As I’ve mentioned here before, I consume a metric truckload of news on a daily basis. And yet, it occurs to me that I don’t know the answers to the following questions about the stimulus:
1) Given all the hoopla over Obama’s tax cut concessions to the Republicans, are these tax cuts the ones he campaigned on, or different ones more common to Republican policy?
2) After tax cuts, and ignoring the 0.7% of the stimulus that the Republicans are arguing with (I, for one, think the National Mall is damn well in need of sod), just what the hell are we spending the other 99.3% on?
I mean, we’re spending $816 billion here. That should be newsworthy. And not to imply that we have a blitheringly incompetent news media, but at the moment the word “stimulus” does not appear on CNN’s home page. (Headlines: WWII vet frozen to death leaves $$$ to hospital; Sarah Palin takes on Ashley Judd; Boy, 10, gets porn text on birthday phone.) Amusingly, the CNN home page that does not include the word “stimulus” does include a story about how hard it is to understand the concept of “trillion”, called “Numb and Number”.
Accurate, if only they we’re talking about their own news room.
So, as a public service: here is the PDF of the Congressional Budget Office report which summarizes the costs of the bill, by explicating some of them. However, they have a habit of saying things like “$6.4 billion for other purposes”. So here is the complete text of H.R. 1, while these are the amendments in the House and the Senate.
The full text prints to a 362 page PDF, if you’re so inclined. It’s a shame we don’t have an industry whose job it is to analyze proposed legislation and report it to the public; perhaps we should do something about that.
These are a little easier:
New York Times
HR Press Summary
The tax cuts include both what he campaigned for (a check for each working family, etc.) but also things he campaigned directly against (like allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on their own, rather than removing them on Day 1. As was the case when we went from primary to general election, his changing positions are moving more in line with what I agree with, so I’m not complaining.
That said, most of this stimulus package doesn’t start spending money until 2010, which seems mind-boggling, given all his speeches about the armageddon that’s coming if we don’t listen to him (gee, it’s been what? Four weeks since we’ve heard that about our President? But I digress…).
Also, a lot of things in it aren’t stimulus items at all. Example: put sod on the National Mall and you pump money into the economy for a while. That’s stimulus. Build a new powerplant or a new highway, and you’ve got to maintain that plant/highway for years to come. Not that they’re bad ideas, but once we spend the money, then we’re on the hook to spend more money year after year to keep it up. So the trillion dollars we spend now isn’t “one time,” it’s followed by a recurring bill after it’s done.
In other words, this guy is so popular, even his pork is appetizing…
Oh, and I’m sure if you read the article about the kid who got a porn text message on his phone, the word “stimulus” is in there somewhere. ;-)
Thanks for the links, will consume them tomorrow.
Re timing of the spending, the CBO says outlays will be $93B, $224B, and $159B respectively over fiscal years 2009-2011, and note that FY2010 starts in October. So the math I’m doing says that we’re looking at around $149 billion spent in calendar year 2009, out of a three-year total of $476 billion. Makes sense to me.
As for what stimulus and what’s not, I think you’re drawing irrational boundaries. Keynes said that it’s stimulative to dig holes and then fill them, right? So your argument isn’t against stimulus, it’s against long-term government commitments. And I can argue that a new power plant or highway could very easily be cost neutral or cost negative over the long term, if you combine it with the current costs of having poor highways and brownouts. (Not saying that’s always the case, of course.)
Hmmm…but the total spend is somewhere north of $800B. So something about the CBO stats you’re quoting seem fishy…
The discrepancy comes from the difference between “outlays” and “costs”. Keep in mind that “net impact on the deficit”, the last line of the spreadsheet, includes tax cuts, none of which are outlays.
Total outlays through 2019 are estimated at $604B, of which $476B is spent in the first three years. There’s a $2.2B discrepancy between “budget authority” and “outlays” which I don’t understand at all. Also confusing: $1.3 billion of deficit reduction is listed as “off budget”, resulting in an on-budget total cost of $817B, and a “unified” budget cost of $816B. The media have been reporting this as $819B, so I guess three billion dollars is now a rounding error.
Of course, the irony that I am trying to explain a spreadsheet to you does not escape me, so feel free to download it yourself and explain it right back to me.