economic stimulus

In addition to super-accurate presidential and local race polling, Rasmussen Reports traffics in polls that ask unusual questions that have been bouncing around conservative circles. In October 2008, for example, the company asked if Americans agreed with President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address and the statement “Government is not the solution to our problem; government [...]

How’s this for a stimulus plan?
A trio of senators introduced legislation today allowing owners of gas-guzzlers to trade their vehicles in for thousands of dollars in credit on a more fuel-efficient car.

Faced with rising criticism from economists and Democrats alike, President-elect Barack Obama yesterday scrapped his plan to include $150 billion in business tax credits in his emerging economic stimulus proposal.
The provision would have given businesses a $3,000 tax credit or every new employee they hired, and every employee they planned to fire but retained instead. [...]

The classic 1985 film Brewster’s Millions is strangely analogous to the tale playing out in Washington these days as lawmakers — and President-elect Barack Obama — draft plans for an enormous spending bill to buoy the sinking economy.
You remember the story: Monty Brewster (Richard Pryor) is forced to spend $30 million in 30 days in [...]

Democrats and many economists were none too happy last week when President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team announced plans to include $300 billion in tax cuts as part of its economic stimulus blueprint — and the number of critics just keeps growing.
In his column in The New York Times today, Princeton economist and recent Nobel Laureate [...]

With this morning’s news that employers laid off 524,000 workers in December, at least one prominent economist has some news of his own: “The economy is the jaws of a depression,” Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland, wrote to reporters this morning.
What’s the criterion? Morici claims it’s this: Recessions correct themselves, while [...]

Too late to slip into this morning’s story on the tax cuts being floated as part of President-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein emails to add his name to the growing list of skeptics. Workers given a $500 payroll-tax credit, Feldstein writes, will likely use it the same way they did their [...]

Since some Democrats like Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota are starting to complain that President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed stimulus package is too heavy on tax cuts — Harkin has called them “trickle-down” — I asked Brian Darling, the director of Senate relations at [...]

As the unemployment lines grow longer by the month, a report released today reveals why many jobless folks will likely soon lose their health coverage as well.
On average, the cost to cover families under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) — the federal arrangement allowing laid-off workers to keep their employer-sponsored health plans by [...]

It’s not impossible. In an interview with CNBC yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama threw out the $1.3 trillion figure as the upper-end of the suggestions his economic team is hearing from experts.
[I]t’s important to note that every economist, conservative or liberal, at this point agrees that we have to have a substantial recovery plan that helps [...]