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The new year started with the next cadre of White House correspondents following the next President of the United States to Capitol Hill where he opened negotiations with Congressional leaders on a $775bn fiscal stimulus to the economy over the next 24 months. Barack Obama's economic team hopes that such deficit spending will be enough to generate 3m additional jobs--which is not that impressive bearing in mind Jake Tapper's prediction on ABC that this Friday's unemployment numbers will bring 2008's total for lost jobs to an almost equivalent 2.5m.
CBS' Chip Reid focused on that 40% of the stimulus that "pleased many Republicans," a two-year plan to cut taxes by $300bn: "Obama, hoping to pass the stimulus package with a large bipartisan majority, was encouraged by early reactions." NBC's Chuck Todd previewed "a speech on Thursday" in which Obama will outline the plan to the public. ABC's Tapper cited the "Google-like search engine" that will allow to voters to examine the costs and projected job gains for each element.
NBC kicked off its America's Agenda series with CNBC's Carl Quintanilla surveying economists' criticisms of the $775bn program. He found a trio of potential flaws: first, federal grants to state governments to build infrastructure and forestall budget cuts may attract wasteful porkbarrel spending; second, the tax cuts may create too much debt, necessitating future, larger tax hikes; third, the stimulus does not address the continuing collapse of the housing market, which "caused all of this hardship in the first place."
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