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116 IRET Byline 1 (1993)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/iretbyln0116 and id is 1 raw text is: May 3, 1993 No. 116
SENATOR DOLE'S PYRRHIC VICTORY
Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole marshalled
his troops to gain a stunning victory over President
Clinton and the Senate Democrats, killing most of the
President's economic stimulus spending proposals.
Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans may have
lost the economic policy war while
winning this battle.

The issue
Senator Dole and his colleagues  whether
had the opportunity to make Mr.
Clinton's puny little economic    government
stimulus plan the subject of public  assume the
scorn and obloquy. Instead, they  for   deteri
allowed it to become a political  specific ecot
cause celebre - a battle between
political good guys and bad guys.
As is so often the case, however,
the fuss was misdirected. Instead of focusing on the
basic issues the Clinton stimulus package presented,
the Republican leadership allowed opposition to the
package to be portrayed as partisan obstructionism.
Thus, the President and the Senate Majority leader
were able to cast the Senate Republicans as bad guys
who would sacrifice the economic well being of the
nation to their political power play.
The Senate Republicans, more's the pity, failed to
direct their fire against the real deficiencies of the
stimulus package, instead condemning it because the
President hadn't specified how he proposed to pay for
its pork and other public boondoggles. They should

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have based their opposition to the President's proposal
on the grounds that (1) no stimulus is called for, (2)
the Clinton program would create no real jobs, and (3)
what is needed instead is elimination or at least
moderation of the huge array of government policies
and programs that impede economic progress.
Implicit in the President's and Majority Leader
George Mitchell's bashing of Senator Dole and the
rest of the Republican membership of the Senate was
that everyone agrees that the Clinton stimulus package
is the right thing to do, and it is only the pettiest of
politics that impelled Mr. Dole and company to
oppose it. The Senate Republicans were thus cast as
villains, willing to trash the economy for their own
political gain.
One would have preferred to believe that Dole et
al were opposed to the President's plan because they
recognized that the best that could
be said of it is that it was small
as   and   is    enough not to do too much harm to
 federal    the economy.   But along came
Senator Hatfield, professing to
n or should      speak  ...for a wide range of
esponsibility    views... on the Republican side,
ling... any...   offering an alternative stimulus
zic outcome,     package of roughly half the size of
Mr. Clinton's original proposal.
The alternative package was merely
a cut-back version of the Clinton
spending initiatives - one-year funding for summer
jobs, child immunization, small business association
loan guarantees, waste disposal loans and grants for
rural communities, and mass transit capital grants,
along with emergency unemployment compensation.
Whether Mr. Hatfield recognized it as such, his
alternative was an explicit endorsement of the Clinton
approach. He positioned the Senate Republicans as
fighting to the death over a small amount of outlays
rather than over the basic deficiencies of the Clinton
approach. It's hard to see how this could excite the
political passions of the electorate and forge a strong
alliance with the nation's taxpayers.

IRET is a non-profit, tax exempt 501(c)(3) economic policy research and educational organization devoted to informing the
public about policies that will promote economic growth and efficient operation of the free market economy.
1331 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Suite 515, Washington, D.C. 20004  Phone: (202) 347-9570

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