The New New Deal (71 page)

157
Gregg himself had just published an op-ed:
Judd Gregg, “How to Make Sure the Stimulus Works,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 5, 2009.

158
“I do not work for Barack Obama”:
Bob Cusack, J. Taylor Rushing, and Hugo Gurdon, “Reid: ‘I Don’t Work for Obama,’”
The Hill
, January 6, 2009.

159
“May be hard to enact without significant consensus”:
Memo to Rahm Emanuel, “State Fiscal Relief Plans,” December 27, 2008, draft provided to the author.

160
“We cannot depend on government alone”:
Obama speech, January 8, 2009, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=85361
.

161
“To me it looks a little bit like trickle-down”:
Elana Schor, “Harkin Fears ‘Trickle-Down’ Stimulus,” Talking Points Memo, January 8, 2009,
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/harkin_fears_trickle-down_stimulus.php
.

162
the headlines were all about friendly fire:
Peter Baker and David M. Herszenhorn, “Senate Allies Fault Obama on Stimulus,”
New York Times
, January 8, 2009; Steve Holland, “Democrats Make Clear They Will Guard Turf,” Reuters, January 10, 2009; Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane, “Democratic Congress Shows Signs It Will Not Bow to Obama,”
Washington Post
, January 11, 2009.

163
Oberstar upped his request to $85 billion:
“A Proposal to Rebuild America by Investing in Transportation and Environmental Infrastructure,” December 12, 2008,
http://www.dot.ca.gov/fedliaison/documents/Rebuild_America_proposal.pdf
.

164
Mark Zandi warned that the economy was “shutting down”:
Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing on the economy, January 7, 2007.

165
the Romer-Bernstein report:
Romer and Bernstein, “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.”

166
Most analysts believe Romer and Bernstein came close to the delta:
Romer and Bernstein predicted the Recovery Act would boost GDP by approximately 3.6 percent and employment by 3.3 million to 4.1 million jobs compared to the no-action case. Private economic forecasting firms have said the boost has been 2.1 percent to 3.8 percent of GDP and roughly 2.5 million jobs:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cea_8th_arra_report_final_draft.pdf
.

167
“We’ll be lucky if the unemployment rate is below double digits”:
Michael M. Grynbaum, “In String of Bad News, Omens of a Long Recession,”
New York Times
, December 7, 2008.

168
Several days after Romer-Bernstein hit the streets:
Macroeconomic Advisers changed its initial estimate of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2009 from –1.3 percent to –4.3 percent. Jon Hilsenrath and Jonathan Weisman, “As Economy Falters, Doubts on Obama Plan Mount,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 28, 2009.

8. “Wow. We Can Actually Do It.”

169
The big-ticket items in the Recovery Act:
The initial estimates for the Recovery Act included $141 billion for state aid, $116 billion for the Making Work Pay tax cut, and $40 billion for unemployment insurance, according to CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation estimates from February 2009. CBO cost estimate, February 13, 2009,
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9989/hrlconference.pdf
; Joint Committee on Taxation cost estimate, February 12, 2009,
http://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=1172
.

170
aid to poor families with high propensities to spend:
Mark Zandi testimony before the House Small Business Committee, July 24, 2008,
http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Small%20Business_7_24_08.pdf
.

171
the transition team secured hefty increases:
The line items for the safety net included $20 billion for food stamps, $2.3 billion for child care, $2 billion for rental assistance, $4.7 billion for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and $25 billion to subsidize 65 percent of the COBRA health insurance premiums for laid-off workers. Other investments in Obama priorities included $360 million for construction at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, $2 billion for community health clinics, $1.3 billion for Amtrak (not including the high-speed rail funding), $4 billion for public housing renovations, $145 million for floodplain easements, $1.1 billion for Early Head Start, $1 billion for preventive medicine, and $200 million for Americorps.

172
stimulus would be one blade of the scissors:
Eric Pooley,
The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth
(New York: Hyperion, 2010), p. 313.

173
more than Bush had managed to spend in eight years:
The Bush administration spent $2.5 billion on clean coal programs. “Fact Sheet: DOE to Demonstrate Cutting-Edge Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technology at Multiple FutureGen Clean Coal Projects,” Department of Energy, June 24, 2008,
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/FutureGen_Fact_Sheet_2008.06.24.pdf
.

174
the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program:
The federal government has given out loan guarantees for years, but the Energy Department’s program only began in 2005, and it hadn’t closed a single deal before Obama took office. Normally, the government promises to repay all or most of a recipient’s obligations to private investors in case of a default; after the Great Recession, though, credit was so tight that the federal government usually ended up loaning the money directly. The Energy Department’s loan office oversaw three programs. The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, for factories making fuel-efficient cars, was separate from the Recovery Act. The 1703 program for “innovative” clean-energy technologies that had never been commercialized before received new credit subsidies under the Recovery Act. The 1705 program for more mature clean-energy technologies was created by the Recovery Act. Matt Rogers, the department’s stimulus czar, oversaw all three programs until November 2009, when Jonathan Silver was hired to run the loan office.

175
“The apparent haste in recommending the project”:
Many of the Solyndra documents released by the Obama administration have been made available online by House Republicans at
http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9090
;
http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9000
; and
http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8897
. The White House has released more Solyndra documents that were made available only in hard copies.

176
The Census Bureau needed to hire:
The Recovery Act provided $1 billion to the Census Bureau, $650 million for the analog-to-digital television transition, $730 million to the Small Business Administration, and $1.2 billion for the Labor Department’s summer jobs program.

