In the post below, I expressed concern about emphasis on tax cuts in an economic recovery plan. Paul Krugman has similar concerns, but also paints a complicated picture of where we are economically and comes around to qualified support for tax cuts.

We need stimulus fast, and there's a limited supply of "shovel-ready" projects that can be started soon enough to deliver an economic boost any time soon. You can bulk up stimulus through other forms of spending, mainly aid to Americans in distress — unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc.. And you can also provide aid to state and local governments so that they don't have to cut spending — avoiding anti-stimulus is a fast way to achieve net stimulus. But everything I've heard says that even with all these things it's hard to come up with enough spending to provide all the aid the economy needs in 2009.

What this says is that there's a reasonable economic case for including a significant amount of tax cuts in the package, mainly in year one.

But the numbers being reported — 40 percent of the whole, two-year plan — sound high.

Image by Flickr user Cayusa used under a Creative Commons license.