Women’s Lobby Loses Birth Control Battle, Wins Stimulus War

The removals of the family planning is a tragedy in the stimulus bill. Mr. Obama was trying to show he could be sympathetic to Republicans, and seemed to me to convey a desire to reach out across the aisle. Than ALL of the Republicans voted no.

They spoke volumes with that vote, basically saying, “You may want to work with us, but we don't really want to work with you.” They set a fiery stage for legislation in the future during the Obama administration.

I'm not sure why you're portraying it as a positive thing that the bill only allocated 5% to infrastructure. Saying that investment in infrastructure is bad because most construction workers are male is like saying that investment in education is bad because most professors and teachers are white. It doesn't make sense.

I think that the biggest tragedy is that the President and Democrats went along with gutting the proposed infrastructure expenditures in order to put in more tax cuts (and thereby win some Republican votes) — and then no Republicans voted for it anyway. I think that the House and Senate should just toss out most of the Republican-sponsored changes (since the Republicans aren't interested in the stimulus anyway) and push it through. There are clearly enough votes in the House and nearly enough votes in the Senate to pass Obama's original proposal in the first place. So chuck out the crap the GOP wanted in there and pass the plain-vanilla version.

What a straw man, Alon. Nobody is saying that infrastructure is bad because it creates jobs for men. I'm not against infrastructure investment and neither are NOW or Planned Parenthood or any of the groups I talked to. They argued for a balanced investment in social and physical infrastructure. 5% is a striking indication of how much lobbying pressure there was because the stimulus was originally sold as primarily an infrastructure package–but it turned out that there were more pressing needs in the states to maintain basic social services. The vested infrastructure interests sold infrastructure as a quick way to stimulate the economy, but it isn't necessarily, at least not compared to direct budget stabilization to the states.

The infrastructure vested interests aren't that strong. The mass transit lobby is tiny. The highway lobby is bigger, but right now it's severely cash-strapped, as well as image-strapped in the wake of the Big Three bailout. The construction unions are fairly big, but not compared to teachers' unions, Governors, the health care lobby, or the military-industrial complex.

It's not clear at all that “infrastructure isn't necessarily a quick way to stimulate the economy, at least not compared to direct budget stabilization to the states.” The numbers are conflicting. The main argument against infrastructure was that there weren't enough shovel-ready projects; the problem is that there is hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of backlogs and projects canceled for cost reasons. To me, much of the decision to lowball infrastructure looks like a combination of lobbying efforts, tax cuts to make Republicans happy, and additional welfare spending to make the Dean Bakers and Ezra Kleins happy.

We need more birth control money, but the stimlus may not have been the right place to try and get it, to much of what “should” go to the programs specified will end up in pet projects.. Birth Control money should be included in a bill where it is one of the highlights and not just an add on.

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come on