The New New Deal Read Online Free Page A

loosen its belt when families and businesses are tightening theirs. He has also struggled to make the counterintuitive political case that things would have been even lousier without the Recovery Act. It’s true, but his slogan wasn’t Yes We Can Keep Things From Getting Even Lousier. He didn’t promise to create a somewhat-less-weak middle class. He always made it sound like the problems he inherited from Bush were kinetic problems, not thermodynamic problems.
    As a kid rambling around Scranton, Pennsylvania, when Biden would break an arm or dislocate a hip, his mother would say: Joey, it could’ve been worse. You could’ve broken both legs. You could’ve crushed your skull . As the White House point man on the Recovery Act, Biden felt like he was recycling his mom’s talking points, trying to persuade America to feel grateful its injuries weren’t fatal. It’s hard to get credit for averting a catastrophe, because once catastrophe is averted, people focus more on the pain they’re feeling than the worse pain they might have felt in a hypothetical no-action case.
    “One thing they never taught us in grad school was how to sell Keynesian stimulus,” says Biden’s former chief economist, Jared Bernstein, the other coauthor of the overoptimistic unemployment report.“‘It Would’ve Been Even Worse Without Us’ is just a fruitless message.”
    I n any case, the ferocious debate over the short-term Recovery has obscured the long-term Reinvestment.
    ARPA-E didn’t create any jobs in 2009, except for Majumdar’s and his team’s, and it didn’t create many after that. But the stimulus was only partly about stimulus. It was also about metamorphosis. ARPA-E amounted to just 0.05 percent of the Recovery Act—a new Manhattan Project in a rounding error—and most of its breakthroughs won’t produce results for years. But it’s emblematic of the law’s assault on the status quo. MIT professor Don Sadoway, a mad scientist in a bolo tie, has a radical vision of a liquid battery the size of a tractor-trailer that could store electricity for entire neighborhoods, so that renewable power could run our refrigerators when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. He’s got a prototype the size of a shot glass; his $7 million ARPA-E grant is helping him scale up to the size of a hockey puck and then a pizza box. Sadoway snorted when I asked how many jobs his grant had created: “If this works, I’ll create a million jobs!”
    Republicans have howled that many stimulus projects have little to do with short-term stimulus—and they’re right. There was nothing “shovel-ready” about bullet trains designed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours, broadband cables designed to bring rural towns into the wired world, electronic health records designed to drag medical bureaucracy out of the leeches era, smart dishwashers designed to run when electricity is cheapest, automated factories that will manufacture electric trucks in Indiana instead of China, the first U.S. testing facility for wind turbine blades as long as football fields, or research into a new generation of “space taxis” that might replace NASA’s shuttle someday. But these are the kind of long-term investments—more than one sixth of the stimulus—that Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had in mind when he said “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Recovery Act is also financing the world’s largest wind farm in Oregon and the world’s most powerful X-ray laser in California.It’s funding the largest photovoltaic solar array, largest solar thermal plant, and largest effort to install solar panels on commercial rooftops.
    None of those projects was shovel-ready, either, but they were all deemed shovel-worthy.
    The Recovery Act’s most important long-term changes aimed to jump-start our shift to clean energy, reducing our carbon footprint, our electric bills, our vulnerability to oil shocks, and our