Economic antibiotics

There are problems on all sides when it comes to the issue of how we structure and carry out a plan to heal our ailing economy. Because it is such a large problem with so many interconnected issues, mapping out a solution to help the entire system is difficult at best. Reducing a complex system to a series of isolated yes or no questions will not help anyone.

Yet Sunday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, echoed over and over again on "Meet The Press" the clearly partisan stance of "more tax cuts." Likewise, she very plainly agreed that she wants to see long-term spending separated into a different bill from short-term spending. This sets up a dichotomy in the minds of many people that somehow one thing is "good" (short-term spending) and another is "bad" (long-term spending). That's simply not a fair or accurate description.

If you have a sick patient come into the hospital, and you are not quite sure what kind of bacterial infection they have and you can see the patient getting worse rapidly, you give them a very powerful antibiotic to buy yourself some time to figure out what the underlying problem is. This represents the short-term push of many different kinds of financial stimulation. This could be spending on projects, cutting taxes or changing regulations. These all have their strengths, and having a wide variety of positive effects is important, just like giving someone a wide spectrum antibiotic that can fight a large variety of bacteria quickly.

Then, after the patient stabilizes for that brief period of time, you perform the tests needed to diagnose the underlying problems and lay out a treatment plan with your team of physicians, nurses and health care providers to make sure that patient gets the highest quality care and can eventually be sent back out into the world healthy again. This is the long-term investment and push. It requires being planned out in part and set in motion at the same time as the short-term push. It takes more effort and it isn't as sexy as the emergency room physician using the paddles to jumpstart a heart. It is closer to what happens in the show "House M.D.," but it takes a much longer period of time and in not nearly as cavalier a fashion.

This metaphor is somewhat simplified, but the point is the same. You can't just do one and not the other. If you give our economy a powerful antibiotic and don't diagnose the problem then you won't know the underlying reasons for the illness. Let us all be sure we are good consumers of our economic health care and make sure we get a balanced treatment plan that gives us both the immediate relief we need now and sets us on a course to become healthy again. Our job is to be smart and scrutinize both parts.

Jeremy Block is a Masters in Public Policy candidate and a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry expected to graduate in 2010.