A high-ranking official in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has confirmed that Democratic leadership is looking to have a stimulus package ready for Barack Obama to sign shortly upon taking office.
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, backed up reports from Sunday and early Monday that Congress would work on a massive stimulus package to be prepared for a presidential signature on January 21st. The hope -- as Obama himself noted during a press conference announcing his economic team on Monday -- is to hit the ground running once he takes office, in efforts to repair the teetering economy.
"I want to see [a stimulus package] enacted right away. It is going to be of a size and scope that is needed to get this economy back on track," he said. "We have a consensus, which is pretty rare, between conservative economists and liberal economists that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape and that it is focused on ... delivering the 2.5 million jobs I am talking about."
Obama would not get into the details of what, exactly, the stimulus would look like. "I don't want to get into numbers right now," he said.
Another plugged in Democratic aide, however, said economic advisers for the president-elect, in particular Jason Furman, have been in touch with the relevant members of Congress to begin shaping legislation. The group is looking at a package that could be as high as five percent of the GDP (which is where the $700 billion figure has come from) but would likely end up in the $100 billion to $500 billion range. Included in the language, it was predicted, would be spending on infrastructure, aide to states, money for health care programs and transportation projects, middle class tax relief or tax-incentives for job creation, and direct assistance to certain industries (see, potentially: auto).
The package, or course, is a work in progress, complicated by the fact that the Obama team has to defer for the time being to the current president. But as the president-elect begins to fill out his economic team, starting with the staffing announcements on Monday, things should roll move at a more accelerated pace.
"Part of the task of this economic team behind me is to help shape the details of that plan," said Obama.
Added the aide: "You can see even before his inauguration, Congress rolling out the skeleton of what the stimulus could be... That could happen in the next few weeks... then we will have to sit down and hammer out the details. And you can envision that by the first weeks of January, Congress could push this thing forward."
Should there be GOP quibbles over the size or language of the bill, Obama could, the aide noted, simply introduce his own version through a member of Congress and call for an up or down vote.
There are a few minor obstacles in the way of a wildly expeditious passage of the stimulus package -- though, there should be no doubt, the bill will almost certainly be passed. For starters, the Senate is not in session (save for a meeting in early December to discuss a loan to the Big Three automakers) until January 6th. Members will be around from then through the inauguration, but that might not be enough time for the contours of a package to be hammered out. They will want their "say in the process," noted one Senate aide.