IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS…. Hoping to spur faster growth and take advantage of the summer months, President Obama intends to spend stimulus money at a more aggressive pace in the coming months, with the intention of creating more than 600,000 jobs. Many of the projects were in the pipeline anyway, but will be moved up for greater impact.
On the other hand, we have Republicans and conservative activists, who’ve decided the economy is moving along just fine, and officials should scrap the economic recovery package altogether.
With the economy showing signs of recovery, fiscally conservative economists and Republican lawmakers are suggesting that the large unspent portion of the nearly $800 billion stimulus fund should be redirected to slash this year’s nearly $2 trillion annual deficit.
Democratic lawmakers, Obama administration officials and many economists doubt the wisdom of truncating the stimulus program so soon after it began. But Republican congressmen and economists who were not thrilled with the stimulus effort are increasingly calling for it to be foreshortened as a return to economic growth appears closer at hand. […]
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, told The Washington Times that he too thinks the recession will be coming to an end within months and he will push to bring the stimulus fund’s spending to a halt.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) added that he believes “the economy is just as likely to begin to recover on its own.”
And while it’s frightening to hear these arguments made, there appears to be very little chance that Republicans will succeed. The administration’s ramped up schedule aims to fund thousands of additional jobs in education, law enforcement, and military construction.
