• CongressDaily reported ($) yesterday that "House Democratic leaders appear to be moving toward bringing a $100 billion economic stimulus package to the floor during a lame-duck session the week of Nov. 17" and that Democratic leadership might include "federal matching funds for state Medicaid programs, an extension of unemployment benefits, expanded food stamp spending and money for infrastructure projects" in the package.
• House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), meanwhile, has other plans. Earlier this week, he was touting a Republican stimulus package that would be composed mostly of tax cuts. Noteworthy, however, is that his plan would increase the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000. The rest of the measures would cut taxes for businesses and owners of stocks outside of retirement plans.
• The White House is taking a different approach. Stepping back a bit from being "open" to a second stimulus, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors does not believe that such a package is "the right way to go." Instead, the administration would prefer to re-brand the Wall Street bailout plan (TARP) as "stimulus," because it's "a huge amount of money, and...it's targeted at exactly the right thing."
• But it doesn't seem like anybody is listening to the experts. At hearing held by the Joint Economic Committee, NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini testified that "$300-400 [billion] of public works is more effective and productive than just spending $700 [billion] to buy toxic assets and/or recapitalizing financial institutions." MIT professor Simon Johnson, after articulating the mathematics supporting his suggestion, testified similarly: "Added together, this yields a total stimulus package of around $450 billion, or about 3% of GDP, spread over about 3-4 years. It also implies a way to time the short-term and long-term programs..."
• On hand to provide the standard conservative perspective was American Enterprise Institute Visiting Scholar and Ohio University economics professor Richard Vetter. Vetter fears that the government has already provided too much stimulus and implemented perilous monetary policy. His advice to Congress is to skip economic stimulus altogether and to "[r]elax and recover from [their] labors and allow the healing properties of markets to be asserted again."

Image by Flickr user Thomas Hawk used under a Creative Commons license.