Obama's plan is having a bumpy ride

As the specifics of President-elect Obama's proposed economic recovery plan have started to circulate more widely over the past several days, criticism of the proposed is coming from those who ought to be Obama's most reliable cheerleaders.

Here's the nut of the plan from today's Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama's team has laid out some components of his plan: a $500-per-worker tax cut; tax write-offs for businesses suffering losses in 2008 and 2009; incentives for business investment; about $100 billion for health care, to temporarily take on more of the states' burden for Medicaid and to finance computerized medical records; billions for old-style building projects targeting roads, bridges, water systems and schools; and billions more to foster alternative energy and energy efficiency.

So, who has a problem with that?

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on repeal of the Bush tax cuts now (which Obama has not committed to do) instead of letting them expire at the end of this year: ""Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed."
• Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad on the $500 payroll tax credit: "How much lift is that going to give?" he said. "I don't think there's much bang for the buck there."
• Sen. Ron Wyden, who sits on the Finance Committee, on the $3,000 business tax credit for each new job created: "There's just not a lot of history of that working very well."
• Economy guru Paul Krugman on the size of the stimulus plan: "Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed."
• Columnist E.J. Dionne assessing economists' (like Krugman's) perception of tax cuts: "Many economists, particularly but not exclusively liberals, argue that government spending programs stimulate the economy more quickly than tax cuts. Recipients of tax cuts might choose to save rather than spend the money they get back or use it to pay down debt."

Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat and Democrat.

I get that Republicans love tax cuts and Obama wants bipartisan support for the recovery plan, but there's no reason to think that $500 tax rebates will make any more of an impact on the economy than the last round of stimulus checks.

What happened to doing well by doing good? Why not cut payroll taxes on the first $25,000 of household income and target a modest gas-tax increase toward transportation infrastructure? Why not repeal the Bush tax cuts (as promised) and apply them to lower-income brackets?

Bipartisan support should not come at the expense of putting our best economic foot forward. The Republican congressmen who would not support a plan for lack of enough tax cuts represent the minority view on the issue -- as evidenced by the fact that they lost huge numbers in both houses.

Rundown of 2008 New Yorker fiction

Max Magee at The Millions blog has a phenomenal post summarizing all of the short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008, finding "suburban malaise" a common theme among many of them. Each blurb has a brief synopsis and links to the author's recent work.

My favorite stories of that bunch that I've read so far -- I am perpetually behind on New Yorkers and still have a good dozen 2008 issues left to read -- are "Raj, Bohemian," by Hari Kunzru, an inventive, paranoid little nugget; "The Dinner Party," by Joshua Ferris, a darkly funny riff on boring dinner parties; and "Clara," by Roberto Bolaño, about love and distance.

I would welcome suggestions on how to work in more New Yorker and book-reading time, but I already know. Less TV.

Sunday shows: Jan. 4, 2009

Talking head lineup for Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009:

* NBC's "Meet the Press": Guest: Harry Reid. Panel: Richard Engel, NBC News; Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic; Katty Kay, BBC World News America, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News.

* ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos": Guests: Illinois Senate nominee Roland Burris, Sens. Richard Durbin and Mitch McConnell. Panel: Katrine vanden Heuvel, The Nation; George Will, ABC News; Jonathan Karl, ABC News; Cokie Roberts, ABC News.

David Gregory continues to dust Mr. Steph on guests. And on panelists. (Gees, isn't it time to put Cokie Roberts and George Will to pasture?)

* CBS's "Face the Nation": Another exit interview with Dick Cheney.

* CNN's "Late Edition": Guests: New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, robotronic Mitt Romney.

Krugman: It's the GOP's own fault

Paul Krugman sets aside economics this morning to explain why the Republicans have been sucking it so hard here lately: If you run the government like government doesn't matter, it will eventually smack you in the face. Also, Republicans don't like black people.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Krugman concludes that Obama has plenty of latitude to do what he needs to to fix the economy's foundational problems.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

That is partly true. Barack Obama is going to sink or swim based on how the economy performs in the next few years, but there is a segment -- a shrinking but significant segment, mostly in the Deep South -- that is suspicious of Obama because he is a Democrat and because he is black.

Still, if Obama wins over even 10 percent of McCain voters in Georgia, he could reduce the Republican South to a block of seven tiny states -- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky -- that will have fewer than 60 electoral votes even after the 2010 redistricting.