Stimulating?

Less than a quarter of President Barack Obama’s massive $900 billion stimulus plan is actually going to “stimulate” the economy, according to an analysis by economist Robert Brusca that was picked up in today’s U.S. News & World Report.

Much higher percentages – 40% of the Senate “stimulus” package and 36% of the House plan – is going straight toward funding traditional Democratic agenda items.

From Brusca’s analysis:

There are all sorts of clear Democrat agenda items in the spending portion of this bill. Much of it is on social welfare type plans … It is no wonder Republicans are angry about how this is being done. You can disagree with my numbers but clearly there is a lot of Democrat policy that is whizzing past us in the sheep’s clothing of stimulus.

Basing his analysis off of Congressional Budget Office estimates that show as little as 21% of the “stimulus” spending impacting the economy this year, Brusca’s work takes a sledgehammer to one of “The One’s” most compelling talking points – that we have to “act now.”

“Almost by definition then, we can say that 36% of the House plan is ‘Agenda’ (spending) since it is going to have its impact beyond the year 2010 and can’t be categorized in any reasonable way as a recession buster,” he writes.

Oh, and in case anybody’s forgotten, the American economy has shed over 2 million jobs and plunged even deeper into an anti-competitive abyss since the last time politicians told us that we needed to “act now” in order to avoid an “economic Pearl Harbor.”

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