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The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
2009-02-14
WASHINGTON - America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs. Muzi.com News 10088090-1 (muzi.com)It's the military doctrine of lightning force -- fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage -- applied to the campaign for economic recovery. Muzi.com News 10088090-2 (muzi.com) With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion. Muzi.com News 10088090-3 (muzi.com) President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works. Muzi.com News 10088090-4 (muzi.com) Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years. Muzi.com News 10088090-5 (muzi.com) The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future. Muzi.com News 10088090-6 (muzi.com) Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets -- and right out again. Muzi.com News 10088090-7 (muzi.com) The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs. Muzi.com News 10088090-8 (muzi.com) The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen -- the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn't slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed. Muzi.com News 10088090-9 (muzi.com) "The one thing we'll never know is what would have happened if we didn't do it," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight. Muzi.com News 10088090-10 (muzi.com) It's not FDR's deal and these aren't his times. Muzi.com News 10088090-11 (muzi.com) No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt's day. Muzi.com News 10088090-12 (muzi.com) No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new. Muzi.com News 10088090-13 (muzi.com) "We're not reinventing government," said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling "Don't Know Much About" series. "We're modifying things that exist." Muzi.com News 10088090-14 (muzi.com) Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington's place in people's lives. Muzi.com News 10088090-15 (muzi.com) "The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it," says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. "It's become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can't do. Muzi.com News 10088090-16 (muzi.com) "If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do." Muzi.com News 10088090-17 (muzi.com) To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the "Europeanization of America." Others call it "Rooseveltian" or "generational theft" in reference to the debt passed on to the future. Muzi.com News 10088090-18 (muzi.com) They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers. Muzi.com News 10088090-19 (muzi.com) Obama said it's about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt's administration. Muzi.com News 10088090-20 (muzi.com) "We adapted, we changed," he said about those days -- and these. "President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity." Muzi.com News 10088090-21 (muzi.com) In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country "will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future." Muzi.com News 10088090-22 (muzi.com) Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress -- three -- saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape. Muzi.com News 10088090-23 (muzi.com) Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20. Muzi.com News 10088090-24 (muzi.com) Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early. Muzi.com News 10088090-25 (muzi.com) The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size. Muzi.com News 10088090-26 (muzi.com) Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package's costs -- with interest on the necessary borrowing -- could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American. Muzi.com News 10088090-27 (muzi.com) It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, "you would make a blanket for Jupiter." Muzi.com News 10088090-28 (muzi.com) The stimulus wasn't just about throwing cash at the economy, though. Muzi.com News 10088090-29 (muzi.com) The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail -- renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas. Muzi.com News 10088090-30 (muzi.com) "There are seeds in this bill for long-term change," says Zelizer. "There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives." Muzi.com News 10088090-31 (muzi.com) Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn't need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was -- and could become. Muzi.com News 10088090-32 (muzi.com) Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now -- and they've got solid grounds for their pessimism. Muzi.com News 10088090-33 (muzi.com) The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010. Muzi.com News 10088090-34 (muzi.com) The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time. Muzi.com News 10088090-35 (muzi.com) Ready to buy another home? Muzi.com News 10088090-36 (muzi.com) Poof -- you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing. Muzi.com News 10088090-37 (muzi.com) Buying a first home? You're still in luck -- the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November. Muzi.com News 10088090-38 (muzi.com) A new car? You'll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not -- as was initially proposed -- your loan interest as well. Muzi.com News 10088090-39 (muzi.com)
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