Um artigo de Ronald Brownstein, na National Journal Magazine
«In 1981, President Reagan took office against a backdrop of economic distress and public apprehension. In that crucible, he forged congressional majorities for a massive reduction in federal income-tax rates. That "supply-side" economic agenda, which only months earlier attracted little support beyond a vanguard of conservative legislators and theorists, reshaped federal priorities for decades.
Now President Obama has taken office against a backdrop of economic distress and public apprehension. In this crucible, he is advancing a massive increase in federal spending on programs from education to infrastructure. That "public investment" economic agenda, which has struggled for years to win support beyond a vanguard of liberal legislators and theorists, could reshape federal priorities for years.
To call the economic legislation now moving through Congress a stimulus bill obscures its full implications. The measure represents the most ambitious effort in decades to swell public spending on domestic priorities such as education, infrastructure, and scientific research that many Democrats consider the foundation stones of sustained prosperity.
The Democratic plan directs billions of dollars toward relief for unemployed workers and local governments, as well as billions more for short-term projects (road construction, energy rehab projects) meant to quickly generate jobs. But it also provides the biggest surge in long-term public investment since President Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s.
"No president in my lifetime has had this opportunity to fund public investments," says Robert Reich, a University of California (Berkeley) public policy professor who advised Obama's campaign. Reich should know. As President Clinton's Labor secretary, he was the administration's chief proponent of public investments. That proved a dubious honor. Like Obama, Clinton took office pledging to close what he called "twin deficits" in public investment and the federal budget. But Clinton's first budgets sublimated investment to reducing the federal deficit. And after 1994, he faced a Republican-controlled Congress resistant to new spending.
Clinton won increases for some Democratic investment priorities. But, overall, his gains were modest. During President George H.W. Bush's four years, federal domestic public investment (on infrastructure, research, training, and education) averaged $121 billion a year, according to Office of Management and Budget figures. Under Clinton, that average increased to $143 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars). That meant Clinton increased public investment over the elder Bush's baseline by a total of about $176 billion over two terms.
Even separating out the immediate relief for local governments and the unemployed, the recovery bill that the House approved funds about $280 billion in new public investments. That total represents "a greater commitment to public investment than Clinton was able to accomplish in all eight years," says Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.
From a Democratic perspective, much of that investment -- for new roads, transit systems, or school construction -- serves the dual function of creating short-term jobs and encouraging long-term growth. But the bill also emphatically expands programs targeted more at the far term than the near term -- from aid to schools in low-income areas ($13 billion) to expanded college loans ($16 billion) and scientific research ($10 billion).
In normal times, Congress might never enlarge so many programs at once. But, as with Reagan's tax cut, the crisis-induced demand for action may suspend the normal laws of political gravity -- and allow Democrats to redirect federal priorities as boldly as Reagan did. "This is a once-in-a-25-year opportunity to [implement] a lot of our agenda," a top House Democratic aide says. Largely for that reason, most congressional Republicans are likely to resist the plan, no matter how many more tax cuts Obama offers them.
Success will create its own challenges for Obama. After this spasm of spending, congressional Democrats will surely divide over how much of the new funding should be made permanent -- and whether Washington can afford other Obama priorities, such as universal health care. Democrats will also face the burden of producing results. Almost all Democrats think that Reagan's tax-cutting revolution, especially as revived by President George W. Bush in 2001, failed to generate widely shared growth. Now they'll learn whether large-scale public investment can do better. "Finally, we can implement the vision," Reich says, "and ultimately test whether it was correct." With the economy flat-lining, the economic and political stakes in this experiment could not be higher.»
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