A Republican Called For A Stimulus Plan

An astute reader emailed this link in a day or so ago.  Written in late 2008, it's from the website of some left-leaning periodical called The National Review and it was written by some former Republican Governor of Massachusetts named Romney.

Here's the opening:

What is Washington waiting for? The inauguration is less than five weeks away: At the rate we’ve been going, another 500,000 jobs will be lost by then. The downward spiral is deepening and accelerating: Congress and the president must act now.

American families have lost about $11 trillion in net worth as securities and home values have plummeted. This translates into about $400 billion less annual consumer spending, net of government safety-net funding. Exports won’t grow to make this up, as the dollar has strengthened with investors worldwide clamoring for its relative security. Investments won’t make up the gap either, as bank loans and secondary-market financing have shrunk and as fresh equity is virtually non-existent.

So this is surely the time for economic stimulus.

This is the same Mitt Romney who said this recently:

At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Friday, Mitt Romney once again sharply condemned the stimulus package passed during the president's first month in office, calling it "the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history."

I know what you're saying (I do, really - I'm clairvoyant that way). You're saying that maybe the stimulus package Romney begged for in 2008 is fundamentally different from the one passed in 2009.

Let's see what he called for.  Mitt wrote:

The first is that tax cuts are part of the solution.

Hey, did you know that there were almost $300 billion in tax incentives attached to the ARRA?

Mitt also wrote:

On the spending front, infrastructure projects should be a high priority.

There was $29 billion in infrastructure funding.

We could do this all day, I guess.  Mitt called for an economic stimulus package, one was passed, and now that it's politically expedient, he's against it.