Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Expats: Stimuli Slicing Edition

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called off any Thursday night vote on the American Recovery and Investment Act - the Jobs Bill colloquially known as the stimulus package - for one good reason: He doesn't yet have the votes.

He hopes to have them Friday. And if that doesn't happen, he'll call for a procedural vote on Sunday. That would require 60 Senators to say "aye."

Getting enough votes to pass a package in which the sugar-to-shit ratio is moving in an ever-more fecal direction may well depend on the response to a series of cuts being circulated in draft form by Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. It's impossible to know exactly what the current status of any cuts is because they're changing all the time. Talking Points Memo-DC obtained a copy of the draft Thursday when the total cuts were running $77.9 billion. But by the time Elana Schor blogged about it shortly before Reid said there would be no Thursday vote, a Nelson aide told her the total cuts had risen closer to $100 billion.

Collins was one of three Republicans who spent half an hour with President Barack Obama this week.

Pat Garafalo at The Wonk Room wrote:

For Nelson, who has a personal net worth about $10 million, this is also a case of kicking Main Street while its down, as the proposed cuts are in areas like health care, education, and aid to the states. Adding insult to injury, Collins and Nelson are nitpicking important stimulus funding that would benefit working Americans and their children, after they voted for giving $700 billion to Wall St. with no oversight.

As Marc Ambinder noted, "the big, perhaps ultimate battle will be over education funding for states." Just a few weeks ago, education was a "favorite channel" for stimulus. Nelson and Collins, though, have cut about $15 billion in state incentive grants for education and another $14 billion in Dept. of Education funding. These are important forms of stimulus that need to be included.

They also propose eliminating $24 billion in state stabilization money. This is funding that would go to bolster Medicaid, and prevent layoffs for teachers, firefighters, and police officers; essentially all the people on Main Street who are directly affected by the economic crisis and bearing the brunt of debilitating state budget cuts. From these actions, it’s pretty easy to see where Nelson and Collins’ priorities lie.

It should also be noted that much of money already extracted and proposed for elimination will have a disproportionate impact on women and children.

In the midst of the ongoing effort to worsen the Jobs Bill, Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein suggested that lawmakers "hire personal economic trainers over the coming year to sit by their sides as they fashion the government's response to the economic crisis" to help them avoid repeating the nonsense seen so often in the debate over the stimulus package. Among the correctives would be the potential for schooling Nebraska's other Senator:

"This is not a stimulus plan, it's a spending plan," Nebraska's freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, "won't create the promised jobs. It won't activate our economy."

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

The Jobs Bill arrived on Capitol Hill last month in a pre-compromised state that set many progressives' teeth on edge from the get-go. How much worse will it have to be made before it can get the 60 votes needed to send it to a House-Senate Conference Committee where it can be mucked up some more?

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Sales Fall Sharply for Retailers Not Named Wal-Mart