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President Obama has laid out his plans to revive the economy, and the price tag will be “at least $820 billion.” Something tells me that the “at least” part means “at the very, very least.”

Obama’s goal is to create four million jobs. Dean Baker works out the math and says that the plan comes down to $65,000 per job.

In my mind, the empirical evidence in favor a stimulus package is, at beat, inconclusive. The major problem, however, is that the recovery plan is no longer theoretical—we can see what it is. A lot of this spending isn’t for short-term fiscal stimulus, it’s merely larger government. The Washington Post opines:

Helping hire, equip and pay police, a $4 billion item under the bill, might be a good idea, but writing checks to individual households for the same amount would do more to stimulate the economy. Ditto for $16 billion in Pell Grants for college students, $2.1 billion for Head Start and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. All of those ideas may have merit, but why do they belong in an emergency measure aimed to kick-start the economy?

The short answer is, they don’t belong. I expect the plan to sail through Congress. The only upside I see is that future economists will now have another bit of evidence to weight.

Posted by edelfenbein at January 25, 2009 11:46 AM