Stimulus for Liberals.(THE ECONOMY)(Democratic Party)

PERHAPS the central liberal criticism of George W. Bush is that he used a national crisis as an opportunity to pursue partisan aims. Liberals do not seem to see that, to an outsider, this is exactly what the stimulus bill looks like: an attempt to use the financial crisis to enact every liberal spending wish of the last two decades. (The difference is that Democrats had input in the Patriot Act and the authorization-of-force resolution.) The political scientist John Pitney has calculated that between the introduction of the bill and its passage, Congress spent money at a clip of a million dollars a second. The next time a liberal spending program is proposed, we will have to ask: How worthless must this program be if it could not make it into the stimulus?

Nor is the commitment of current and future taxpayer resources the worst of it. The stimulus bill partly undoes the most successful social reform of the last 30 years, not that Congress debated the matter. State governments will now be rewarded for expanding their welfare caseloads--rewarded even more than the previous unreformed version of welfare allowed. (Welfare reform has been partly, not wholly, undone: Recipients still lack the court-enforced entitlement to their benefits they had before 1996.)

The bill also includes funding for "comparative-effectiveness research" about health care. We have too little research on the effectiveness of treatment regimes because we do not have a system of health-care financing that puts consumers in the driver's seat. Combined with the Obama administration's interest in a more government-centered health-care system, however, this research threatens to pave the way for federal rationing--unless industry groups succeed in making it pointless. Either way, it is a bad idea.

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