A Better Stimulus

A reader in a government job writes in response to the blogpost below,

I am sure you have better things to do than to watch the Today Show, but here was the morning lede from last night's vote..."Republicans voted against the measure because there were not enough tax cuts." That's right. After all the Republican soul searching in the wake of two devastating elections they unify around small government and tax cuts. Truly innovative.

Now imagine if the GOP did not have such a knee-jerk opposition to spending and actually thought strategically. The lede could have been "Republicans voted against the measure because it did not include enough large infrastructure projects and lacked imagination." Instead of fighting Dems on the dollar amount of spending, knowing that we would lose that fight in any event, we could have stood with Obama and called for large high-tech infrastructure projects that would employ large numbers of minorities in construction and white collar suburbanites in development. These projects (high speed rail corridors as an example) would also capture the imagination of the green close-in suburbs that are turning viciously against the GOP and have the strategic benefit of jamming up the young Dem members (Webb/Warner/Hagan/McCaskill) who depended on these voters for their victories.

Then again, we could just listen to Rush and harken back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan supposedly curbed spending.