..and the devastating response:

It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall.

Uh-oh. Why are the verbs now in the future tense? And what happened to the specific and oft-repeated prediction of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year? Those are important language changes, along with the implicit admission that the stimulus has not yet “ramped up.”

This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008. We would have saved much of it, paying off our mortgages, student loans, and credit cards (which would not be a bad thing). We would have spent the rest much more quickly than the federal and state government bureaucracies now stumbling through their usual corrupt, slow and inefficient processes. Instead the President handed the money and program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy. The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending interest-based binge.

The President is correct that the stimulus will increase economic growth, mostly next year. That is too late, and later than it could have been had they done it right.

I wonder who actually wrote the thing?

[Mid-afternoon update]

Stephen Spruiell takes it apart as well:

The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages.

Let’s examine that phrase, “swift and aggressive action.” For Treasury Secretary, Obama rammed a tax cheat through the confirmation process by claiming he was the only man who could do the job. Secretary Geithner then proceeded to unveil a plan to save the banking system that inspired so little confidence, the Dow fell 300 points upon its announcement. Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy troubled assets from banks has failed to launch, primarily because the Financial Accounting Standards Board loosened mark-to-market accounting rules, thus enabling banks to avoid write-downs on their toxic mortgage-backed securities. Now that banks can hold those assets without booking losses, they have little incentive to sell them at a discount to the P-PIP. With P-PIP looking increasingly like a dud, the adminitration’s only real plan to deal with crippled banks is to cross its fingers and hope the economy grows fast enough to enable them to recover on their own.

Nor has Obama’s Making Home Affordable plan been any great success, as Joe Nocera explained in Friday’s NYT (best summed up by the phrase “drop in the bucket”). As NRO’s editors pointed out when the plan was announced, “The relatively small group of in-deep but creditworthy homeowners who could be helped by Obama’s plan already are positioned to refinance at better rates, or to move from variable-rate loans to low-drama fixed-rate mortgages, without a $475 billion government intervention.” That’s $75 billion for the program and $400 billion to shore up Fannie and Freddie, the real beneficiaries of the deal.

On the other hand, Obama did move swiftly and aggressively to sign the Lilly Ledbetter act, exposing companies to spurious equal-pay lawsuits; to roll back Clinton-era welfare reforms; to use TARP funds to shield the UAW from the full fallout of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, and so on. Maybe that’s what he meant.

It’s a barrel chock full of fish to shoot.

[Update late afternoon]

The war against the producers.