Honestly, a 900-word Politico article on “the Power of Obama’s Hand”? It’s going to be a long four-to-eight years. (Hat tip: Dave Weigel).

When President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise but undermining the American economy. This bill is not about sex discrimination — paying men and women different wages for the same job has been illegal for nearly half a century — but rather about statutes of limitations. How long after an incident of discrimination should someone be allowed to sue? The Supreme Court ruled that an employee has six months after a company’s initial pay decision to file a discrimination claim. While this was a fair reading of existing law, critics legitimately questioned whether the law itself unfairly foreclosed redress for a decision made long before an employee discovered the pay discrimination. They correctly went to Congress to fix the law, instead of demanding that courts rewrite it themselves. 

But the solution is not to eliminate statutes of limitations altogether, which is essentially what the Fair Pay Act does when it restarts the litigation clock with every new paycheck. No, the proper solution is simply to codify the common law “discovery rule” for these types of cases, making clear that the statute of limitations begins to run only when the employee discovers the wrong that had been committed against her way back when — a compromise that was proposed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison but rejected by the Senate. Instead, the new law introduces major uncertainty into business operations and gives every employee a Sword of Damocles to dangle over her employer’s balance sheet. Companies will all of a sudden be subject to decades-old discrimination claims they have no ability to defend.

At bottom, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act takes a bludgeon to an already reeling economy, acting as a stimulus only for the lawyers bringing and defending the coming avalanche of lawsuits.

Remember the Blue Dog Democrats? They were the fiscally conservative Democrats from Southern and Western and rural districts who weren’t going to go along with the big-spending leadership of their party. They’ve gotten a lot of attention, especially after a lot of new Blue Dogs were elected in 2006, helping to give the Democrats a majority in the House.

But where are they now? After eight years of unprecedented profligacy, with a trillion-dollar increase in federal spending, and in the face of both trillion-dollar deficits and unimaginably large long-term fiscal imbalances, the House is just about to vote to spend $825 billion that the government doesn’t have. Will any Blue Dogs vote no? Will any Blue Dogs live up to their campaign rhetoric about fiscal conservatism?

Don’t bet on it.

Their record isn’t as good as they’d like you to believe. John Fund pointed out back in 2005 that they were not supporting any Republican efforts to limit spending. But maybe that was just because the Republicans didn’t try to work with them. Fair enough. Now they’re part of the Democratic majority. And apparently they’re satisfied with vague promises from the Obama administration that after we spend all this money, we’ll get back to fiscal responsibility. (Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet.)

Blue Dogs supported fiscal responsibility at some vague point in the misty past, and they will strongly support fiscal responsibility at some vague point in the future, but right now they’re going to vote to put their constituents another $825 billion in debt.

Their members range from Rep. Mike Arcuri of New York to Rep. Charlie Wilson of Ohio, and include the newly promoted Kirsten Gillibrand. If you seek their monument, look around you.

UPDATE: By my colleague Tad DeHaven’s count, 37 out of 43 “Blue Dogs” voted for the spending bill that will probably end up costing about $900 billion. Congratulations to actual Blue Dogs Allen Boyd, Jim Cooper, Brad Ellsworth, Collin Peterson, Heath Shuler, and Gene Taylor.

Cato has just published a full-page ad in the New York Times with the names of some 200 economists, including some Nobel laureates and other highly respected scholars, who “do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance” — contrary to widespread claims that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on a massive fiscal stimulus package. Of course, many economists don’t like to sign joint statements, so this is only a fraction of stimulus opponents in the profession. Greg Mankiw pointed to a few noted skeptics last week:

In a TV interview last month, Vice President Joe Biden said the following:

Every economist, as I’ve said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.

That statement is clearly false. As I have documented on this blog in recent weeks, skeptics about a spending stimulus include quite a few well-known economists, such as (in alphabetical order) Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales–and I am sure there many others as well. Regardless of whether one agrees with them on the merits of the case, it is hard to dispute that this list is pretty impressive, as judged by the standard objective criteria by which economists evaluate one another. If any university managed to hire all of them, it would immediately have a top ranked economics department.

And of course Mankiw’s list isn’t comprehensive. There’s also former Treasury economist Bruce Bartlett, former Yale professor Philip Levy, former Ohio State and Federal Reserve economist Alan Viard, Russell Roberts of George Mason, and many more. Under the current circumstances, plenty of economists are endorsing large fiscal stimulus programs. But it’s just not correct to claim that there’s any consensus or that “every economist … from conservative to liberal” supports the kind of massive spending program that the Obama-Biden administration has proposed.

UPDATE: Martin Feldstein, whose support last October for a fiscal stimulus is the reed upon which journalists justify their claims about “economists across the political spectrum,” now calls this stimulus bill “an $800 billion mistake.”

C|Net News blogger Chris Soghoian has the story on the search for transparency in the economic stimulus bill, and he cites Cato’s recent policy forum, Just Give Us the Data!

Good things will happen when taxpayers can see where the money goes.

There have been at least nine bills to deny Members of Congress an automatic pay increase introduced in the new Congress so far. Some are cleverly designed to deny a pay increase when the federal government’s books are out of balance.

After eight years of higher spending and more intervention, some of us were hoping for change. Unfortunately, President Obama apparently wants to be George Bush on steroids. I explained in a previous video (https://​www​.cato​.org/​2​0​0​8​/​1​2​/​1​5​/​a​r​e​-​w​e​-​a​l​l​-​k​e​y​n​e​s​i​a​n​s​-now/) why Keynesian economics was misguided. The much-anticipated sequel is now available for your viewing pleasure.

This new video looks at the details of Obama’s $825 billion plan to make America more like France. At the risk of spoiling the conclusion, there is no reason to think that big government will work any better for Obama than it did for Bush.