Thursday night last week, as the stimulus bill was winding its way to final form, my wife and I drove to Union Station, in the heart of St. Louis City, to pick up our son. He was headed into town via bus for a get-together with our extended family.
We arrived at Union Station two hours prior to our son’s scheduled arrival, having decided to enjoy an early Valentine’s Day dinner, knowing that our time Saturday would be superceded by family time. As we walked through the historic St. Louis landmark on our way to the restaurant, we passed one dark, empty store after another. It wasn’t just that these stores were closed. They were vacant. Cleaned out. Abandoned. Five short months earlier, every one of them had been filled. Granted, a few brave entrepreneurs were hanging on, peddling merchandise to a painfully thin crowd. But they were the exceptions, insufficient to muffle the sound of our echoing steps.
Some will argue that St. Louis has its own, unique set of challenges; that it is still paying the price for its civic leaders’ decision, more than a century ago, to favor river boats over railcars. Chicago’s civic leaders made the opposite choice and their city flourished while St. Louis stumbled — and never quite recovered.
Any student of St. Louis/Chicago history recognizes the merits of that argument. However, in the last few years, the city of St. Louis had been making a turnaround, with new developments and an influx of new inhabitants, young and old alike, who for various reasons decided to move back into the urban core from the suburban fringes. Still, there stood Union Station last week, virtually empty. Hence, my wife and I (non-experts that we are) convinced each other that the blight we encountered could not be entirely blamed on St. Louis’ ancient history. At least some of it, we decided, must be the result of far more recent history and its pervasive economic disorder.
In turn, that experience and others have persuaded us that, while the stimulus bill President Obama is scheduled to sign tomorrow in Denver might not be a panacea for what ails the country, the mere effort to construct and pass it is better than doing nothing; that, faced with deteriorating circumstances, action (even errant action) is surely a better choice than no action at all.
A similar conclusion, I assume, is what drove Sens. Snowe, Collins, and Specter to negotiate for modifications to the stimulus bill in exchange for their support. And while I don’t begrudge the remainder of the Republican Caucus their bullish opposition, I have to wonder — had they erred more on the side of action v. inaction; had they walked with my wife and I through St. Louis’ Union Station last week; had they been more like Snowe, Collins, and Specter than the cartoon characters portrayed by Dan Aykroyd and friends on SNL — what other modficiations to the final bill they might have secured.
Based on some quick math — using data on this page and this page at ProPublica — the three rogue Republican senators were able to negotiate a 5.2 percent decrease in the overall cost of the bill (compared to the original House version), while increasing the aggregate for infrastructure and tax cuts (two Republican favorites) by nearly 10 percent. So again, I have to ask: How much improvement to those “Republican goals” could the GOP caucus have achieved, if they had rolled up their sleeves and come to the table in a sincere attempt to negotiate rather than deciding that the most productive “action” was, in an analogy suggested by Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX), to “declare jihad on Obama”?
Did the bulk of Republicans just vote for river boats over railcars?