David E. Sanger: Should the U.S. rescue have grand ambitions?
[David E. Sanger is White House correspondent for The New York Times.]
As President Barack Obama and Congress barrel toward the latest emergency program to resuscitate the U.S. economy, one question is looming over their search for a cure: Can the government fashion a fast and efficient economic stimulus while also seizing the moment to remake America?
For now, Obama and his aides are insisting that they can accomplish both goals, following their mantra of using the urgency of the economic crisis to accomplish larger - and long-delayed - changes that never garnered sufficient votes in ordinary times.
In fact, at various times in U.S. history, moments like this one have been used for big programs, from racially integrating the armed forces to creating Social Security and, later, Medicare. So it is little wonder that everyone with a big, stalled, transformative project - green energy programs, broadband networks that reach into rural areas, health insurance for the newly unemployed or uninsured - is citing the precedent of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and declaring that a new New Deal is overdue.
But the question that the Senate will begin debating Monday is whether grand ambitions are getting in the way of pulling the country out of a nose dive. And so for every comparison of this moment to Roosevelt's first hundred days, there are warnings that much of his social experimentation did not have a big effect on economic recovery in the United States, which took years.
"When you are filling a hole this big and adding to America's debt on such a large scale, you need to make sure every dollar is aimed for the economic boost you need," said the economist Martin Feldstein, who served in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and is now a professor at Harvard. He was warning more than a year ago that the U.S. economy was about to be hit between the eyes.
Feldstein has provided the economic arguments behind Republican objections that Obama is starting a long-term expansion of government, after decades in which the United States has relied on market solutions and encouraged nations around the world to do the same.
The economic arguments mask, for some on the right, a primal fear that this is 1933 all over again, the beginning of a 21st-century resurgence of the left.
The comparisons to 1933 are sure to resound even louder in the next week. Much as Roosevelt imposed a "bank holiday" in his first days in office to stop the run on U.S. financial institutions, Obama promised in his weekly video address that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would soon announce "a new strategy for reviving our financial system that gets credit flowing to businesses and families."
That is bound to revive the question of whether anything short of nationalizing some of the biggest banks, even briefly, can get the job done...
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
As President Barack Obama and Congress barrel toward the latest emergency program to resuscitate the U.S. economy, one question is looming over their search for a cure: Can the government fashion a fast and efficient economic stimulus while also seizing the moment to remake America?
For now, Obama and his aides are insisting that they can accomplish both goals, following their mantra of using the urgency of the economic crisis to accomplish larger - and long-delayed - changes that never garnered sufficient votes in ordinary times.
In fact, at various times in U.S. history, moments like this one have been used for big programs, from racially integrating the armed forces to creating Social Security and, later, Medicare. So it is little wonder that everyone with a big, stalled, transformative project - green energy programs, broadband networks that reach into rural areas, health insurance for the newly unemployed or uninsured - is citing the precedent of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and declaring that a new New Deal is overdue.
But the question that the Senate will begin debating Monday is whether grand ambitions are getting in the way of pulling the country out of a nose dive. And so for every comparison of this moment to Roosevelt's first hundred days, there are warnings that much of his social experimentation did not have a big effect on economic recovery in the United States, which took years.
"When you are filling a hole this big and adding to America's debt on such a large scale, you need to make sure every dollar is aimed for the economic boost you need," said the economist Martin Feldstein, who served in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and is now a professor at Harvard. He was warning more than a year ago that the U.S. economy was about to be hit between the eyes.
Feldstein has provided the economic arguments behind Republican objections that Obama is starting a long-term expansion of government, after decades in which the United States has relied on market solutions and encouraged nations around the world to do the same.
The economic arguments mask, for some on the right, a primal fear that this is 1933 all over again, the beginning of a 21st-century resurgence of the left.
The comparisons to 1933 are sure to resound even louder in the next week. Much as Roosevelt imposed a "bank holiday" in his first days in office to stop the run on U.S. financial institutions, Obama promised in his weekly video address that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would soon announce "a new strategy for reviving our financial system that gets credit flowing to businesses and families."
That is bound to revive the question of whether anything short of nationalizing some of the biggest banks, even briefly, can get the job done...