Republicans forcing a debate on stimulus

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has managed to accomplish what her predecessor Denny Hastert, Tom DeLay, George W. Bush and a pantheon of conservative critics were unable to do for the better part of the last eight years: Get Republicans in Washington to demonstrate some fiscal accountability.

Actually, that gives Pelosi too much credit. Hastert, DeLay and Bush didn't actually try to slow down the federal squandermania during their watch. They weren't even innocent passengers on a congressional runaway spending train.

They were the ticket collector, engineer and conductor of a fiscal locomotive that ran off the rails. And the deficit wreck they left behind makes it understandably difficult for the American people to take seriously the newfound, unanimous GOP concern about the $819 billion stimulus bill that came out of the House.

Make that the so-called stimulus bill.

There's ample economic theory and historical evidence to question the proposition that government spending is an effective antidote to recession or depression. That's why 200 economists — including three Nobel laureates — signed onto an ad that ran in newspapers across the country last week warning that belief in the panacea of massive government spending is "a triumph of hope over experience."

But suppose you do accept that proposition, as Pelosi and most congressional Democrats do. When Congress and the Bush White House were hammering out the first economic stimulus a year ago, Pelosi said its features should be "timely, targeted and temporary."

She was repeating a prescription that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke had given in testimony on Capitol Hill. And that formula was so good that Larry Summers — Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and head of President Obama's National Economic Council — adopted it as well.

But what emerged from the House last week is not timely, according to Congress's own number crunchers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates only $29 billion of the bill's $359 billion in discretionary spending for job creation will come online before the end of fiscal year 2009. Barely half the appropriations occur before the end of fiscal year 2010.

A thorough reading of the bill's 647 pages — which you can be certain very few Democrats gave it — reveals that it's anything but targeted. Only $30 billion is directed toward those vaunted "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects to build roads and repair bridges.