This is a fairly typical Bobo head-scratcher line. "The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle."
Let's see ... The Democrats just passed a historic bill, one of the most substantial relief bills in US history.
This week in Congress:
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 12, 2021
Dems: Passed $1.9T COVID package to deliver stimulus checks (w/ dependents!), cut child poverty in half, extend $300 UI, prevent cuts in state + local services, largest-ever investment in Native communities, etc
GOP: Took a week to read The Cat in the Hat
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says of the bill that the Republicans all voted in lockstep against, "The economy is coming back, people are getting vaccinated: We're on the way out of this. We're about to have a boom. And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion." (Ramsey Touchberry, GOP's new reality-warping message: Economic boom will have "nothing" to do with Biden stimulus Salon 03/11/2021)
And Bobo's take is that the Republican Party "shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle"? Well, that's one way of organizing the information, I guess.
I give Bobo credit for recognizing that Biden's COVID relief package is a qualitative step up from Obama's cautious approach to stimulus. Although I'm not entirely sure he means it as an improvement. In 2010, he thought that Obama's super-cautious stimulus approach was too wild and crazy. Dean Baker wrote about the 2010 version of Bobonomics in real time (The Arrogant David Brooks Tells Readers That Stimulus Will Risk National Insolvency CEPR 07/096/2010):
David Brooks has decided to jump into the debate over stimulus with both feet. In a column in which he warns against arrogance he tells readers that additional stimulus would: “risk national insolvency on the basis of a model.”The fact that he thought a country that borrows in its own currency could actually go bankrupt says an awful lot about the state of Bobo's grasp of real-world finance and economics.
Mr. Brooks doesn’t tell readers how he has determined that further stimulus carries this risk. He doesn’t explain how raising the country’s debt to GDP ratio by 4-8 percentage points over the next few years would jeopardize the creditworthiness of the U.S. government. ...
There also is a basic question of logic that Mr. Brooks neglects. If the country really did start to face insolvency (i.e. no one would buy its debt), why would the Fed not simply step in and buy up government debt itself, as it has been doing to some extent over the last year and a half? This could cause inflation, which could be a serious problem, but then the issue would be inflation, not insolvency. [my emphasis]
In the column Dean Baker cites (A Little Economic Realism New York Times 07/05/2021), Bobo writes, "Maybe monetary policy is the only strong tool we have."
Eleven years later, the sound of laughter coming from John Kenneth Galbraith's grave can still be heard.
But apparently he did talk to unnamed "entrepreneurs in Racine and Yakima" for that column, so who are we to quibble?
But it's encouraging to see that it only took Brooks 30 years or so to notice that opportunities and income for younger people have been declining, as he notes in this week's column, "in 1970, 90 percent of 30-year-olds were making more than their parents had at that age. By 2010, only 50 percent were."
But I guess part of being a Bobo-style "conservative" means not rushing to conclusions about the terrible effects of the policies he supports.
But this is a cute line from the current column, "Even Republicans like Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney, for example, are cooking up a plan to actively boost wages for American workers."
I'll make a wild guess that it will be something involving deregulation and tax cuts for business. Just a random hunch!
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