Reading The Stimulus So You Don't Have To

I think about the stimulus this way, if it doesn't get our economy going again, at least we'll have new roads and bridges and such.
But I'm more confident than that. 
Here's Steve Coll who's taken up the task of reading every itty bit of the stimulus and blogging about it in an irregular series for the New Yorker. I have read pieces of the bill but certainly not the whole thing, so I'm going to track Coll. Today, he did a short blog about the intro to the stimulus. Here's why he's doing it (I'm sure he's getting paid too):

The great David Plotz coaxed me off the fence about blogging when he launched his “Blogging the Bible” feature on Slate, about three years ago. He proved over months that by blogging he could write something very worthwhile and even lasting in a way that could not be done as successfully in any other format. The fruits of his adventure will be published tomorrow in extended book form: “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.”

No inspired achievement of this kind will long go un-imitated. This morning, full of new-Monday vim, I printed out all 407 pages of the stimulus bill, thinking that I should commit an act of think-tank citizenship and read it. I was planning just to skim through it, educate myself, and find a blog post or two in it. Then I remembered Plotz. Actually, it was the Old Testament type face on the first page that reminded me of his earlier work.

Here are some of his assumptions:

As a piece of law, and as economics, the stimulus cannot be seen as very controversial; in fact, it is more or less conventional. A Republican President would have enacted something very similar, no matter the partisan lineup in Congress. Probably, a McCain version would have had more tax cuts in it and less spending on energy, technology and health-care infrastructure (although it would likely have had some of those things), but broadly, as an intellectual or policy project, this is a product of consensus, not radicalism. Read the rest of his entry here.

I think the stimulus is being painted as radical because that's the frame that the republican party, in the hard right corner, with the loudest voices, is trying to put around the democrats, which are largely center, not hard left. The left says the stimulus isn't radical enough.