Critics of the stimulus fall down on the job

The House of Representatives has passed a staggering $819 billion stimulus bill, and the Senate looks poised to pass one of about $900 billion. Who knows how much that’ll work out to when you factor in all the interest we’ll pay on it. This is almost certainly a huge waste of money, and as Obama budget director and former Congressional Budget Office head Peter Orszag acknowledged to Congress last year, even the supposed “on-the-shelf” public works projects can’t be started fast enough to provide timely stimulus. Most of them will end up getting going once the economy is already in recovery, and the money could be better spent by individuals. The government simply can’t put capital where it’s needed to create jobs anywhere near as quickly or effectively as the market.

Yet most of the places you’d expect to offer substantive critiques of the stimulus have little but silence and knee-jerkery to offer. The American Enterprise Institute has a Larry Lindsey piece on a stimulus plan focused around payroll tax cuts, but little else that jumps out at you. The Heritage Foundation has a decent page about the cost of the stimulus package and another about reading the bill, but there’s basically nothing approachable for the average American who wants to know what it all means for him.

Cato, my former employer, ran a full-page ad in the New York Times. For the cost of that ad, Cato could have employed an analyst for a year — or even better, two dozen analysts for two weeks — to read the stimulus bill and research its historical precedents with the aim of creating a series of short, easily digestible pieces on why the whole thing was an act of lunacy. Instead, we get a completely unapproachable, all-text ad. Most readers probably don’t know what a Keynesian is. “Hoover, Roosevelt. Hmm,” the average reader thinks. “Doesn’t sound awfully helpful to me now that I’ve lost my job and my savings.”

Nevertheless, here are the names of a couple hundred economists, most of whom you’ve never heard of, with the Nobel laureates buried in alphabetical order instead of highlighted at the top. No pictures or anything else that might strike a chord.

And finally, no specific alternatives proposed — just a vague allusion to tax cuts and a reduction in the size of government.

Yes, but how?