Opinion: Obama Offers Stimulus Reruns

(Sept. 7) -- It's summer that's supposed to be the time for reruns. So with summer ending, why is President Obama offering up repeats in hopes of getting the economy moving again?

On Monday, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to spend $50 billion more on transportation to rebuild roads, railways and runways. And on Wednesday, he's set to announce a proposal to permanently extend the business research and development tax credit.

In announcing the transportation plan, Obama told an audience in Milwaukee that "This will not only create jobs immediately, it's also going to make our economy hum over the long haul."

But the stimulus bill from last year included an almost identical $48 billion in extra transportation spending, along with those same promises -- rebuild the nation's infrastructure for tomorrow, and create jobs today.

So far, it hasn't exactly worked out that way.

One problem was that the transportation money got spent at a painfully slow rate. Six months after getting passed, only about 7 percent had been paid out, held up by red tape and bureaucratic inertia, according to ProPublica.

When the funds did finally get spent, it didn't exactly set the job market on fire.

This June, the White House touted the fact that a huge chunk of the transportation stimulus funds would get paid out over the next three months, dubbing it "Recovery Summer" because of all the economic benefits it would bring.

But those same months saw the employment picture worsen, the economy weaken, and the White House quietly drop the term.

Even some White House officials aren't claiming this new spending plan will create jobs anytime soon. "This is not an ... immediate jobs plan," a senior administration official told Politico, directly contradicting Obama. "We're not trying to put out an idea today that in October 2010 will be creating jobs."

The R&D tax credit idea has also been aired many times in the past. Put in place under President Reagan in 1981 as a temporary credit, it has been extended more than a dozen times since. And almost as soon as it was enacted, politicians of every stripe have called for making the R&D credit permanent. Hillary Clinton proposed it, so did Al Gore, President Bush, and the Democratic Leadership Council have backed it. John McCain proposed making the credit permanent in his 2008 campaign.

So too, it turns out, did then-candidate Obama. In his 2008 "Blueprint for Change" campaign booklet, Obama said making the tax credit permanent was needed " so that firms can rely on it when making decisions to invest in domestic R&D over multi-year time frames."

Yet, despite these repeated calls, Congress has never managed to make it so.

Even if lawmakers did, it's not clear how much of a difference the change would make to the economy, since Congress' long-established pattern of extending the credit has made it de facto permanent already.

Obama may think repeats are good enough. But the public might be forgiven if it pushes for some new economic programming.