Conservative Donnybrook

There’s a meme going around that the only really effective part of the “stimulus” bill for actually helping the economy is whatever portion of it is “targeted, temporary and timely.” See David Brooks, apparently reborn as a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. … Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Thanks for Econ 101! Brooks continues:

In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.

It’s easy to see why Democrats decided to do this. They could rush through permanent policies they believe in. Plus, they could pay for them with borrowed money.

Well, yeah.

And here we have this Ryan Avent fellow, who echoes the targeted-temporary-timely CW:

that there are actually multiple criticisms coming from the right, some of which are more valid than others. If enough Senators can be peeled away to get the bill through by improving how the bill performs on the three Ts — timely, targeted, and temporary — then there’s no problem seeking compromise. But many Republicans have basically no interest in producing a good stimulus bill. …

Scoundrels! And Avent even handicaps the Dems’ future electoral prospects based on his certainty that the “right” kind of stimulus will work as a matter of course:

…[Megan McArdle] says Democrats might be better off with a smaller stimulus bill. I disagree with that for several reasons. First, Democrats will need to be popular (and, post-2010, in office) to carry out their agenda. If the economy does not recover strongly, they’ll lose their mandate and possibly their majorities. Secondly, a strong recovery will do wonders for the budget outlook. …

The naivete on display here is almost touching. It brings a tear to my eye. It’s nice to know that there’s someone left who believes his own bullsh*t.

It’s worth noting that there’s not a single case of government stimulus ever helping an economy and many cases of such spending hurting it seriously–for example, during the Great Depression.

(But didn’t the massive mobilization of World War II end the depression, thus validating the idea of stimulus, and even suggesting that the problem with the New Deal is that it wasn’t big enough? See Robert Higgs for the answer.)

But is the Obama administration a little more savvy than the Ryan Avents of the world?

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Team Obama actually knows that classic public works-type stimulus spending only further wrecks the economy, or at least that it’s never been effective in helping. Thus they have included just enough classical pump-priming in the bill to give a plausible fig leaf to a massive slate of traditional Democratic priorities, i.e. welfare state expansion and crass interest group buyoffs.

(UPDATE: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that those aren’t traditional Republican priorities, as well.)

Meanwhile, the immediate spending impact is low enough not to do too much damage, so the economy is able to right itself through its own corrective mechanisms in a couple of years.  By that time, the really big spending from the Dem wish list is just ramping up, and what’s more, Obama can claim that the stimulus bill was just the balm that the economy needed to recover.