Obama: "This is not just another public works program,"

Obama: "This is not just another public works program,"

He said the overwhelming majority of the three million jobs he wants to "save or create" would be in the private sector. (Lawrence Summers, chief architect of the plan and Obama's National Economic Council chair, has promised that 80% of those jobs would be in the private sector.)
Obama promises an "unprecedented" routing of wasteful government spending and a transparency process that will put details of his new spending online for public review. On Wednesday, he appointed a McKinsey & Co. director, Nancy Killefer, as his top cop to monitor the hundreds of billions to be spent.
But the Obama plan is also defiantly long-term: doubling the production of alternative energy, outfitting public buildings with energy efficient windows and insulation, constructing a "smart grid," investing in science and research and schools, building and repairing roads and bridges. The broad sweep of his plan begs the question: Once the federal spigot is turned on for these projects, however worthy each may be, how does it get shut off?
As Washington veterans well know, "temporary" doesn't usually appear in Congress' vocabulary - since every program comes with a built-in, and generally noisy, constituency. It took Congress 108 years to eliminate a 3% excise tax on long-distance calls - a levy imposed on "the wealthy" in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War.

Keynesian-style stimulus
A wide range of economists - including conservatives who met with Republican senators Wednesday - agree that the U.S. economy needs a massive injection of Keynesian-style spending to avoid a freefall.