"Pork isn’t necessarily bad when the economy is still sputtering from the pandemic. It can serve as a Keynesian stimulus. But, classic old-school military Keynesianism, fuelled by great power rivalry and funneling money to big tech, will only exacerbate inequality and do nothing to grapple with climate change."
Perhaps. (I agree about the climate change.) It depends on how many people they hire and how much that employment expansion & uptake occurs. Strategic interests matter here, but what this is crying out for is spending big to speed up green economic/energy conversion (which is also strategically important).
"Another way to put this is that one-sided bipartisanship by Democrats feeds into unilateral partisanship from Republicans. Biden might have no other choice but to govern in a bipartisan manner, but in doing so he’s only stoking the fires of GOP extremism."
It does seem at times as though Senate Dems are mainly interested in protecting the interests of the Republican donor class.
elm
presumably because they believe that's a good thing to do
"Pork isn’t necessarily bad when the economy is still sputtering from the pandemic. It can serve as a Keynesian stimulus. But, classic old-school military Keynesianism, fuelled by great power rivalry and funneling money to big tech, will only exacerbate inequality and do nothing to grapple with climate change."
Perhaps. (I agree about the climate change.) It depends on how many people they hire and how much that employment expansion & uptake occurs. Strategic interests matter here, but what this is crying out for is spending big to speed up green economic/energy conversion (which is also strategically important).
"Another way to put this is that one-sided bipartisanship by Democrats feeds into unilateral partisanship from Republicans. Biden might have no other choice but to govern in a bipartisan manner, but in doing so he’s only stoking the fires of GOP extremism."
It does seem at times as though Senate Dems are mainly interested in protecting the interests of the Republican donor class.
elm
presumably because they believe that's a good thing to do