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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > February > 20
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Editorial: Flawed stimulus doing good around the state
Calculating how many jobs the federal stimulus has stimulated is kind of like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Does anyone really have confidence that a precise number can be had, given our inability to know what would have happened to the economy in the absence of the stimulus?
President Barack Obama and a bunch of his people spent this week talking up the stimulus on the occasion of its first anniversary. They were on defense, with Republicans and, indeed, many Americans, wondering if the $787 billion effort has worked.
After all, unemployment nationally is nearly 10 percent; it’s a full point higher in Ohio.
The president reminds people that things really could have been worse, that the economy was crumbling fast when he proposed the stimulus.
What’s incontrovertible is that if the stimulus funds hadn’t been there, state and local governments and schools would be on a different footing today.
Even for people who love to hate government, it’s worth considering how ugly the situation would be here, but for the feds’ money.
The Columbus Dispatch reported this week that Ohio is set to receive $10 billion under the stimulus program. The largest amounts are for Medicaid assistance ($2.8 billion) and to stabilize the state budget ($1 billion).
Schools are the biggest direct and indirect beneficiaries of the money. The state has only so much discretion — because of federal law — as to how it can reduce spending on medical care for the poor. But on schools, it has legal leeway to cut. (On a political level, of course, the pressure to support them is great.)
Let there be no doubt that schools would have been hurting badly if the feds had not come along.
Some of the stimulus money will take a while to arrive in Ohio or will be spent over years. But the state’s current two-year $50 billion budget is patched together with close to $6 billion in stimulus money.
If the state had 10 percent less money today— given that a sweeping 10-percent across-the-board cut simply can’t be imposed on every agency (think prisons) — Ohio would be in a stunningly bad way. So would its citizens.
Remember in 2005 when state lawmakers were considering cutting the local government fund? That would have meant that cities, counties and townships would have taken cuts of up to 20 percent. Remember the uproar then about many police and firefighters, among others, could lose their jobs?
Remember the protests when library funding was on the chopping block?
Those reductions absolutely pale in comparison to what would have happened if Ohio hadn’t been bailed out by Washington.
Meanwhile, plenty of the federal money has gone to the private sector, including in Ohio, in the form of government contracts, construction projects, and loan programs, and even indirectly through the unemployment checks that have kept out-of-work people buying groceries and making their house payments.
Another hefty junk of the stimulus money — $120 billion — went directly to individuals and small businesses in the form of tax cuts, which were also designed to keep money flowing and people spending.
Has every stimulus dollar been spent wisely? Of course not. Was there ever a way to ensure that? No.
Is it possible that without massive intervention the businesses and families that are still trying to recover from a near economic meltdown would be the worse off today? Entirely.
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