Think Tanks Helping to Write 4th Coronavirus Stimulus Package

Here is more from the Wall Street Journal:

As lawmakers last week completed a record-shattering economic-rescue package estimated at $2 trillion, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) predicted: “This is certainly not the end of our work here in Congress—rather the end of the beginning.”

Legislators from both parties, administration officials, economists, think tanks and lobbyists are already roughing out the contours of yet another emergency-spending package—perhaps larger than the last—to try to keep the coronavirus crisis from turning into a 21st-century Great Depression. Many expect the debate to begin in earnest by late April.

“There’s talk of a multi-trillion-dollar program, given the size of the shutdown,” says Stephen Moore, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There’s a general recognition that we need something big to get some juice into the economy,” adds Mr. Moore, an outside economic consultant to the Trump administration and some congressional Republicans.

The article notes that Mr. Moore "has discussed with administration officials and congressional Republicans" the idea of suspending the payroll tax through the end of the year.

It also notes that Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been working with Republican lawmakers on crisis-response measures.

Here are some links to Think Tank Watch's latest pieces on the coronavirus.

Republican Think Tanks Mourning Their Party

The Republican establishment, many of whom are housed within think tanks across the United States, is feeling a bit uneasy about Donald Trump with less than a week to go before Election Day.

Here is an excerpt from Politico Magazine:

As the country geared up for the third and final presidential debate last week, the fellows of the storied conservative Hoover Institution gathered in Palo Alto to present their research to the think tank's wealthy patrons. Elsewhere in America, in the homestretch of perhaps the weirdest election the nation has ever experienced, things were getting tense, excited, even feverish. But the rooms at the Hoover retreat at Stanford University could have doubled as a funeral parlor, and the lectures as eulogies for a bygone era. Larry Diamond, a prominent political sociologist known to fellow scholars as “Mr. Democracy,” talked about the breakdown of the party system. Kori Schake, a National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration and adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, spoke about how the U.S. was endangering the international order it had itself created. Peter Berkowitz, a conservative political scientist and commentator, gave a talk about “the unraveling of civil society” in America.

Of course, not all think tanks and think tankers are sad.  After all, many of the 100-plus people on Donald Trump's transition team come from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.

Ed Feulner, former President of the Heritage Foundation (and a policy adviser on Trump's transition team), is reportedly trying to raise $100,000 at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's request, for the Trump transition to cover costs that aren't covered by federal funding.  This week, Feulner is hosting a $5,000-a-person breakfast with Christie at the swanky Metropolitan Club.

Among the key players on Trump's transition team are Myron Ebell, Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Paul Winfree, Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, and Ed Meese, a Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus at Heritage.

Do Republican Think Tanks Need a Facelift?

Here are Think Tank Watch's favorite excerpts from a new piece by Chris Ladd in the Houston Chronicle entitled "Rebuilding the GOP: Think Tanks":

• If politics is a sausage-factory, then think tanks are the grinder. In a city starved for glamour there may be no less glamorous job. The best ones function as hives of bright minds, relied on by political leaders to deliver the research, drafting, advocacy, and analysis on which successful legislation is constructed.

• Go the 1:12 mark in that famous Schoolhouse Rock video posted here. That’s the point in the process in which think tanks have perhaps their most important role. Armed with what seems like a great idea – school buses should stop at railroad crossings – it is time for our noble representative to draft a bill. It sounds easy. It is not.

• In short, to draft legislation that will successfully navigate its way toward adoption and also be effective on the ground, more often than not you need help from smart, savvy people who share your interest in the outcome.  That leaves Congressmen to rely on think tanks, interest groups, or to an increasing extent, industry lobbyists. As Republican think tanks become more intensely ideological, bent on orthodoxy in nearly every case regardless how absurd the result, representatives are forced to lean more and more on lobbyists for advice and research.

•  One can still occasionally glimpse flashes of insight from mainstream Republican think tanks, but on the whole they remain loyal to dogma over discovery. What happened to David Frum and Bruce Bartlett when they expressed independent insights remains a warning to anyone who might step out of line. The best advice a Republican policy maker can get from a mainstream think tank today would come from the American Enterprise Institute.

• No “think tank” is worthy of the name if it is blocked by political considerations from even considering vital, empirically-proven realities. Having an ideological focus is often central to a think tank’s mission. However, if that ideology focus fails to yield to discoveries, then the organization becomes a source of dangerous distortions.

Chris Ladd is a Republican precinct committeeman who also works in the software industry.