A sense of urgency without delay
President Obama is all over the place. ... May Hub Blog give some unsolicited PR, political and economic advice? Here goes: Do not follow or publicly articulate, under any condition, the following line of reasoning:

When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

This, Hub Blog submits, is the real reason for so much skepticism out there -- skepticism that isn't confined to the tax-cuts-as-religion conservatives. Americans were rushed into a decision about Iraq. Look what happened. Americans were rushed into a $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Look what happened. Americans are now being rushed into something that's really more of a liberal-wish-list bill than an economic-stimulus package. There's not going to be a David Stockman who later tells us the truth about the real underlying intent of the legislation. Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and others on the left are already blabbing the truth about the bill's real intent of building a "new American economy." Those of us who watched the government's Katrina response aren't buying it. ...

This leads to my second piece of advice: Obama should start negotiations within his own party to pull this bill back to the center. That'll have the almost immediate effect of picking up moderate and moderate-conservative votes. The negotiators can start with some of these ideas. They should also look at cutting the huge amounts of money now tenatively earmarked for two of the most financially dysfunctional industries in America -- health-care and education. Those of us who have endured double-digit health care and education inflation, year after year after year, aren't buying this one either.  ¶ 7:56 AM