EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in an occasional series that will follow Reps. Mike Coffman and Ed Perlmuttera Republican and a Democrat — as they struggle to address America’s economic crisis from the halls of Congress.
The fatigue on his face showing, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter munched take-out Vietnamese from a Styrofoam carton late Tuesday as he flipped through the tally of the billions the Senate had just cut from the massive federal stimulus bill.
Gone was $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants. Gone was nearly $20 billion for school construction.
And gone were thousands of jobs in Colorado that money would have created (though a small amount of it was later restored).
If Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman had been in the room, he would have wished those billions good riddance. In fact, he told constituents during a late-night telephone town hall two days later exactly that.
The school construction would have taken too long and come too late. Same for billions more in wasteful spending still in the package.
This stimulus “will be an enormous turning point in American history,” said Coffman, a first-term congressman from Aurora. “The way this is written, it’s not temporary. And it will take a monumental effort to ever roll this back as the economy begins to recover.”
The stimulus bill that was passed into law on Friday without a single Republican vote in the House and just three in the Senate has become a kind of political Rorschach test on the nature of America’s crisis and the role of government in solving it.
It is described as bold action — or precipitous folly. It is government stepping in when it’s needed most — or government saddling future generations with debt.
President Barack Obama plans to sign the bill into law today during an invitation-only event at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. CNN quoted an unnamed administration official as saying that Denver was selected, in part, to get “away from the politics of Washington.”
Spending just a few hours with the two lawmakers whose districts encompass vast suburbs around Denver shows the extent of the political divide on the stimulus bill.
Like many Americans, Coffman and Perlmutter are struggling to understand this crisis and how it could have hobbled the world’s largest economy so quickly, already robbing American households of what one recent estimate characterized as 20 percent of their net worth.
A divide as wide as ever
The last few weeks have held one 12-hour day after the next as the two lawmakers talked to economists, listened to the woes of constituents and pored over dense spreadsheets and thousands of pages of legislation.
They came to agree on one thing: This likely will be the biggest policy challenge they face in their careers as federal lawmakers.
But it’s also hard to believe they are reading the same legislation.
After a telephone town hall during which his constituents talked about losing jobs or seeing their businesses destroyed, Coffman called the stimulus “transformational,” the beginning of the end of America’s economic leadership.
Earlier that day, Perlmutter had made an impassioned floor speech for the bill’s passage: “We are going into a spiral,” he said, his face tense and his tone rising. “This is about action. Action now.”
The gaping divide reflects the unprecedented nature of the crisis, experts say, and the fact that there are few clear guideposts to stabilizing an economy in deep trouble.
And it’s a reminder of the profound fissures that underlie American politics, fissures that will make Obama’s goal of ushering a new era of political consensus at least as hard as righting the economy.
Strip out the politics and the posturing, and the differences between the two largely come down to this: For Republicans such as Coffman, the stimulus needed to be mainly about tax cuts, putting money immediately into the pockets of consumers to spend and businesses to create jobs. Any direct government spending must happen quickly — at most, within two years.
That means no energy grids; no long-term research projects; no highway spending doled out over several years.
Too much — or too slow?
While 78 percent of the spending for the bill will be dispensed within two years, that amount drops to 48 percent when you take out tax cuts and spending on benefits such as Medicaid, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate version.
For Democrats such as Perlmutter, tax cuts aren’t enough. The shock is too big, the ability of the private sector to create jobs too hobbled. When the wheels of commerce are grinding to a halt, the only actor left standing is government. And government must jump in fast and jump in big.
“Tax cuts don’t help as much when people aren’t earning money or businesses aren’t earning money,” Perlmutter said during his own telephone town-hall meeting last Tuesday.
Who’s right — or more accurately, whether the Democrats are wrong, as it is their plan that will be followed — won’t be clear for months, even years.
Even the referees have a hard time telling which is more likely.
“We really don’t understand exactly all the details of how stabilization policy works,” said Alan Viard, a former Bush administration economist who only a few months ago said a stimulus wasn’t necessary but has since changed his view.
Viard believes the package as passed is too big, and he sides with Coffman on one essential point: Any spending that takes more than a few years not only isn’t necessary, “it could be destabilizing.”
“The timing is absolutely critical on this. Not only for it to do as much good as it possibly can, but for it to do any good at all,” Viard said.
One thing is clear: Friday’s votes on the stimulus — and voters’ assessment of whether they made the right choice — will likely follow politicians for years.
