Is David Leonhardt pretending Henry Paulson did his job?

Or does he know better?

This year’s election coincided with an important moment in the financial crisis. The credit markets have stabilized in the last few weeks and even improved a bit. But the rest of the economy is deteriorating fairly rapidly. It’s now in danger of falling into a vicious spiral, in which spending cuts by consumers and businesses lead to further layoffs and then more spending cuts.

To prevent that from happening, the Obama administration will need to move quickly — before it takes office — to put together some emergency plans for the financial markets and the broader economy.[italics mine; emphasis his]

So Leonhardt’s first solution is “throw more money.” Or maybe—as with the common taters last night who pretended that the Republicans didn’t control the Presidency and both Houses of Congress for six years—he’s forgotten that this one was tried, with the same kleptocrat at the helm of the Treasury then as there is now, and will be until 20 January 2009.

Leonhardt then admits that Barack Obama knows more about economics than he does:

Throughout the campaign, whenever Mr. Obama was asked about the financial crisis, he liked to turn the conversation back to his long-term plans, by saying that they were meant to solve the very problems that had caused the crisis in the first place. Back in January, he predicted to me that the financial troubles would probably get significantly worse in 2008. They had their roots in middle-class income stagnation, which helped cause an explosion in debt, and the mortgage meltdown was likely to be just the beginning, he said then.[italics mine]

We then get the mealy-mouthed conditional that makes the NYT so Authoritative:

His prognosis was right — and the pundits now demanding that he give up major parts of his economic agenda in response to the financial crisis are, for the most part, wrong.[ibid.]

And, just so we’re clear, Leonhardt isn’t talking about much money:

There is at least one obvious area of potential compromise: Mr. Obama’s call for a $1,000 payroll-tax rebate for almost every family. That would cost the government about $65 billion. But a stimulus package should probably be a lot bigger than that — maybe $200 billion or so. And at this point, drafting it well matters more than passing it immediately.

So consumers might get to borrow $2 to pay themselves for every $7 they give to Hank Paulson’s buddies. But of course these monies will be poorly spent. Not the parenthetic:

That means starting work on new construction projects that government agencies have already deemed worthy but that lack financing. It also means sending money to state governments to close their budget shortfalls, in addition to softening the blow of the downturn by extending jobless benefits (as flawed as the unemployment insurance system is).

Meanwhile, giving AIG that money has been a great investment.

Leonhardt finally gets to a positive:

The two leading candidates for Mr. Obama’s Treasury secretary — Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — seem likely to be more aggressive than Henry Paulson, the current secretary. Mr. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has at times lobbied for a more proactive approach to the current crisis. He favored direct equity injections into banks, for instance, before Mr. Paulson did.

As early as last December (2007), meanwhile, Mr. Summers criticized policy makers for being “behind the curve.”

“More aggressive” translates to “actually know what they are doing.”

What will this mean? Leonhardt glosses the ending:

Whatever he decides, it probably has to involve more money — which will make the government’s budget problems even worse. Some economists think next year’s deficit could potentially exceed $900 billion. Relative to the size of the economy, that would be the largest deficit since the years just after World War II.

A deficit like that will indeed force Mr. Obama to change his approach to the economy’s long-term problems, mainly by coming up with new ways to pay for his solutions. But that is tomorrow’s problem. Today’s are big enough as it is.

What this means is that apparatchiks like EconomistMom* will be whining about “the deficit” and the evil of “having to pay the increasing costs of social programs.” (If you wonder why we question your motives, look at your list of Senators and Conngresssmen who are determined to “do something about the spectre of future deficits”—a large portion of whom are the same people who pushed through the 2001 and 2003 raping and pillaging of the same people whose benefits you want to cut now. We question your motives because, by your own Revealed Preferences, you’re crooked.)

Leonhardt wants to placate them. Dean Baker, for one, knows that’s not possible, and pushes for a more optimal solution.

*If I were being fair to Diane Rogers (who advertises her Clinton Administration credentials whenever she can, so that we can believe she’s one of The Good Ones even as she shills for Pete Peterson and the entitlements-for-me-but-not-for-thee crowd), I would say she was hired to argue that neo-Hooverism is A Good Thing—but she made that bed and chooses to lie in it, so sympathy is not something I’m inclined to. Others here disagree. You can look it up.