Better critiques on stimulus plan

Yesterday I was complaining that stimulus critics weren't offering any positive suggestions and today Krugman delivers a few. He doesn't like the limiting nature of the rhetoric, citing "jump-start" and "shovel ready" as terms that should dropped and sums up his advice in the last graf.

So my advice to the Obama team is to scrap the business tax cuts, and, more important, to deal with the threat of doing too little by doing more. And the way to do more is to stop talking about jump-starts and look more broadly at the possibilities for government investment.

He advises the new President to think bigger and include long range planning in the stimulus projects. Sounds like good advice to me considering how long planning takes and anticipating the economic meltdown will be surely take more than two years to resolve. Specifically he suggests enhanced unemployment benefits, expanded Medicaid and an early start on the insurance subsidies to advance universal health care.

Reasonable proposals and more helpful than pure criticism, but I still want a supertrain. I wish Krugman and his peers would start pushing more for mass transit, because it's a sure bet no one is going to listen to me.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News.]