.
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Here’s “hardcore leftist” Markos Moulitsas from the Great Orange Satan DailyKos on what it really means:
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The problem with…libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty — the government and other individuals.
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The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty — the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.
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Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn’t believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.
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In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them — corporations and other individuals.
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So in practical terms, what does a Libertarian Dem look like? A Libertarian Dem rejects government efforts to intrude in our bedrooms and churches. A Libertarian Dem rejects government “Big Brother” efforts, such as the NSA spying of tens of millions of Americans. A Libertarian Dem rejects efforts to strip away rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights — from the First Amendment to the 10th. And yes, that includes the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms.
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So far, this isn’t much different than what a traditional libertarian believes. Here is where it begins to differ (and it shouldn’t).
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A Libertarian Dem believes that true liberty requires freedom of movement — we need roads and public transportation to give people freedom to travel wherever they might want. A Libertarian Dem believes that we should have the freedom to enjoy the outdoor without getting poisoned; that corporate polluters infringe on our rights and should be checked. A Libertarian Dem believes that people should have the freedom to make a living without being unduly exploited by employers. A Libertarian Dem understands that no one enjoys true liberty if they constantly fear for their lives, so strong crime and poverty prevention programs can create a safe environment for the pursuit of happiness. A Libertarian Dem gets that no one is truly free if they fear for their health, so social net programs are important to allow individuals to continue to live happily into their old age. Same with health care. And so on.
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The core Democratic values of fairness, opportunity, and investing in our nation and people very much speak to the concept of personal liberties — an open society where success is predicated on the merit of our ideas and efforts, unduly burdened by the government, corporate America, or other individuals. And rather than always get in the way, government can facilitate this.
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Of course, this also means that government isn’t always the solution to the nation’s problems. There are times when business-government partnerships can be extremely effective (such as job retraining efforts for displaced workers). There are times when government really should butt out (like a great deal of small-business regulation). Our first proposed solution to a problem facing our nation shouldn’t be more regulation, more government programs, more bureaucracy.
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The key here isn’t universal liberty from government intrusion, but policies that maximize individual freedom, and who can protect those individual freedoms best from those who would infringe.

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Make sense, yoshiattack?

yoshia says
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To pretend that the healthcare section only included that, however, would be wrong.

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Ok then educate the rest of us on what was in the health care section of the bill. If you can try to provide a link also to wherever you are getting your information from.

SZ:
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It’s actually pretty close to conservative thinking, in my opinion, right until the social net/health care bit. (I don’t know what was up with the ‘freedom of movement’ – of course we need roads. I guess he’s talking about public works)
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Indeed, the ‘third danger’ does make sense. Few people would say big corporations, unfettered from regulation, would avoid infringing on the freedoms of the little guy. Of course, the devil’s in the details. I don’t think you’d find a Republican who supports repealing our ancient antitrust legislation, which is restricting the free market somewhat, but I’m sure some proposals from a Libertarian Democrat, as you say, wouldn’t square with them.
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Side note, there’s an amusing typo in the third-from last paragraph – success should be unduly burdened by the government? lol

yoshia
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Here is how the education funds are stimulative and how a Republican is trying to allow 7,500 teachers lose their job by opposing the stimulus money
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http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/12/sanford-stimulus-education/
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I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if South Carolina’s jobless rate wasn’t already higher than the national average.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29160311
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- $86.6 billion to help states with Medicaid
- $19 billion to modernize health information technology systems
- $10 billion for health research and construction of National Institutes of Health facilities
- $1 billion for prevention and wellness programs.
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The problem I have with that is that the healthcare system should be addressed in a different bill, with the goal being that the government refrain from throwing money at it in a very uninformed manner. The problem is that healthcare is bloated. We don’t solve that problem by computerizing databases.

86.6 billion to states for Medicaid so they would have that money for other purposes like not laying off public employees.
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19 billion for Health IT is to save money on paper records.
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10 billion for research again saves jobs, construction of NIH facilities creates construction jobs
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1 billion for prevention and wellness both saves jobs as well as invests in the future to lower health care costs.
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I am not sure you realize this but healthcare eats up the budget of a lot of businesses large and small. Investing in healthcare helps their bottom line going forward and hopefully that projected savings will help to create jobs as well.

Yoshi: I think the other commenters have said almost everything that I would in response to your posts. Just wanted to add: Thanks for engaging in this thread, it’s been quite interesting.

SG:
Obviously, the funding that’s needed to shore up schools is necessary. I imagine that’s this part of the bill:
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$44.5 billion in aid to local school districts to prevent layoffs and cutbacks, with flexibility to use the funds for school modernization and repair
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What I don’t like is that the rest of the money seems like an expansion. The wording is unclear – however, since there is already money allocated to prevent layoffs, it seems like an expansion.

It’s actually pretty close to conservative thinking, in my opinion…
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yoshiattack:
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Taking the wars off of the table for a second, does this thinking come close to the behavior of the Republicans when they were in control of the entire government?
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Are the Republicans in the Beltway actually conservatives, in your opinion?

yoshia
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An expansion of what exactly? More schools, more teachers? Lets say thats the case. That means both more jobs and smaller classes. Are you REALLY against that?

