Secret Obama memo wanted the $800 billion stimulus to be—gasp!—$1.8 trillion

Secret Obama memo wanted the $800 billion stimulus to be—gasp!—$1.8 trillion

By James Pethokoukis

It could have been bigger. Much, much bigger.

Back in late 2008, soon-to-be Obama White House economic adviser Christina Romer prepared a policy memo—the contents a mystery until now—about how the new administration should deal with the collapsing economy. Romer thought to really do the job, the stimulus—later called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—should have been $1.8 trillion (highlighting for emphasis):

This memo was dug up by Noam Scheiber of The New Republic magazine. Now, Obama never saw that $1.8 trillion number since Larry Summers, who was leading the econ team, thought it was politically impossible:

When Romer showed Summers her $1.7-to-$1.8 trillion figure late the week before the memo was due, he dismissed it as impractical. So Romer spent the next day or two coming up with a reasonable compromise: $1.2 trillion. In a revised document that she sent Summers over the weekend, she included the $1.2 trillion figure, along with two more limited options: about $600 billion and about $850 billion. … But with less than twenty-four hours before the memo needed to be in Obama’s hands, Summers informed her that he was inclined to strike the $1.2 trillion figure. Though Summers, like Romer, believed more stimulus was almost unambiguously better, he also felt that a $1.2 trillion proposal, to say nothing of $1.8 trillion, would be dead on arrival in Congress. Moreover, since Obama’s political operatives were convinced that any stimulus approaching a trillion dollars was hopeless, Summers worried that urging more than this amount would stamp him and Romer as oblivious in their eyes. “$1.2 trillion is nonplanetary,” he told Romer, invoking a Summers-ism for “ludicrous.” “People will think we don’t get it.”

When the economic team finally walked through the contents of the memo with the president-elect on December 16, Romer mentioned her preference for over a trillion dollars. Summers allowed that bigger would be better. But these points were made in passing. “I don’t remember that as part of the discussion,” conceded one member of the economic team in attendance. The final version of the memo had framed the debate around two basic choices—roughly $600 billion and roughly $850 billion—and these were the focus of the conversation. “The option of going well above $800 billion was certainly raised, but it was not discussed extensively,” Romer later recalled in an interview. “We felt the most important thing was to make sure the president-elect was on board with a plan as large as $800 billion.” Neither the memo nor the meeting would have given Obama reason to suspect this amount was arguably $1 trillion too small.

Good heavens. I recently wrote a post about Michael Grabell, a reporter for ProPublica. He documents the many failings of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in “Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History.”

In reporting on the stimulus over three years, I traveled to 15 states, interviewed hundreds of people and read through tens of thousands of government documents and project reports. What I found is that the stimulus failed to live up to its promise not because it was too small (as those on the left argue) or because Keynesian economics is obsolete (as those on the right argue), but because it was poorly designed. Even advocates for a bigger stimulus need to acknowledge that their argument is really one about design and presentation.

In short, Big Government screwed up the Big Spend. Joe Biden, Grabell notes, said the stimulus would “literally drop kick us out of the recession.” But Grabell concludes that “the stimulus ultimately failed to do what America expected it to do — bring about a strong, sustainable recovery. The drop kick was shanked.”

And Team Obama wanted it to be $1 trillion bigger?

http://blog.american.com/2012/02/secret-obama-memo-wanted-the-800-billion-stimulus-to-be-gasp-1-8-trillion/