Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Republicans and Musicals

The Republicans are driving me nuts. They are opposing the stimulus package for stupid reasons (read: they are lying about why they aren't supporting it):


  1. The bill does not contain enough housing funds.
  2. The bill does not specify how funds will be allocated to states.


I suppose that those are the only two things that are clearly deceptive. There are a couple of more reasons that seem reasonable to disagree with at first glance, but might not hold up under closer inspection:


  1. The Republicans did not like the family planning provision in the stimulus package, and President Obama removed it. The sad part is that there is evidence that this would save the government money (and possibly prevent abortions), since it would prevent unwanted pregnancies - especially among the poor. I'm going to give the Republicans a pass on this on the basis of consistency, since they do tend to oppose anything that allows other people to have sex more easily.
  2. The Republicans opposed re-sodding the National Mall. I'll give them a pass on this, too, since it does sound kind of stupid. However, it would create jobs, since I don't think that it is going to be Pelosi and Boehner getting their hands dirty on the Mall.


I get the sense, though, that these are all just excuses. What I would like to hear is: "We Republicans are opposing this stimulus package because we believe that government spending is wrong in most cases. We would all be better served by using the money for tax cuts (Ed. comment: they would say ' tax relief') than spending. We will continue opposing this bill until it contains at least 70% of the money going toward tax cuts/relief."

I would respect that. I personally think that government spending is a smarter way to stimulate the economy (see below), but I am open to a debate on this.

Another, more cynical, reason I would also respect more is this: "We Republicans are opposing this stimulus package because we want to demonstrate that President Obama is weak, thereby helping the Republicans re-gain office in 2012." Again, I don't like it, but it might be more honest.

Since no one asked, here are my reasons why I believe government spending is smarter right now than tax cuts*:


  1. It is a more efficient way of getting money into the economy. 100% of government spending goes into the economy, while some unknown (but less than 100%) of tax cuts go into the economy. I certainly wouldn't spend all of my tax break.
  2. Tax cuts now will make it almost politically impossible to do the right thing later on. Our debt is out of hand (thank you, W.). I believe that we should start paying it down once we get our economy back on sound footing. This will require money, and we can't really sell bonds to pay off the debt (for somewhat obvious reasons). We will have to do some combination of cutting spending and raising taxes, and I doubt that either will be enough alone. A temporary tax cut now will amount to a "tax hike" once it is reversed, and no one likes to hike taxes. By keeping tax levels the same now, we will have to raise taxes less later on.


Skye and I started watching Scrubs again last night. After a long while of Buffy and Angel, I had forgotten how enjoyable Scrubs is. We saw the musical episode last night. Skye really liked it, but I did not. I am not crazy about musicals to begin with, and I felt like most of the songs were shoehorned into the episode. That is, a song about how doctors can diagnose anything by looking at "poo" had nothing to do with that episodes plot. Similarly, songs describing characteristics of characters we already know are not enlightening (although they may have been fun to write, and they were definitely fun to watch for Skye): we already knew that Turk and JD were in guy-love, so I didn't feel like we needed a song about it. Worse yet, a running joke about Turk thinking that Carla was Puerto Rican was ruined by writing a song about the running joke. In fact, Turk and Carla were having some interesting problems with their relationship, and Turk even sang that they should be singing about their relationship problems instead of the running joke. I couldn't have agreed more.

One factor that is going on here is that I can't get away from comparing the Scrubs musical to the Buffy musical. In Buffy, the songs brought long-simmering tensions between characters to a head. Spike tells Buffy to get lost, Giles realizes that he is stifling Buffy's growth, Tara realizes that Willow hasn't been truthful with her. These songs moved the plot along. I liked that better.

* Please keep in mind that the last economics class I took was in 11th grade.

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