Imagine yourself in 1993. OK, most of you were probably obsessing over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at that time, but imagine yourself as an adult in 1993. What might you have spent your time thinking about? Chances are that you’d be thinking about exactly what they are thinking about today: recessions and stimulus packages.

In 1993, President Clinton had just won the 1992 election trumpeting the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid!” For the first time in 12 years, one party held all of the lawmaking branches, and one of the first items on the docket was an ambitious plan (relatively speaking) to create $16.3 billion worth of public spending on programs to get the economy rolling again. Sound familiar?

In short, Republicans and even some Democrats began to voice their concerns in the halls of Congress, and before you knew it, that $16.3 billion dollar plan was shaved down to a mere $4 billion. To the chagrin of the newly elected president, compromise after compromise had to be made before the crucial number of votes to break cloture was met.

Fast forward to 2009. Details about the stimulus plan leaked last weekend, and the plan is far more ambitious than anything in recent history. The House plan proposes $825 billion of spending on infrastructure and tax cuts. $4.3 billion is slated to go to Wisconsin to reduce our educational budget deficits and pay for road repairs and health care, among other things. Governor Doyle has even already set up an office to deal with dispersing and managing this aid.

Assuming you aren’t ideologically opposed to deficit spending — a move getting harder to defend as long-term monetarists and tax cut ideologues have been dropping like flies into Keynesianism in light of the failure of monetary policy to dig us out of this hole — this all looks great, right?

Well, I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. The fact remains that policymaking follows a set institutional path, and until you reach a critical mass of congress people which will allow you to beat the filibuster, you’re going to have bargaining and a major scaling back of the Democrats’ wishes. Smart political spectators will bet on Republicans in Congress refusing to pass anything resembling this bill. What incentive would the Republicans have to pass it? Their respect for the public’s welfare and the opinion of economic experts? Welcome to the real world: it isn’t happening. In fact, dissent and hard-lining seems to be growing in the Republican caucus, and it will undoubtedly continue.

Columnist Gerald Cox got it right earlier this week when he said that the economy is “a badly-made automobile.” The problem is that, if history holds true and this proposed stimulus plan gets cut to the point that it can’t do what it is supposed to do (and some economists have said that it already is potentially too small), we have the even bigger problem of not having a venue for addressing systematic problems. Simply put, Congress is institutionally designed to be gridlocked. This is especially true in those rare times when major policy is most needed. When you up the stakes, there is just that much more reason for politicians to shirk collective responsibility for fear of failure and future electoral blame.

So while things need to change in our economy, the real problem is our politics and our political institutions. Until they change, we’re likely going to be disappointed with what we ultimately get. This is why things need to change at the local level.

When the House plan leaked, Governor Doyle said that it, “gives us a pretty good idea of the direction that Congress is going.” Similarly, early reports about the bill prompted Chancellor Biddy Martin to say that she was “cautiously optimistic” that a stimulus bill would help UW set a tone of greater federal support for public higher education. Both the more extreme and the more cautious forms of confidence in the plan are misplaced. Rest assured that this plan will change significantly before we see one dollar of aid, and if we are not careful to make provision for it, it will hurt the state and the university.

Here’s an idea — let’s get used to the idea that help isn’t coming, or at least not at the level we all want. But let’s not mope. Let’s get down to work finding ways to be more efficient and, yes, raise taxes while not compromising on things we value. It’s like training at high altitude for the Olympics: if we do happen to get something like the proposed package, it will be a bonus, kind of like reaching the finish line with less effort than you expect. In the long term, we need to start a major dialogue about reforming our federal political institutions. We’re too great a nation to institutionally lock ourselves out of a better future.

Dan Walters ([email protected]) is a graduate student studying political science and law.