I’m sort of in-between Jim Powell and Bruce Bartlett on this. Despite their successes in the newscycle, I think congressional Republicans made significant mistakes in how they attacked the stimulus bill. First, their recently discovered hatred for deficit spending is long overdue, but hardly persuasive given the previous eight years. The disconnect between their past actions and the requirements of the present crisis lend credibility to the charge that Republicans are just being petulant and partisan.

Moreover, I agree with Bruce that we should have a stimulus. A serious payroll-tax moratorium would be far more stimulative and would help the GOP win over the middle class. It would also bloat the deficit, but it would leave the money in the hands of workers and employers likely to spend it.

Moreover, I think objecting to the pork in the stimulus bill was overdone while objections to the non-stimulative social policy were under-done. The real significance about the pork wasn’t that it was in there, but that it symbolized the Democrats’ effort to fulfill long-term ambitions without having to endure the hassles of debating them. The health-care and welfare provisions as well as the baseline-bloat ploy are much more significant than the porcine nuggets. Those provisions are bad for the long-term economic health of the country, are not stimulative, and do amount to a down payment on a stealth new New Deal.

Republicans could have offered a more sophisticated argument against Porkulus by offering a simpler, cheaper, and more effective alternative to it.