SG, your problem is that you automatically assume the conversion of money to results is 100%. It is not.
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http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=106
The benefits of computerizing healthcare records have been grossly overstated. This is NOT to say that it is not the right step to go in, but any substantial debate on the issue is either nonexistant or has been choked off because we have to pass this stimulus bill NOW! For instance, computer systems carry with them the prospects of electronic failure, and questions about how to distribute the information or archive it using the Internet are not readily answered. In other words, the savings (if any) have a good chance of not being passed on. Bottom line, this is an item that should have been reserved for a time when we can all sit down and think about it. Could be necessary, perhaps could not. Instead, we have to do it NOW!
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The same carries over to the other items in the stimulus. Case in point: wellness and prevention. Who gets the money? Is it being used to expand? How do we know it’s not being wasted? etc.
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The point is that these items aren’t pressing enough to warrant actually being in a crisis bill, and the public only accepts them because a billion here, a billion there doesn’t matter. We talk about saving costs with computerization; yet, we could save a lot more if we actually devoted time to a REAL healthcare reform effort. To pretend that all of this is completely necessary because if we don’t have it in the bill the world will end tomorrow is a gross oversimplification.
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So in the end, there is a nice probability that we will pour billions into the bloated healthcare machine and get no reduced costs and really nothing for our trouble. This might have something to do with the fact that a thousand page bill handing out money by the truckload was passed before anybody had time to read it. Great. Just great.

Yoshi,
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I had to leave the thread for a few hours and have now mostly caught up. I second Art Pepper’s comment at 3:49. Thanks for your participation! Have you eaten? Do you need a nap? We’ll be around later.

Art – thanks, it’s been fun.
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SZ:
That’s an interesting question. Generally, my answer is this: a lot of them are, but the party structure at the time was all about keeping power and not about using it responsibly. Case in point: the Contract with America fell in shambles. This smacks of general congressional disease, as well – take a look at our attempts to reform immigration and congressional rules on lobbying. They may have had conservative beliefs, but enforcing those responsibly wasn’t their primary goal.
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(also, I hate to say this, but the War on Terror definitely sucked out a lot of energy)
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SG:
Look at California’s situation (not sure if I’ve already described it here…ah, whatever). They keep getting into deficits, and there’s a pretty simple reason why. The state budget at the time of the Governator’s election was something like $40 billion less than it is now. What happened in between? Special interests pushed for expansion of government, and they did it by making the governor look like he was persecuting tykes and their attendant kindergarten teachers.
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Well, look what happened. California’s system has grown way beyond its means, and now they’ve got to raise taxes to afford all the BS the special interests have jammed on them, since state budgets have to be balanced every year. Oops.
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The kind of thinking in the stimulus bill is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that led Californian voters into this mess. Give money to teachers! How could you deny children an education?? Never mind that if we actually take a look at the system, we could figure out other ways to cut costs. But no, it’s gotta be “throw money at the schools or you’re an evil child-hating cretin!”
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Is the money for programs deserved? Maybe. We can figure that out with REASONED DEBATE, instead of dumbing down the debate to pond scum levels by expecting the words “teacher,” “kids,” and “schools” to pass everything.

yoshia
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What you linked to was the CBO blog. In the post there is a link to the full study. Here is the link
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http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/91xx/doc9168/05-20-HealthIT.pdf
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You will find through out the study how Health IT can save money. They can’t guarantee it though because of some variables. You say that I assume that there will be savings well if that’s true then wouldn’t you say that you assume there will be expansion and waste? I am going by the best estimates by most economist. You seem to be going by party rhetoric. All governement spending isn’t bad nor wasteful. And again you can say that this wasn’t required for the bill but what you still fail to seem to realize is that the money is going to put people to work in order to set up the system. Thats what I call a two fer. You create jobs while setting a foundation for moving the country toward a more efficient and cost saving system. Here is the thing that I have found, conservatives in general aren’t willing to look outside of their conservative lens of the world to see if there is another way of doing things. Government spending is always bad and tax cuts are always good. Now its evident that I won’t convince you how counter factual that is but bigger than that its bad for the Republican Party. If every problem has the same ideas and answers thrown at it then there will be times when the problem doesn’t get fixed. The sooner conservatives and Republicans understand that the sooner they might return to relevance. As it stands you guys are moving even further away from the middle and the mainstream because they aren’t tied down with that baggage. The average voter in this country doesn’t care which ideology is used to fix a problem as long as the problem gets fixed. It is what it is.

yoshia
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In point of fact precisely the reason why California is phucked right now is because conservatives inserted a rule that any tax increase had to be approved by 2/3 of their legislature. They kept spending money but they also couldn’t raise taxes on pretty much anything in order to pay for those expenditures because Republicans always blocked them. In another point of fact Gray Davis was recalled because he instituted taxes that were actually well on their way to strenthening California and getting them back to good fiscal health. One of the first things the Govenator did was repeal those taxes and now they are in the hole. So guess what, if there was ever an argument against conservative governance it is the State of California. The Republicans there put ideology over the financial health of the state and you see how that ended up. I think you might want to study the situation in California a little closer before you use them as a case study on the problems with government spending. The problem wasn’t the spending, the problem was the refusal to raise taxes to pay for it. Mike Huckabee raised taxes in Arkansas to get his state on better footing. The Republican party rebuked him for his trouble and accused him of not being conservative enough. Again, it is what it is.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/amarlow/2009/03/11/77734/#idc-ctools

…

Steele, at least, has an excuse.

