Listen to Larry Summers, not Nancy Pelosi

David Brooks points out that the President's own economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, last year laid out three criteria for a stimulus package. It should be immediate, targeted, and temporary. Unfortunately, in outsourcing the creation of the stimulus bill to the House Democrats, we got a bill that met none of Summers' requirements.

In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.

It’s easy to see why Democrats decided to do this. They could rush through permanent policies they believe in. Plus, they could pay for them with borrowed money. By putting a little of everything in the stimulus package, they avoid the pay-as-you-go rules that might otherwise apply to recurring costs.

But they’ve created a sprawling, undisciplined smorgasbord, which has spun off a series of unintended consequences. First, by trying to do everything all it once, the bill does nothing well. The money spent on long-term domestic programs means there may not be enough to jolt the economy now (about $290 billion in spending is pushed off into 2011 and later). The money spent on stimulus, meanwhile, means there’s not enough to truly reform domestic programs like health technology, schools and infrastructure. The measure mostly pumps more money into old arrangements.

Second, by pumping so much money through government programs, the bill unleashes a tidal wave on state governments. A governor with a few-hundred-million-dollar shortfall will suddenly have to administer an additional $4 billion or $5 billion. That money will be corrosive both when washing in, and when it disappears in a few years time.

Third, the muddle assures ideological confrontation. A stimulus package was always going to be controversial, because economists differ widely about whether or how a stimulus can work. But this bill also permanently alters the role of the federal government, thus guaranteeing a polarizing brawl at the very start of the Obama presidency.

Fourth, Summers’s warnings about deficits have been put aside. There is no fiscal exit strategy. Instead, permanent spending commitments are entailed with no permanent funding stream to pay for them.

Fifth, new government expenditures on complex matters are being designed on a hasty, reckless timetable.

It's time to go back to the drawing board and craft a stimulus bill that is only that. Forget about the Democrats' desire to use the country's financial fears to sneak in all their favorite spending priorities. As Alice Rivlin, Clinton's budget director, has advised, let's do the stimulus now and then spend more time crafting the spending part of the bill and making sure it's done right.

This recession is scary and complicated. It’s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.

During the campaign, Republicans pointed out that there was no time in his professional career when Obama had ever stood up to the powers that be in the Democratic party. Now in his first major move as president, he's followed that pattern. Instead of insisting that his advisers craft the stimulus package and then using his popularity to force congressional Democrats to support it, he allowed Pelosi and her cronies to come up with this mess of a bill and then just went along with it. Other than a bit of trimming around the edges to get out the embarrassing bits like the funding for contraceptive, he's adopted their approach. He's made nice gestures to the Republicans about bipartisanship, but that's been mere window-dressing for his basic approach of allowing the House Democrats to craft his own economic policy. As Jichael J. Franc writes,

Here’s a thought experiment for you: Imagine for a moment what might have happened last November if candidate Obama had made the so-called stimulus bill the centerpiece of his presidential run. And suppose that Democrats running for House and Senate seats had joined in the fun.

If candidate Obama had posted this $1 trillion-plus hodge-podge of new spending and tax pork on his website and had vowed to make its enactment his #1 priority, would things have turned out as they did on Election Day?

Is it even remotely conceivable that Obama would have won the support of 22% of conservatives? Or that he would have carried a comfortable majority of political Independents? Would Democrats have prevailed in contested House races in Idaho, Alabama, New Mexico, Florida, and Virginia? Or Senate seats in North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, and even Louisiana?

To ask the question answers it. But instead of following his promise to put forth proposals that are stripped of ideology and focus only on doing what works, he handed the reins over to Nancy Pelosi. And she ran with it. It was a mistake on his part and the Republicans were quite right to unanimously oppose this bill. If he'd followed his own economic adviser's advice, maybe we wouldn't be debating this abomination of a bill right now, but instead discussing something that actually had a chance of improving the economy.