"Surely at the end of the day, there are moments when even partisans, when faced with only two choices, find themselves so disenchanted with what would be their normal choice that they feel compelled to choose the other?"

Let's see. I can take this butcher knife and stab my abdomen. Ewe!! That's gonna suck. Or I can take this .357 and put it to my head and pull the trigger..........aw, what the hell, I'm "disenchanted"....gimme the .357.

Bizarre.

Remember, he won and won't forget it.

Short version: I don't read either Buckley or Sullivan as registering surprise here, just reservation about the policies. I can't imagine that they didn't foresee disagreement with an Obama administration, especially on the topic of spending.

Surely at the end of the day, there are moments when even partisans, when faced with only two choices, find themselves so disenchanted with what would be their normal choice that they feel compelled to choose the other? (Even if they know they will be critiquing that candidate once he is in office?)

If it is just "no fiscal policy" that's a little less extreme but it risks the throwing up of hands.

Rising unemployment has lead to depletion of state run unemployment insurance (compensation) programs to the point where they are on the brink of failure. Individual who have lost a job, and their families, depend on these funds to tide them over while they scramble to re-orient their lives.

So tell me James, what is your solution to this problem? Or do you plan to join the Mark Sanford of the world whose ideological purity is being violated by the stimulus plan?

So here is the deal, name what discrete part of the stimulus plan you disagree with, and then we can have a reasonable discussion in the resulting thread. If you flatly state you are against the stimulus plan, do not preach ideology, present reasonable alternatives to the current financial crisis. Surely by now you must appreciate what our friend Rick Moran is unable to comprehend. Ideology is a very thin gruel to feed the hungry.

We need decision making in the face of uncertainty, even if it is a decision to keep his hands off of forces he, like everyone else, doesn't understand.

The financial world is a huge mess. Forced, gross manipulation of that world can only have unintended effects, since no one understands it. My experience has been that unintended effects are rarely good, but YMMV.

And no, I don't think very highly of economists as a class. How could you tell?

Is it really Obama? Are his "proposals" along those lines going into law?

Or is it just his critics, who so badly want to make "spending" arguments that they flatly ignore the state of the economy? (And stolidly pretend that there is no such thing as stimulus.)

Give poor Andrew a break. He's too busy trying to figure out who Trig Palin's Mommy is. ;)

Cheers,

Bill

Buckley is grappling with what we all should be, the difficult rational question: if stimulus is sometimes justified is it now, and how much?

He correctly brings in that too much economics is bunk, and we don't know the future, but that shouldn't really let us off the hook. We don't elect Presidents to say "I can't deal with this" and then go off to their retreats.

We need decision making in the face of uncertainty, even if it is (as I suspect this stimulus is) an arbitrary attempt to split the difference.

That's the harsh truth. Between the demands of the Krugmans and the implacability of the Mankiws, we split the difference. Now we'll see how that works.