Being that he was long exposed to Maryland.

SG:
Your second sentence encapsulates my whole point. “They can’t guarantee it though because of some variables.” Uh oh. That sounds like a lot of money to throw at something impossible to guarantee. On this planet, you unfortunately can’t call that “responsible.”
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Yes, I know, like every other project proposed by the government ever it will create jobs. A lot of other things in the stimulus do. Thus, this is NOT NECESSARY. Then, when the next generation finds out they can’t avoid paying off China forever, they’re going to pay for the excesses of this generation’s leadership. That day is going to be quite sad.
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If we can waste all the money we want, so long as the project has a slim chance of not being a crapshoot, then why not build high-speed rails everywhere, buy those additional 170-or-so F-22s, turn the majority of public buildings (heck, private buildings) green, and bail out the car companies again? I mean, it would only cost an additional whatever billion or so. We just committed for spending a cool $7.4 trillion. Why? Because such spending is irresponsible. So is a good deal of the stuff in the stimulus bill.
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This is also why you can’t give me that boilerplate about “Republicans always hate government spending.” I don’t have a problem with a lot of the bill. I do have a problem with the attitude that we can do the equivalent of Keynes’ proposal (burying money so people would be stimulated digging it up) and still come out on top. Eventually, we WILL have to pay back China. And the more BS we buy now, the more BS we will get. Fiscal responsibility.
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As for California: the public there UNEQUIVOCALLY HATES tax increases (see: Gray Davis and the current Governator). And they wouldn’t have to have them if the legislature hadn’t got unequivocally drunk on spending. Spending beyond our means (often for dumb reasons) is what got the American public into this crisis. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that overspending beyond the pale would get the US government in a similar crisis?

Sorry, that should read “one of Keynes’ proposals”…
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Friar Tuck, thanks. I really don’t know what happened; I’ve been glued to the lappy all day.

I add my own applause to yoshiattack. Thanks for your contribution.
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Back to Steele, wouldn’t it make more sense for the conservative cause to embrace him more rather than treating him like the village idiot?
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yoshia aside, the biggest enemy of conservatism is the gang of currently recognized conservatives.

yoshia
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I just have one final question for you. If the stimulus bill does work as well as the bailouts and the economy bounces back at the end of this year or early next year will you admit you were wrong, or will you say the economy bounced back in spite of the stimulus? I ask this because, and you can write this down and hold me to it later, if the economy comes back I can promise you that every big name conservative and Republican will say it wasn’t because of the stimulus it was in spite of it. But I want to hear your answer beforehand.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123682571772404053.html

…

Certainly, he’s no Murkie Waters.

Since both the Democrat and Republican parties are both old and worn out (dis)organizations which live by corruption and wastefulness, why do so many link them and whoever is occupying the office of US President with the economic well being or illness, as it were, of the USA?
Most citizens of the US don’t know who represents them in Congress, much less know or care about who heads the RNC or the DNC.
It is the ignorance of politics, government, economics, and foreign relations and the foolish financial choices of the citizens of the US that is the important factor in the economic and political troubles we are now facing.
The Republican and Democrat activists and officeholders and their supporters are overestimating their importance, if they think that they have the power to make the economy respond positively by enacting in the U S Congress a hodgepodge conglomeration of bail-outs, laws, programs, rules and regulations, which then gains some terrific efficacy with the signature of the US President.
Hubris reigns supreme.

SG:
Exactly what do you mean if the bill does “work as well as the bailouts?” We don’t know how the bailouts have worked yet. The DOW is still jerking around like a fish, and AIG requires more billions by the week. The effects of the trillions of dollars we’ve just belched onto the economy won’t be fully realized until the next generation actually has to account to China and the other unfortunate countries who loaned to us.
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Second, you pose an oversimplified question. If the economy bounces back, how do we calculate how much of that is due to the stimulus and how much is due to the 7.4 trillion we dispensed with under Bernanke’s hand? How do we even know what PART of the stimulus bill to consider?
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Like I said, I’m in favor of a good deal of the stimulus spending. I proposed the sections highlighted be addressed with separate bills as they are inherently less urgent. To phrase this as a simple “I told you so” if the economy turns around would win plaudits for neither side of the argument.

yoshia
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If you happen to check back here I wasn’t saying the bailouts were working. I was saying if both of them work and the economy bounces back. But I think I understand what your answer is to the question anyway.

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