Seriously, though: if Senators like John McCain view the stimulus as "generational theft", and if Senators like David Vitter believe their opposition to the stimulus is "the greatest challenge of [their] generation" why is Jindal only objecting to less than 2% of the stimulus funding for Louisiana?
Joe Klein was unimpressed by Jindal's recent tv appearance. Remarkably, Klein had the temerity to go off-script and suggest that Jindal was NOT being "intellectually honest" about the stimulus! Klein was supposed to gush that Jindal was "authentic and effective", but instead he said:
To summarize [Jindal's objections to the stimulus]: Jindal opposes the unemployment codicil, the slimmer tax breaks for small businesses, the support for high-speed rail and the money for the arts. That leaves the overwhelming bulk of the stimulus package, which he presemably supports. A fair question would have been: Governor Jindal, if you were given a take it or leave it choice on the entire package headed for your state, would you take it or leave it? The answer, of course: he'd take it. And so would nearly every one of the Republicans who hooted and howled and grandstanded against the bill. They had the luxury of voting against it because they knew it would pass.
(Well, the vote against the bill wasn't a "luxury" for one Rep. Cao. Cao was leaning in support of the stimulus bill mere hours before the vote, but ended up voting against it. Can someone ask Cao what new bit of data he acquired just prior to the vote that made him change his stance? Was it because the Republican whips needed the "Cao-boy" to preserve GOP unanimity so they could make their really cool "Back in the Saddle" video, celebrating their unified opposition to the lyrics of a song about saloon town hookers?)
I agree with Klein. Jindal wasn't being intellectually honest in his grandstanding objections to the stimulus bill, and he should've been asked whether he would've voted for an (admittedly) imperfect, compromised bill over nothing. As a reference point on Jindal's fiscal authenticity and honesty, please use Jindal's principled "YES" vote on the $300 billion pork-laden farm bill. Back then, Jindal didn't grandly refuse 1% of Louisiana's share from THAT gargantuan bill. I guess it was 100% perfect, even the parts that raised taxes, incentivized illegal immigration and paid subsidies to dead people.
Before I bash Jindal some more, here's some praise. Kudos to da Guvnah for making this statement on national television:
[A]s governor of Louisiana, I will continue to work to make sure that the federal government repairs and builds the levees the way they should have been built in the first place, repairs our coast to prevent against future storms and also, by the way, helps to repair some of the damage that was caused by the breaking of those federal levees. That's important for Louisiana, it's important for our country.
Our, our state, by the way, 9 to $10 billion comes off of our coast in terms of federal oil and gas royalties. If that was federal lands within our state, we'd get 50 percent. We get virtually none of that. You look at 30 percent of the nation's oil and gas in some form comes off of our coast. It's important for the country that America rebuilds those levees, that America helps those communities get back on their feet. Absolutely, as the governor of Louisiana, I'm going to say-- because the federally built and designed levees didn't do what they were supposed to, absolutely I'm going to advocate that they get... rebuilt properly, absolutely I'm going to be willing to put up my own share, and absolutely I'm going to push the federal government to cut through the red tape.
Very nice. But why would Jindal pollute such a fine statement with this ignorant bullshit?
MR. GREGORY: [D]emocrats would... argue, with regard to a call for greater tax cuts, that over the course of the Bush presidency you only had a--three million new jobs through aggressive tax cutting, that the change in median income did not appreciably go up at all. And yet there is this emphasis on tax cuts as the best way to cure what ails the economy.
GOV. JINDAL: Well, I think there's just a--I think this is--shows the fundamental disagreement...
MR. GREGORY: Is that wrong? Is that--are those facts wrong?
GOV. JINDAL: Well, I-- a couple of things about those facts. You look in our country's history, when President Kennedy, when President Reagan and, yes, when President Bush cut taxes, you know what, they created jobs for our country. It caused some of the best economic times and prosperity for our country.
Jindal evaded Gregory's "are those facts wrong" query, and did so by using the exact same idiotic "historical" formulation made two weeks ago by David Vitter, our high-hung, nincompoop-for-a-junior-Senator. Unbelievably, our whiz kid governor is joining the GOP idiots who are trumpeting the PATHETIC job growth numbers under President Bush (2.4 million over 8 years, versus Jimmy Carter's 10 million in 4 years), and they're brazenly doing it one month after Bush left office, during a severe "Bush recession" which began in 2007!!
Holy moly! George W. Bush's economic record is so weak, it makes Jimmy Carter look like a titan of job creation. But Jindal won't dare mention Carter, and he sure as hell won't mention Bill Clinton's 23 million net jobs number. No. Jindal, like Vitter, has placed the "Bush Boom" in the pantheon of growing economies. It's a bizarre thing to do, unless you're a conservative hack. But Jindal is playing the game, and the game is this: history must be re-interpreted to show that tax cuts always work. So Jindal makes the claim that George Bush's tax cuts "created jobs" and caused "some of the best economic times and prosperity for our country", and he links the Bush economic record to the Reagan and Kennedy administrations.
This is how Jindal tackles the historic economic facts-- with hacktacular pseudo-history.
The real fact is that Bush cut $2 trillion in taxes and the economy emerged from a shallow recession with below-average job growth. Even incredibly low interest rates and a housing mania weren't enough to raise the level of job growth during Bush's term to anything beyond the sluggish range. One of the reasons that the tax cuts didn't work was because they were skewed towards the rich, and instead of investing in job-creating businesses or the meandering stock market, the rich put their money into hedge funds and (speculative) financial instruments supported by a housing/credit bubble. The money freed up by Bush's tax cuts did not "trickle down" in any awe-inspiring way. The 2000's were NOT one of the "best" and most prosperous economic periods in American history. Incomes were flat. Job growth was pathetic. The recession that followed the so-called "Bush Boom" is wide and deep and ongoing. But Rhodes Scholar Jindal is reduced to celebrating the Bush economic record as a high point in American growth and prosperity, because history must be re-interpreted to show the success of tax cuts! If tax cuts fail, Republicans fail. Therefore, if Goopers are forced to rearrange history and group Bush with Reagan with Kennedy in an awkward, tax-cutting menage-a-trois, then that is what they will do! They won't tell you what really happened-- that the highlight of Bush's economic legacy is a "paltry few government jobs financed by China".
So this is what it comes to: a month after Bush left office, during a recession that began in 2007, the "Next Ronald Reagan" is on national TV telling us that the pathetic "Bush (housing) Boom" that occurred between Clinton's shallow recession and the current deep recession was one of the best, most prosperous times in American history-- and it was caused by those lovely tax cuts.
Does anyone believe that? To be sure, the Bush administration's mantra between 2003-07 was that the economy was "strong and growing stronger". This strengthening "Bush boom" economy ended in a nasty recession which has already seen the partial nationalization of the banking industry, and an ongoing conversation about whether capitalism "works". This is the economy that the GOP's brightest star chose to celebrate during his recent appearance on national tv.
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As I said, the GOP opposition to the stimulus bill is similar historical "bad faith". Andrew Sullivan recently described it well:
The GOP has passed what amounts to a spending and tax-cutting and borrowing stimulus package every year since George W. Bush came to office. They have added tens of trillions to future liabilities and they turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit - all in a time of growth. They then pick the one moment when demand is collapsing in an alarming spiral to argue that fiscal conservatism is non-negotiable. I mean: seriously.
Labels: Bush, Cons, Dismal Science, Federal Flood, Jindal, levees, Reagan, Vitty-cent, Voodoo economics
