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My brother Matt turned me on to Greg Mankiw's blog (a Harvard economics professor and a former economic adviser to Bush). The following are highlights from the past few weeks on the stimulus bill.

From an interview done by Coner Clarke with Robert Barro (an economics professor at Harvard):

Clarke: The last thing is just about the stimulus bills as it stands. Two things here. One thing is what do you think about the ratio of spending to tax relief in the bill. And the second is, if you judge it by Larry Summers standard -- that stimulus be temporary, timely and targeted -- does it clear the bar?
Barro: This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don't know what to say. I mean it's wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don't think will work, so I don't think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect. I don't think it will expand the economy. And the tax cutting isn't really geared toward incentives. It's not really geared to lowering tax rates; it's more along the lines of throwing money at people. On both sides I think it's garbage. So in terms of balance between the two it doesn't really matter that much.

David Brooks published a really good article in the New York Times on the Larry Summers standard.

While we are at it, I really liked this Wall Street Journal article written by Alberto Alesina (an economics professor at Harvard) and Luigi Zingales (a finance professor at the University of Chicago) about stimulating the economy through tax policy.

This stimulus bill worries me. Personally, I think the current powers are using this economic crisis as an excuse to pass, in one blitzkrieg, spending that would normally take four years to navigate the house and senate. I echo the thoughts of many: if the stimulus is so important, why is there so much pork in there? I support the idea of splitting up all the concepts in the bill and passing them one by one. Sure this would take time, but the majority of the items in the bill aren't due to hit immediately anyway. Start with the most important stimulus concepts and finish up with the pork. This all or nothing mentality is unacceptable.