Even as lawmakers in Washington tussle over the details of President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill, the public seems to agree on one thing: they want to see some form of a recovery package enacted.
Two-thirds of Americans believe some version of the president’s bill should be passed, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. However, people seem to have very low expectations of the immediate benefits of the bill.
Just 17 percent of those polled say the bill would make the economy much better and only a few believe the bill would impact their lives this year.
“Americans have become much more negative about everything,” said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup Polls.
“It’s reality,” he continued, explaining why consumer confidence is so low. “Americans view the economic problems as severe [and not as] a quick fix.”
The numbers seem to bear out that belief.
The stock market has lurched up and down over the past few months, after suffering a near crash in the wake of the housing market implosion.
And in 2008, the country witnessed record layoffs, with 1.9 million losing their jobs in the last four months alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Americans view the economic problems as severe [and not as] a quick fix.”
Just in December, the number of unemployed persons increased by 632,000 to 11.1 million, raising the unemployment rate from 6.8 to 7.2 percent, Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, said people need to see real changes in their own circumstances.
“People are feeling economically insecure; they’re tightening their belts,” she said. For confidence to increase, “people have to feel like their jobs aren’t in danger and that’s going to take a while.”
For the most part, people still seem to believe the president—who has a 66 percent job approval rating, according to the latest polls—can make that change.
In the Black community, said University of Maryland political science professor Ronald Walters, while many may not know the details of the plan, “the general expectation is that the stimulus package will make their lives better and that’s because people have faith in Barack Obama’s leadership.”
Getting this near-trillion-dollar stimulus passed is critical in helping President Obama live up to those expectations and build his political cache, the political analyst said.
“This is the largest piece of legislation that we have seen in modern history in the United States and he is at the helm of it,” Walters said then added, “He is very concerned about his re-election so he has a stake in getting this right.”
Ideas about what the right package would look like have been divided, however, and usually along party lines, jeopardizing Obama’s vow to pass bipartisan legislation.
Even public opinion is painted in shades of red and blue, according to the Gallup poll. More than one-third of the Republicans surveyed said the bill should be rejected altogether while 43 percent said it should be passed with major changes.
And the $819 billion House bill passed last week—of which one-third was devoted to tax cuts and the other two-thirds to spending—was devoid of even one Republican vote, despite the president’s outreach to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
That was nothing but partisan maneuvering, said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
“President Obama came up to the Hill and spoke to the Democrats and Republicans in the House. One hour before he spoke to them, the leader of the House Republicans sent an e-mail out saying, ‘I urge all of you to vote against the package.’ That’s not give-and-take, that’s politics,” Kerry said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Monday that Republicans are not trying to derail the legislation, however.
“Nobody that I know of is trying to keep a package from passing,” he told reporters. “We’re trying to reform it.”
Chief among those reforms for Republicans and some Democrats is to pare down the unwieldy bill to measures that will immediately and directly stimulate the economy.
According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis released Monday, 78 percent of the funding in the current Senate bill would be used by the end of fiscal year 2010, compared to 64 percent for the House version.
The stimulus package needs to be “timely, temporary and targeted,” Sen. McConnell said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Sunday.
Instead, McConnell and others said, the bill is weighted down with measures such as honey bee insurance, sod for the National Mall, $75 million for anti-smoking programs, another $400 million for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, a $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion pictures, $600 million to buy hybrid cars for federal employees and more.
Walters said Democrats are simply trying to push forward things that were neglected during the George Bush years.
“This is set against the atmosphere of a long drought for Democrats in which they have not been able to get passed large packages in human investment,” he said.
In the House bill, $550 billion is divvied up between education, $142 billion; health care, $111 billion; infrastructure, $90 billion; aid and benefits, $72 billion; energy, $54 billion; science and technology, $16 billion and housing, $13 billion.
Republicans are floating ideas of their own, including the addition of $71 billion for the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was intended for wealthy Americans but is, instead, affecting middle-income families; and a 15,000 tax credit for homebuyers.
And a group of Republican senators led by Florida Sen. Mel Martinez has drafted their own bill.
The $713 billion package would include $430 billion in tax cuts, $114 billion in infrastructure investment, $138 billion for extending unemployment insurance, food stamps and other aid and $31 billion to counter the housing crisis.
Obama has said that the bill in its current form needs to be trimmed and has expressed support for some of the Republican offerings.
The president has met repeatedly with leaders from both parties to urge some compromise so the bill would move swiftly.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said they are willing to make some changes in order to have a proposal on the president’s desk by Feb. 13, the Congress’ self-imposed deadline for passing this bill.
"The president, the Democratic leaders, the Republican leaders certainly have every intention of moving forward to getting everything out of the bill that causes heartburn to a significant number of senators," he told reporters Tuesday.
Shierholz, the EPI economist, said no matter what the final stimulus package looks like, it will not be “a magic bullet.”
She said, however, that an effective stimulus should not focus on too many tax cuts for businesses—since results will not be guaranteed--but on getting money into consumers’ hands.
“We need to increase aggregate demand for goods and services [and to] get money into the hands of people most hurt by this crisis and those who are cash-strapped so they would get right out there and spend that money,” she said.
“Businesses, they can just pocket that money,” she added. “If demand is low, why would a business take that money and invest it in another plant? We need demand first.”
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