This article was written by Madison Powers, a guest columnist for the CQ Politics online news website. It was posted on February 4th, 2009, on the CQ Politics website. It was written to explain some of the trade-off issues dealing with the new stimulus package. I think this article was written to a general audience, that being the American people, to try to help them understand what is going on with the debates on the stimulus package. It was also written, I think, with the legislators in mind, to try to get them to see the trade-offs in a new light.
Powers talks about two important trade-offs in particular: the need to balance between equity and efficiency and the need to “balance between infrastructure and other activities that also stimulate economic growth.” Powers seems to be fairly neutral when explaining the equity–efficiency trade-off, saying that “we want our spending priorities to yield a greater amount of economic activity per dollar of cost than the alternatives,” while on the other side we want the policies to be fair. When he moves on to the issue of balancing infrastructure and secondary programs, Powers seems to take the side of helping more of the extra programs with the stimulus package than infrastructure. He explains that many of the programs, if aided, would have returns similar to the big infrastructure programs. Helping the smaller programs might be the smartest thing right now, “to prop up the solvency of state budgets and with it, their bond creditor confidence, shore up vulnerable pension funds, keep basic local services and jobs intact, rebuild the economic safety net, and invest in any number of other diffuse things.” Doing this might help prevent these items from failing and causing further damage to the economy.
