Good and Evil in the Stimulus

This is a subject I've been thinking about a lot recently. It all started during a discussion I was having about the Mormon Church. I told the other person that I refuse to believe that anything is monolithically good or evil. The result of the conversation is inconsequential, but the same idea came up today while talking with some friends about Bill O'Reilly. They were shocked to find out that yes, occasionally, he does makes some sense.

Which leads me to tonight. I read a post over on Greg Mankiw's blog. He pointed out that a particular school district in Milwaukee would get some $80 million in aid from the federal government, when enrollment in that school district had been declining for years and that buildings from the last construction project (in 2000) were going largely unused.

Willem Buiter wrote the other day that if protectionist clauses (Buy American) make it into the stimulus that the results will be disastrous for the rest of the world.

Obviously this economy is a wreck. Many economists believe that we need action now, because doing nothing is far more dangerous than doing too much. And I have been convinced of the effectiveness of the Keynesian multiplier in economies. But I still have this nagging doubt that we're not talking about this enough. That this piece of legislation, while never seriously considered to be monolithically good, might not turn out as good as we are hoping. That it, God forbid, might make things worse. Surely just a few more weeks of planning things out wouldn't be disastrous. Because as Gene Kranz famously said, "failure is not an option."

UPDATE: The New York Times ran a story yesterday saying that the Senate has agreed to water down the Buy American clause (to make it "consistent with international agreements") in their version of the stimulus bill.