Thank Gridlock for Economic Turnaround - Reason.com - David Harsanyi:
January 2, 2015 - "The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we've seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it's going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened?.... What policy did Barack Obama enact to initiate this astonishing turnaround? We should definitely replicate it.
"Because those who've been paying attention these past few years may have noticed that the predominant agenda of Washington has been to do nothing. It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around. So it's perplexing how the same pundits who cautioned us about gridlock's traumatizing effects now ignore its existence....
"[S]pending in current dollars has remained steady since 2010, and spending as a percentage of GDP has gone down. In 2009, 125 bills were enacted into law. In 2010, 258. After that, Congress, year by year, became one of the least productive in history. And the more unproductive Washington became the more the economy began to improve....
"'People often don't realize that a political system is sometimes effective when it does not do certain things,' Pietro Nivola, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, argued in 2012. 'You can't just measure the things it does, the actions it takes; you also have to measure the actions it does not take.' Nivola was impressed by how gridlock has the ability to stop the Republican House from cutting spending too abruptly for the economy.
"And perhaps he's right. Gridlock has caused an odd but pervasive stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed — no cap and trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut the growth we're now experiencing. The inadvertent but reigning policy over the past four years has been 'do no harm'."
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2015/01/02/thank-gridlock-for-economic-turnaround
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January 2, 2015 - "The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we've seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks as if it's going to be strong in 2015. Unemployment numbers have looked good. Buying power is up. And the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened?.... What policy did Barack Obama enact to initiate this astonishing turnaround? We should definitely replicate it.
"Because those who've been paying attention these past few years may have noticed that the predominant agenda of Washington has been to do nothing. It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around. So it's perplexing how the same pundits who cautioned us about gridlock's traumatizing effects now ignore its existence....
"[S]pending in current dollars has remained steady since 2010, and spending as a percentage of GDP has gone down. In 2009, 125 bills were enacted into law. In 2010, 258. After that, Congress, year by year, became one of the least productive in history. And the more unproductive Washington became the more the economy began to improve....
"'People often don't realize that a political system is sometimes effective when it does not do certain things,' Pietro Nivola, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, argued in 2012. 'You can't just measure the things it does, the actions it takes; you also have to measure the actions it does not take.' Nivola was impressed by how gridlock has the ability to stop the Republican House from cutting spending too abruptly for the economy.
"And perhaps he's right. Gridlock has caused an odd but pervasive stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed — no cap and trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut the growth we're now experiencing. The inadvertent but reigning policy over the past four years has been 'do no harm'."
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2015/01/02/thank-gridlock-for-economic-turnaround
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