Shields and Brooks Mull Obama’s Intel Picks, Stimulus Plan

JIM LEHRER:

And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

David, how do you read the substance of the Obama stimulus plan, as we know and understand it at this moment?

DAVID BROOKS, columnist, New York Times: Too complicated.

JIM LEHRER:

Too complicated?

DAVID BROOKS:

Yes, I mean, my basic view is, we've never done this before. No one has ever done — successfully stimulated an economy before. For 50 years, the economic doctrine, the common conventional view was that stimulus doesn't work. You use monetary policy to fix recoveries. We have never used tax cuts…

JIM LEHRER:

You mean, fool with interest rates and stuff like that?

DAVID BROOKS:

Right, and stuff like that. And then you have automatic things, like unemployment insurance. That stuff works. The conventional view was that tax cuts and big spending increases don't work. And this was true in the Kennedy administration, in the Eisenhower administration. This was the conventional view.

And it's totally changed in a couple months. And it's not changed because we somehow know how to do stimuluses. It's changed because we've already used the other stuff we believe in, so now this is all we're left with.

So now there is widespread belief in stimulus, but no historical experience on how to do it and really no accurate guides. If you talk to the economists, they are all over the map on how to do it.

And so to me, if I'm Obama, with something you've got to do but you have no idea how to do it, you try to keep it big and simple and discrete.

So maybe you have a payroll tax cut to give funding. You use the infrastructure. You give money to the states, just three or four big things, because you're not — you can't do something too complicated.

But instead, if you looked at the Obama program, at least as he's outlined it this week, he's got the big things, but he's also got a power grid, he's got special-ed programs, he's got basically most of his domestic agenda. The idea…

JIM LEHRER:

Health care, a lot of health care in there.

DAVID BROOKS:

Health care, the idea, I think…

JIM LEHRER:

Schools.

DAVID BROOKS:

… that he can pass these things so quickly that it'll help as a stimulus measure exceeds the carrying capacity of Congress to pass it intelligently, exceeds the carrying capacity of a new administration to actually execute it.

And I'm afraid the risk is, first, that it may actually not get passed, because it's so complicated, but, B, that it's going to be hard to do special-ed programs or pre-K programs, things that I think are good programs, it's going to be hard to implement them intelligently in three or four months to get it to stimulate the economy.