Paul Krugman..

.. on the stimulus after Obama struck out with the GOP :

"Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?"

Anyway.. here's a good back and forth about the stimulus, featuring one of Con's professors.

And David Brooks articulates.. I guess.. how I'm feeling about it.

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.