Recover the Future

President Obama's plan is called Recovery and Re-Investment. Both elements will immediately stimulate the U.S. economy. That's clearly confirmed by a real (as opposed to fictional) Congressional Budget Office Report that says nearly 80% of the money in the plan will be spent during the year and a half after it becomes law. But both elements are important.

Maybe we're in danger of hearing too often that we're in uncharted waters with a hole in the side. If we get numbed to it, there's the temptation of politics as usual. But we are in uncharted waters etc. Preventing the country from really sinking, and taking a lot of the world with it, is not going to be easy.

Right now Republicans are complaining, giving courage to conservative Dems to also say the plan is too big, while governors etc. are trying to make sure they get as big a slice as possible. But as this article in the NYTimes Magazine Sunday narrates, getting us through this is a delicate matter, and major changes could sink the whole enterprise. The article is called The Big Fix, which can mean both the plan and the situation, the big fix we're in.

So here are the principles that Team Obama cannot compromise: the plan has to be big enough--spend enough--to have a chance to be effective. And it must keep its focus on the future.

If you believe the latest news chatter, the first principle is in danger, but this second principle is also under attack. Nearly everyone must agree on this: that huge amount of money can't be misspent or wasted. But that means different things to different people. Obama has the right idea: spend on infrastructure that really needs attention, but build new infrastructure to meet the needs of the future as well as the present. Which means the new economy and the new jobs of the future, as well as the only kind of world that will be livable in the future.

Infrastructure isn't just roads and bridges. It's a new, smart energy grid, built to use sustainable green energy generation. It's infrastructure, and it needs attention--ask the folks without power from the kind of storm that's likely to happen more often. But throwing away money on infrastructure that isn't sustainable, that will have to be replaced anyway, is the Halliburton in Iraq solution: spending just to make some corporation wealthy.

Some conservatives complain that big government is the problem, and that private enterprise with little regulation brings prosperity. Hey, look around you. We've tried it that way to an extreme not seen in this country since long before World War II, and that's why we're in this big fix. Once when it happened before it took the Republican they don't like to talk about, Teddy Roosevelt, to bust the trusts. Meanwhile, our educational institutions are falling apart, while Europe and the fast-developing nations are catching up and moving ahead. Many of them have better health care now. America is fading. We're first in greedy bankers and decadence. That's about it.

Some say government shouldn't be picking winners and losers in the economy, and so shouldn't be supporting alternative energy. There's two problems with that nice theory. First, government has picked winners, and second, those winners are now so powerful that they kill actual competition. Government picked the automobile and oil industries by building the interstate highway system, and now the oil trust is so huge and powerful that it has smothered alternative energy businesses. It's killed fuel efficient cars, not to mention alternative energy transportation. It's the same monopoly trust scene as TR faced, only worse.

Over time--but not too much time--I trust that the folks in Treasury will develop the regulations necessary to control the excesses, especially of the banks, though it looks like it may be too late for the solution to be that simple. I trust that the folks at Justice will contribute by enforcing laws already on the books. This will all create a new financial infrastructure.

But the Obama recovery and reinvestment plan is absolutely eesential if we're going to have a chance at recovery that is sustainable. If we throw away this money on useless tax cuts for the wealthy, and on too many projects that aren't sustainable while not paying enough attention to the future, we may not have the resources to change when we must. We're going to be left behind economically. Which I suppose is okay, because the planet will be uninhabitable. Let's get the bullshit under control, and pass this thing. Spend and invest to recover the future.