Senator Thune: Opportunity is Knocking

Wednesday, 04 February 2009 12:59

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or the next week South Dakota's Republican Senator, John Thune, has real power. alt

He can use it to "Just say No!" to President Obama's stimulus plan, which is ideologically easy, maybe even popular in conservative South Dakota, but not good for the nation, and not good for South Dakota's long term interests. Or, Senator Thune can use the threat of a "no" vote to extract an important stimulus program for western South Dakota that would pack a big bang-for-the-buck and could be a model for a new partnership between government and western ranchers.

In the end, it is economic suicide for the nation's economy to be held hostage to failed 19^th century conservative economics. As pragmatists, the nation's Republican governors know that. I bet John Thune knows it. If he votes "no" on the final package, (thereby tossing out almost a $900 billion dollars of stimulus because of differences over $1 billion dollars of liberal pork), even I would be able to run against him in two years on the platform that he drove the nation into Depression.

Here's my campaign slogan: "First John Thune and George Bush drove the nation into the deepest economic depression in a century, then they blocked President Obama's effort to solve it." If he thinks pandering to the cultural conservatism of his base will save him from a grassroots populist insurgency, then he is thinking like Tom Daschle. I would love to debate him. I'd chase him all over the state, make him defend a congressional career spent promoting the interests of the rich over hard-working families. "John Thune, that Washington insider who pals around with Republican plutocrats while South Dakota's economy collapses."

On the other hand, Democratic leaders in the House have tossed a politically dumbed-up stimulus proposal into the Senate, and if he is smart, there is horse-trading to be done.

Democrats have lost sight of the elemental art of economic stimulation. First, you've got to create jobs...lots and lots of jobs--the less ideological and partisan the better. "Just Do It! Baby." Republican opposition to funding the National Endowment for the Arts is a narrow-minded cultural opposition, because the NEA actually passes money directly to "art workers"-ballet dancers, symphony oboists and trumpet players, painters, sculptors, reading tutors, supplemental art teachers for the schools, and millions of others. Want immediate jobs? The National Endowment for the Arts is a great program!

Second, you've got to create those jobs quickly. No two and five year delays. Criss-crossing the nation with high-speed bullet trains might be great public policy. But a modern train system will take years to design and engineer before the first shovel hits the ground (take the lesson of DME to heart). Re-thinking public transportation belongs in the long-term budget process.

Thirdly, stimulus needs to be short-lived. After all, we're creating a massive debt, folks, and the faster we can get the economy stabilized and then reduce spending the better. I personally think that tripling the number of teachers in our secondary schools should be the most important public policy goal of the new ObamaNation. But the role of a stimulus is not to create long-term commitments. That's why President Obama has focused on re-building schools rather than re-inventing the way we teach children. Once the stimulus package is passed, the more difficult task of taxing ourselves properly to fund education reform will be on the table.

So the formula is simple (if only House Democratic leaders could understand). Spend big. Create Jobs. Create immediate jobs. Put a limit on the timeframe of the stimulus. And, keep the pork out.

Pork is a delicate dance for South Dakotans. Like most rural states with small populations, and the same number of Senators as California and New York, we live on pork. We are the kings of pork. We've got grease all over our lips. We measure the success of our Senators by the volume of pork they bring home. And then, of course, we call ourselves rugged individualists and conservatives. When people in the cities scratch their heads, we tell them "We're entitled, because we're the real America." Go figure.

There is one more piece to the puzzle. It's very tricky. While the political slogan of "shovel ready infrastructure repair" rolls easily off the tongues of both Democrats and Republicans, there is a danger that we will repair 19^th and 20^th century infrastructure and have no money to build a 21^st century economy. President Obama's commitment to a national, high-efficiency, electrical transmission grid is an example of his attempt to create jobs now to build an economy for the future.

Where does western South Dakota fit in? Our rangeland "infrastructure" (both public and private) is degraded. This is not a recent problem. This is not one person's fault, or one group's fault. The grass has been over-grazed for a century, and invaded by exotic foreign grasses and weeds. The stock dams built by public works projects in the last Depression are now silted in. Our riparian forests have been destroyed. The Black Hills pine forest is blighted by the bark beetle invasion. Wildlife interactions have been devastated. Ranchers are apoplectic about runaway prairie dog towns, but oppose ferret reintroduction, shoot coyotes from their pickup trucks, are terrified of wolves, and oppose the kinds of ecosystem scale management that would restore predator-prey interactions. We have no imagination. "Poison, poison, poison" is our version of "Drill, baby, drill." These problems will only get worse as the long-term impacts of global climate instability reveal themselves.

To add to the upside-down insanity of our ranching economy, ranchers imagine creating ecotourism, dude ranches for city folks, and wildlife tourism, but hate environmentalists...the very people who might come to a ranch if it was not over-grazed and speckled with stagnant stock dams.

This is an opportunity Senator Thune.

There are already programs in the Conservation title of the 2008 Farm Bill that have been exhaustively debated, agreed upon, and passed by Congress. They just haven't been properly funded.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service has a long list of backlogged projects that could be funded immediately. Expand EQUIP, expand the Conservation Reserve Program, expand wildlife habitat easements, expand native grass reseeding projects, weed control, and erosion control projects. Expand pasture pipeline projects. Put money into the pockets of ranchers right now! And...this is critical...hire ranchers with their own heavy equipment to do as much of the work as possible on their own land. In the end, pasture and stream restoration is a hundred times more valuable and more of a stimulus than rural road repair. Afterall, ranchers have 4-wheel drive pickup trucks.

I'm no economist, but I figure you could heal our pastures, restore our river forests, re-invent the Black Hills pine forest as a sustainable ecosystem, put money into the pockets of every rancher in western South Dakota, and stimulate our small town rural economies for just about as much as...oh, say, a condom distribution program in the cities, or an upgrade for computers in the Department of Agriculture, or a tax break for Steven Spielberg.

Since the beginning of the new congressional session, Senator Thune has shown a healthy pragmatic streak. He's got his head on straight. His advocacy of wind energy is very positive. And he has shown he is capable of being bi-partisan by joining Democratic Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) to propose a federal "Build America" bond program to pay for transportation infrastructure repair. Now he can take one more step into the future by funding a massive restoration of "nature's infrastructure" on South Dakota ranches.

Go get ‘em Senator Thune.