This should be interesting

At least he reveals his bias at the beginning.  The bill is just buinsess as usual – there is nothing out of ordinary about it – the bill was neccessary but did not go far enough but I’ll still be skeptical about it.  Yeah, sure…

I should disclose some assumptions as I start. The stimulus vote generated a great deal of hand-wringing about the persistence of the partisan divide in Congress. That was mostly theatre born of the Republican Party’s need—and the opportunity that the bill presented—to find a voice in opposition. 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. Obama is pushing toward a transformational
Presidency on health-care reform and climate change—those are the unconventional, risk-taking aspects of his early Presidency, not this. So while I do expect there will be some absurd-sounding spending provisions, and I don’t intend to censor my skepticism about the federal bureaucracy, none of this should be interpreted as opposition to the bill, which is necessary if insufficient. It might have been a better bill, with fewer tax cuts and bolder investments in a new economy, but I am accepting of Rahm Emmanuel’s defense, citing the doctrine of the politically possible, as delivered in my colleague Ryan Lizza’s terrific profile last week.

The NewYorker is blogging the “Stimulus” Bill.