"In driving down the total cost of the stimulus bill -- from $838 billion approved by the Senate and $820 by the House -- legislators also sharply reduced proposed tax incentives for buyers of homes and cars that held huge public appeal."

I'm not familiar with the tax cuts for car buyers, but the 10%/$15,000 credit for homebuyers was, economically speaking, idiotic. Politically popular? Yes. But idiotic. Needless to say, I'm glad it's gone.

Needless to say, I'm glad it's gone. -CJ

I wish it were gone. But all the articles say is that they were reduced. To what?

And can we at least stop calling this a 789 billion dollar stimulus bill? It a 719 billion dollar stimulus bill. The other 70B is for the AMT.

Of course, if you believe in dittohead math, tax cuts always bring in twice as much in revenue. Therefore, as 60/40 split will more than pay for itself!

What was the stimulating effect behind the tax breaks for buying homes and cars? Do folks who are losing their jobs need to get tax incentives for buying homes and cars?

What about parents who have to send their kids into crumbling schools---or need to worry about the potential catastrophe of a trip to the emergency room---or the cost of next week's groceries?

Have you noticed what's still sitting on the car lots these day? Row upon row of gas-guzzlers. When Detroit gets around to putting those hulks through the shredder, using the resultant scrap to forge a coast-to-coast fleet of affordable, high-efficiency vehicles that will fatally break the back of OPEC, then---and only then---should we contemplate tax incentives for buying a car.

What CJ and Steve W said.

Just another example of how clueless politicians, including the Dems, are about the magnitude of the economic crisis.

I have to give some credit to the three GOP "centrists," especially Spector, for at least trying to do the right thing. They just can't wrap their little heads around the fact that everything has truly gone to shit and a really big package is necessary. Collins on TV seems like a nice person, but she doesn't come across as particularly bright.

I guess they're trying to do the right thing, it's just that it's far from good enough.

The funny thing is that Collins, Specter and Nelson (the three I saw harping on the number) all voted for a bill that was $838 billion before the conference. What if the House had just said agreed to go with the Senate bill? Centrism isn't compromise. It's a backwards looking political strategy that is always trying to have an roughly equal number of establishment pundits to your left and right. Collins is very different than Snowe in this regard, she's much more of the female version of Joe Lieberman, where Snowe is more of a true old school New England Republican.

My political inanity meter goes up to 11.

http://www.spinaltapfan.com/atozed/TAP00160.HTM

ABC's Good Morning America this morning repeated the asinine Republican talking point of describing just how high a stack of 800 billion $1 bills would be. Of course, instead you could use 800 billion $1 bills to insulate a lot of elementary schools. That would be a more useful exercise than imagining that they were stacked up to the moon. And an even more useful thing would be to SPEND them on improving schools.

Is it me, or has Collins suffered a stroke? She seems a little unsteady/

It was never about the numbers. The Republicans just had to find some way to stay in the game.

$800 billion might sound like a big number till you consider how much we spend on the military EVERY YEAR...

the pentagon budget request was near $540...the two wars tack on $145 or so..dig thru the budgets of other departments, like energy for example, looking for things that are defense related.......you can get to $800 real quick

The vast majority of Republicans weren't even dealing in economic reality. The few "centrists" who hijacked the process took pride in their ideological rigidity. Sen. Collins boasted in today's WaPo that they "hung tough" on cutting funding for school construction- which would have created thousands of local jobs and would have dramatically improved our schools for generations to come.

Obama did his best and acted in good faith to accommodate the Republicans, but they responded with grandstanding and economic stupidity. And now, of course, they're accusing him of not being bipartisan enough. Ha!

First, I haven't been following the Nastis' math lessons, so I missed how high an 800 billion dollar tall tower of $1 bills is. Is that taller than the 5.9 trillion dollar tall tower of $1 bills that Adolf Bushler added to the national debt during the eight years he spent building a Great Wall out of Mein Kampf bricks to protect us from Muslim National Socialism?

Second, what motivated me to post was Steve Benen's completely unfair comparison of the Republicans' fetish with the number 800 billion in raising the national credit card limit to Adrian Monk's fetish with perfect numbers of all sorts. Monk is one of the three shows I watch semi-religiously (Survivor and BBC World News are the other two), and I resent that slander. Adrian Monk may suffer from OCD and the inability to fuck anybody after the long ago death of his wife, but he solves crimes, doesn't commit them. The Republicans commit crimes, and they fuck everybody.

I wonder what would happen if the USA Network set Adrian Monk loose on Adolf Bushler's ass down in Texas? I also wonder, is the stack of 1 million Iraqis that Johns Hopkins estimates America has genoslaughtered since 2003 higher than the Nastis' terrifying stack of 800 billion one dollar bills?

Brett Landgraf