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The economy has been getting worse and worse every day, and while President Obama was juggling with the problems of filling his cabinet positions, minority Republicans in congress seized on the opportunity to play politics with a much needed economic stimulus package.  The “conservatives” who gave us three trillion dollars of added debt during their man’s failed terms as president are now crying foul about spending money right here in the U.S. to create much needed jobs and repair our crumbling infrastructure. 

Paul Krugman explains just what is at stake:

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

…

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

Krugman and several other columnist were wondering when Obama “the orator” was going to speak passionately about why congress needs to pass the bill right now.  Obama answered the call last night:

NYT article here:

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” Mr. Obama told a gathering of House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va., referring to Republican demands for more tax cuts.

“We are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face, that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, or the soaring cost of health care, or falling schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees.”

…

“The scale and scope of this plan is right.  If we do not move swiftly,” the president said, “an economy that is in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.”  He added, “Millions more Americans will lose their jobs. Homes will be lost. Families will go without health care. Our crippling dependence on foreign oil will continue.  That is the price of inaction.”

Republicans, including John McCain will have none of it.  They have but one solution for every economic problem:  Tax Cuts. 

Republican efforts to drastically alter the package, by eliminating huge blocks of spending in place of expanded tax cuts, continued Thursday morning as Senator McCain proposed yet another substitute bill, including a plan to slash corporate and personal income taxes.  Democrats defeated his proposal and others.

John McCain needs to go back and watch his own speech that he gave on the night of November 4, 2008 – His CONCESSION speech, the one where he said:

“The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.”

That’s right Johnny.  You lost.. by a lot.  The American people did speak clearly. They are tired of the Republicans’ failed economic policies that favor only the very richest among us.  In fact, even the very richest among us are tired of the reckless Republican tax cuts.  Here’s a snippet from a column that Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, wrote for the New York Times today:

I’m the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

So take note people.  If we want to get this economy back on track, the government needs to start spending money right now on projects that will put people back to work and improve our future economic prospects.  How will we pay for it?  By raising taxes on the very richest among us who got a free ride while Bush added trillions to our national debt.

Bob Herbert wrote today about the many ways that Obama is planning to create jobs with his economic plan. 

In a radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama described his plan as follows:

“It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.

“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”

The message is many years overdue. The hope is that it hasn’t come too late.

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Right now infrastructure projects go forward willy-nilly. They are often financed haphazardly and are subjected to the worst kinds of political influence.

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut is sponsoring a bill that would create an infrastructure bank with a bipartisan board of directors and a chief executive to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The board would streamline the process of reviewing and signing off on major infrastructure proposals. It would determine the value to the public of each project — and its environmental impact. It would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage private investment.

Anyone living in Seattle and especially anyone who was working downtown or driving on the Alaskan Way viaduct during the Nisqually earthquake of 2001 knows that we need some serious infrastructure rebuilding as soon as possible.  Here’s a photo of what I see every day I drive to work on the viaduct:

That’s the lower level of the viaduct heading south.   During rush hour, it’s way more crowded than that.

And here’s a photo of what I’m thinking of every day I drive to work on the viaduct:

That’s San Francisco’s Cypress Street viaduct that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  Dozens of people in cars on the lower level were crushed to death.  The death toll probably would have been in the hundreds had the earthquake not occurred during warm-ups for the World Series that was happening at the time, because fans had already traveled to the game or were watching it at home on television.  Anyway, the Cyprus Street viaduct and the Alaskan Way viaduct were built about the same time using essentially the same design.  Both bridges were built on fill, and the S.F. quake showed that a lot shaking results in catastrophic structural failure.

Seattle’s 2001 Nisqually quake was different than San Francisco’s.  The earth shook more horizontally during the San Francisco quake and more vertically during the Seattle quake.  I was on the eleventh floor of a concrete office building downtown when the Seattle quake hit, and I thought I was a goner.  The quake lasted forty-five seconds.  Ordinarily that doesn’t seem like a very long time, but it seemed like an eternity while I was bouncing up and down under my desk.

When the quake was over and I started walking around, I remember looking out a window towards the viaduct to see if it had collapsed.  I was both surprised and relieved to see that It had not.  I read recently that scientists think it would have collapsed had the quake lasted fifteen more seconds.

The point is that we do have hundreds of bridges in our country that are in serious need of repair or replacement, and I am all too familiar with one of them.

So, President Elect Obama and Senator Dodd, let this be a formal request for you to send some stimulus “economic recovery” dollars to Seattle so we can tear down our life-threatening viaduct.  Seattleites have been arguing about what to do with it for over seven years.  (Nothing that has anything to do with transportation happens quickly in Seattle.)  We need someone from the outside to say, “Here’s a bunch of money.  Tear that deathtrap down.  NOW!”