The tax cuts for lower income people are nice and will help some people. As stimulus for our economy they suck because the actual cash is just enough to stretch the grocery budget and maybe allow for some cheap stuff to be bought at WalMart, our favorite pipeline to China. Remember, WalMart hates buying American products and pressures their suppliers to cut prices so much that they have no choice but to go overseas. They have even explicitly told vendors in meetings to move their production overseas.

Yeah, the states shouldn’t get any help now. Right. Tell that to the people in Missouri who will lose their unemployment benefits if the state can’t get some federal help right away. The entire argument against helping states and cities is highly questionable. First, I find your argument that booting more people out of work is a good thing somewhat questionable. Actually, I find the entire argument much more like what I’d expect to see over at RedState or LGF, protestations of being a Democrat to the contrary. For one thing what does job loss in the private sector have to do with jobs in government?? In fact in many agencies more people are needed to help deal with the unemployed and working poor. The logic content of the entire rant in that paragraph is zero.

Then there’s this one: “See today’s New York Times for the story of the $9 billion proposed for broadband in “underserved” areas. It seems that no one can say whether the end users of this huge public investment are even there!”. Since the company I do IT for has locations in small towns I can tell you that the end users do exist. There is in fact no doubt about that on the part of anyone who has a clue about what it’s like there and even in some suburbs if you happen to be in just the wrong place in relation to a phone company CO and no cable service nearby either. Heck, our main office in a suburb of KC still can’t get DSL and had to wait for a couple of years to get cable and could only get that by cutting a deal to run some extra cable on condition of length of service contract and services purchased. Anyone familiar with the issue knows that our country with its pathetic patchwork system is behind many other countries in how “wired” we are and are falling further behind.

The Republicans don’t have the better argument mostly because their entire argument seems to be that if they can’t make the entire stimulus be nothing but tax cuts at least we should minimize the whole thing. This, of course, is exactly what should be done if we want it to fail miserably. Gee, what a coincidence after Rush’s wish for Obama.

1) That 22% to be spent in the out years is hardly chump change. $142 billion would not be spent until after Sept. 30, 2010, more than 19 months from now. Calling that “fiscal stimulus” is transparent nonsense.

2) While it’s true that tax cuts generally don’t produce the same bang (lower multiplier effect) for the buck as many kinds of direct spending, tax cuts can be literally immediate — i.e., next week, people could see more take home pay — and can be modified, extended or rescinded as circumstances change. By and large, tax cuts to the less wealthy produce the most stimulus, but some types of targeted tax incentives to businesses can be helpful too.

3) The whole business about the pressing need to bale out states and munipalities is, in my judgment, vastly overblown. First, not all states and localities are in the mess that California is, and a big chunk of the bale out would effectively reward California for its profilgacy. Second, it’s not so vital to head off layoffs of public employees. As millions of private sector emplyoyees are losing their jobs — everywhere, in retail, manufacturing, technology, financial services, etc. — BLS data shows that government employment has held steady and is even growing in some categories! If you’ve ever worked in government (and I have in both big city and state agencies), you know that in many public functions, you could fire every fourth person and the remainig three would still never face a workload typical for any private company.

4) Finally, a lot of the proposed expenditures have simply not been examined closely and no one knows whether they make sense, even if the money could be spent in a timely way. See today’s New York Times for the story of the $9 billion proposed for broadband in “underserved” areas. It seems that no one can say whether the end users of this huge public investment are even there! So would it not make more sense to knock $9 billion off our payroll taxes next week?

There is a really compelling case for a great many changes. If they were made and the Republicans still didn’t support it, thenyou’d have them over a barrel. Now, frankly, they have the better argument.

I don/t come from a partisan perspective, so I am especially perturbed to see arguments of the form “the republicans are wrong about x, therefore the current plan is sound.”

What the government sb doing is intervening more directly to stabilize the RE market by forcing or doing the brokering of new term on all those iffy loans based on long-gone valuations. Terms sb renegotiated for folks with the income to make some type of loan sustainable, and folks with insufficient income should be steered to bankruptcy to allow them to get out from under. Waiting for banks to do this semi-voluntarily won’t work.

Then the rest of the dough should go only for things for which a good argument can be made that they’ll have a demonstrative stimulative effect beyond replacing money that that disappeared from projections, like with state budgets,

The feds shouldn’t be jumping in to help state budgets until every state has made one FY round of serious and difficult budget cuts. And if the states want to undertake their own deficit spending, let them do so. Don’t make the feds borrow money to give to the states. That’s just stupid.