Stimulus: It's the Patriotic Thing To Do

"Seconds in this business," my venerable publisher told me, "can mean everything."

The salty veteran was teaching me the lesson that when you have an idea for a news story — or in the case of the this humble site, something I find remotely interesting — get it out before it's too late.

I learned that lesson as I looked on the front page of the good ole Demozette this Sunday morning: On the front page, Alex Daniels hosed me.

Well, not completely. I still think I have a mayoral unique angle. And this could be a valuable lesson of two things: how to salvage a story when someone rightly beats you to it instead of watching cartoons over the weekend, and that maybe these old timey newspapers can still break a news story. Hey, it happened here, after all, just the other day (speaking of Old Timey).

But anyway, to the story.

Daniels rightly compares the sprint-to-the-finish tactics between recently pressing yet controversial federal legislation in the wake of dire circumstances; the 2001 USAPATRIOT Act and most recently the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama signed into law Tuesday.

Both are timely: The USAPATRIOT Act was a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In just under three weeks, the Bill was rushed through committee and chamber to the President, then Dubya, and signed into law. The Stimulus is a response to the stagnant and somehow still slowing economy that is putting millions in the bread line, the worst economic crisis since that Great Depression thing, as most would surmise.

Both faced strict opposition from the out-party: The USAPATRIOT Act was lamented by liberal Democrats as a foul piece of legislation that put American civil liberties in a headlock. The Stimulus is seen by every Republican congressional delegate — save for three Senators — as further expansion and dependence on an already swollen federal government, sending the country into a greater number of trillions in deficit than one.

Both encourage a lack of transparency and general oversight: The USAPATRIOT Act, apparently written in capital letters so that everyone who invoked its name would be required to scream it at the top of their lungs, seemed to be, at its essence, a legal loophole.

The debate over whether the means justify the ends can certainly be debated. Republicans will claim that the proof is in the puddin': No terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since. Democrats contend that in spite of the safety it provides, there was and is a lack of respect for inalienable civil liberties, like that whole right to privacy thing that people seem to like. Slack-jawed delegates will bellow from their chaw-stained mouths that "Freedom ain't free." Toby Keith will say that it should be. So on and so forth.

But the point is that whether or not it was the right thing to do, it certainly opened up avenues for the government that had hitherto been blocked off by the writ of law. It expedited the process to get the goal of the bill realized in a quicker-acting fashion.

Well, guess what I heard this Friday from someone speaking with the President.

A caucus of mayors was gathered in Washington, an earnest attempt by the new Executive to reach out to local officials and make sure that this important legislation was implemented as soundly as possible.
The mayors assembled to meet with key figures of the Obama cabinet that were crucial to the success of the stimulus, and even had a good sit down with the President himself.

Now, you may have read the story I wrote for the Bureau last week. The important part for most Arkansans and central Arkansans specifically of my conversation with North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays was that there will be money on the streets as soon as this very week, "next week" at the time of publishing.

But my conversation with Hays also yielded something else I found remarkable, so remarkable in fact I had to ask him to repeat it.

Hays said that in the 45 minutes the President spoke to the mayors, Obama told them that there would be a lot of room to "cut corners" and that a lot of this stimulus spending would be unregulated, although there would be an office established by the President for the sole purpose of monitoring the stimulus funds to make sure everything was transparent.

In Hays' defense, Obama was speaking about this in a challenging light. Obama was using this as a charge to the mayors that they had better make sure that they were handling this money in the right way, otherwise the whole system will be doomed to ruin. It was supposed to be encouragement that the Federal government was entrusting and enabling local officials; what I heard was that the keys are being given to governors, mayors and local officials with little oversight and a message: Do good, or it'll be bad.

Well, duh. But what about corruption? What about protecting this investment? One office to monitor the $787,200,000,000 or so dollars and make sure its not getting spent on a fur coat for the First Lady of Dallas? I thought the name of this game was de-deregulation; It was the deregulation that got us into this mess, so get those shackles back on, right?

"We're not promising some silver bullet for the economy," chief economic adviser to Obama Lawrence Summers said in an interview Friday on NBC. "Indeed, what really is very important about President Obama's approach is his commitment to working this through step by step in its many aspects."

It seems like we're putting an awful lot of trust in the some very important steps on shoulders untested.

Obama in his inaugural address said that it's time of the country to get up, dust itself off, and get to the business of fixing itself, paraphrasing. Then, its taking control of the deregulation that drove it into the gutter. Now its re-releasing it into the wild, at the whim of God-Knows-Who-Has-Been-Elected?

The Stimulus seems to be being formed as it goes and on the fly, possibly because of the unprecedented nature of the situation in which we find ourselves, but also perhaps of the rush to get these 1,071 pages of legislature on the books ASAP.

We can see the ending of the USAPATRTIOT Act in the public's eye. It was the beginning and the cornerstone of a country that no longer trusted its government nor its hero in the strife, George W. Bush (look at the approval ratings then; everyone loved him, despite what current sentiments are).

With all of the similarities between that bill and this new one, will we be reviling Obama's Administration for creating a rushed and unstable expansion of the federal government forged on the backs of the American taxpayers?

I sincerely hope not. We need this thing to work. We need these leaders that Obama has dutifully charged to pay heed. We need transparency.

I sincerely hope this falls the other way. I hope the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does everything is says it will.

But it sure feels like I'm hoping for a lot.

UPDATE: My boy, Mike Allen at Politico, has more on the Stimulus Funny Money Watchdog. The field mouse is fast, but the owl sees at night, as per the old man from Talladega Nights