177
The idea was to keep stormwater out of overwhelmed sewers:
Grunwald, “Smart Streets.” Energy efficiency is attractive for similar reasons; it’s cheaper and easier to reduce demand for electricity than it is to expand the supply of power with new plants. Similarly, water conservation is cheaper than new reservoirs; drug treatment programs are cheaper than new prisons; and congestion pricing, incentives for carpooling and telecommuting, and other public policies designed to reduce traffic tend to work better than building new highway lanes.

178
he left most of the details to Congress:
The Recovery Act actually included $27 billion for health IT, but the CBO estimated that wiring medical offices would save the government $7 billion in health care costs within ten years, so it came out to $20 billion.

179
mandating adoption of the Veterans Administration’s computer system:
In
The Promise
, Jonathan Alter suggested the Recovery Act should have mandated that all health IT programs use the VA’s VISTA system. But there was no need for such heavy-handed government intrusion. Instead, the Recovery Act set up a partnership with the industry to promote “interoperability,” to make sure the various IT systems will be able to communicate with each other, and a process for government certification of eligible products. That way doctors and hospitals can decide if they want VISTA, and private firms can try to develop something better. The Department of Health and Human Services has already certified more than six hundred products.

180
private disincentives to build a network:
Nobody wanted to invest in a fax machine before anyone they communicated with had a fax machine. Similarly, doctors didn’t want to be early adopters of health IT if they wouldn’t have colleagues to share data with. The Recovery Act helped solve this classic network problem by bringing almost the entire country on board at once.

181
Summers had spent one of the most traumatic hours of his life:
Lawrence Summers remarks at Department of Health and Human Services event, December 8, 2010, video available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpZBF7FKk2M
.

182
Republican health care propagandist Betsy McCaughey wrote a column:
“Ruin Your Health with the Obama Stimulus Plan,” Bloomberg, February 9, 2009. McCaughey wrote a famously dishonest slam of the Clinton health plan, “No Exit,” that
The New Republic
later retracted.

183
Rush Limbaugh began trashing:
“Outrage over Socialized Health Care Hidden Inside Porkulus Bill,”
The Rush Limbaugh Show
, February 10, 2009,
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/02/10/outrage_over_socialized_health_care_hidden_inside_porkulus_bill
.

184
America’s freight rail was the envy of the world:
Michael Grunwald, “Can High-Speed Rail Get on Track?”
Time
, July 19, 2010.

185
After David Obey’s tantrum:
Steven Brill has already written a compelling book about the genesis of Race to the Top and its impact on the national debate over public education:
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

186
a short list compiled by ProPublica:
Michael Grabell and Christopher Weaver, “In the Stimulus Bill: An Earmark by Any Other Name,” ProPublica, February 5, 2009,
http://www.propublica.org/article/welcome-in-the-stimulus-bill-an-earmark-by-any-other-name
.

187
about $150 billion to long-term change:
That includes about $90 billion for clean energy, $30 billion for health IT and other transformative health programs, $8 billion for education reform, $8 billion for high-speed rail, $7 billion for broadband, and $7 billion for unemployment modernization. There’s also TIGER, homelessness prevention, green infrastructure, and other assorted innovations scattered around the Recovery Act.

9. Shirts and Skins

188
lists of dubious-sounding provisions:
The provisions were part of a “Wasteful Spending Resource” maintained by GOP Senate aides, including a running list of “Top Ten Stimulus Boondoggles from Congressional Democrats.” Many of these showed up in a CNN.com list of Republican complaints about the Recovery Act: “What GOP Leaders Deem Wasteful in Senate Stimulus Bill,” CNN.com, February 2, 2009,
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-02/politics/gop.stimulus.worries_1_green-buildings-homeland-security-summer-job-programs?_s=PM:POLITICS
.

189
Eric Cantor claimed that it would direct $300,000 to a Miami sculpture garden:
PolitiFact rated this claim “Pants on Fire.” “Does the Stimulus Package Really Include $300,000 for a Sculpture Garden?”, PolitiFact, January 23, 2009.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/26/eric-cantor/does-stimulus-package-really-include-300000-sculpt/
.

190
a previously uncontroversial disaster aid program:
Michael Hiltzik, “Republican Buzz on Stimulus Plan Has No Sting,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 5, 2009.

191
“In fact, there’s no money in the bill for mice”:
PolitiFact rated this claim “False.” “No money in the stimulus for San Francisco mice,” PolitiFact, February 13, 2009,
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/feb/13/mike-pence/no-money-stimulus-san-francisco-mice/
.

192
Republicans kept harping on the mouse anyway:
S. A. Miller, “GOP Hits Pelosi for Mouse Funds,”
Washington Times
, July 10, 2009.

193
The CBO concluded that the family planning money:
“Estimated Effect on Direct Spending and Revenues of H.R. 3162, the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act, for the Rules Committee,” Congressional Budget Office, August 1, 2007,
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/85xx/doc8519/hr3162.pdf
.

194
It sounded like a crass giveaway to the Hollywood elite:
The movie industry was excluded from the bonus depreciation tax break when it was first created in 2004 at the insistence of Bill Thomas, the Republican House Ways and Means chairman at the time. Thomas objected to the Motion Picture Association of America’s hiring of Dan Glickman, a former Clinton cabinet secretary. “Senate Votes Down Repatriation, Hollywood Provisions,” CongressDaily, February 4, 2009.