The overuse of credit is one of the main flashpoints that has caused this mess in the first place. We wanted faster economic growth and rather than driving innovation and output, we made credit easier to obtain. This created an artificial bubble in everything from housing to automobile purchases to furniture and electronics. Now that bubble has popped, and instead of figuring out ways to cure the disease (painful ways, all of them), we’re just pumping more fiscal morphine into the system.

Ok, /rant_off. Less credit is good.

With hundreds of billions on the table, everyone in Congress will want money for their own favored programs and projects, regardless of the economic value.

Keeping this to a minimum will be like herding cats.

The problem — and there’s always a problem — is that once you begin talking about money in the hundreds of billions, everyone wants a piece and even more importantly, every cluster of members of Congress and every powerful individual member will insist on some particular, favored expenditure.

And whether the result will be the RIGHT stimulus plan, one that maximizes the short- to medium-term impact on generating economic activity, may not be all that important to the people on The Hill with the votes.

Obama will need to exercise some pretty fancy leadership to herd all those cats and make sure we don’t waste 100 or 200 billion dollars. There will be a powerful tendency to yield a lot of special favor money to get a package approved swiftly.

And as the late Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader who (I think) once held the same Illinois seat as Obama, used to say, a billion dollars here, a billion there, and before long, we’re talking about real money!