This story leads the New York Times website at this hour:
Congress on Friday approved a $787 billion economic stimulus measure, meeting the crushing mid-February deadline that Democrats had set for adopting the centerpiece of President Obama’s early agenda but without quelling partisan divisions in Washington. Not a single House Republican voted for the bill.
That representation of this bill is incorrect. This is not a $787 billion bill. Congress passed a $717 billion bill grafted to a $70 billion temporary fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax (due to Congress's continued failure to pass AMT indexing.)
We have to get this correct right from the start. $717 billion. Repeat after me: $717 billion.
This matters because economists have argued that we need a stimulus bill of at least $800 billion (and the smartest ones argue that it has to be much more), inviting the inference that $787 billion is close enough, about 1.6% short of what was supposedly needed -- a rounding error.
If and when -- and I expect that I can just say "when" -- the stimulus bill fails to have its desired effect, it will be important to note that Congress didn't miss the mark by that short of a margin. Instead, the $717 billion total was over 10% short of the prescribed $800 billion figure. It was that much more below what Obama originally sought.
For this, we can thank Senate Republicans and the likes of Senator Ben Nelson, who demanded that the AMT be lumped into the bill, allowing them to depict $717 billion of stimulus as being $787 billion. This is the sort of lie that we have to nip in the bud. All of the stories that you read, like the same one in the Times, which notes
The $787 billion plan, a combination of fast-acting tax cuts and longer-term government spending on public works projects, education, health care, energy and technology, was smaller than Democrats first proposed.
are fundamentally misleading. They refer to a "$787 billion plan" that doesn't exist. AMT reform is not, in any sense, part of the "plan." It's a separate issue that, to my mind, should have been adopted, but in a different bill.
The stimulus plan that was passed is much less than needed. The notion that President Obama got pretty much the amount he wanted may make for some good celebratory cheering by Democrats and some bitter denunciation by Republicans, but it is a lie. Let's prepare to say that as many times as necessary. We will probably be saying it forever.