Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/reporters-assess-effectiveness-of-proposed-stimulus-plan Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript As Congress shapes the stimulus package, the debate rages on over what parts of the bill will be most effective in reviving the country's ailing economy. Business reporters analyze the plan's components. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JEFFREY BROWN: Even as the Senate now takes up the nitty-gritty details of a stimulus plan — the particular programs and tax cuts, the exact dollars and cents — larger questions abound about short-term needs, longer-term goals, and the ambitions and tensions of tackling so much at one time.David Leonhardt of the New York Times tackled these questions in a story titled "The Big Fix" that appeared in yesterday's Times magazine. Greg Ip has been watching and writing on them as U.S. economics editor for the Economist magazine.Welcome to both of you.David, in terms of balancing short term and long term, how do you define the ambitions and tensions that arise? DAVID LEONHARDT, New York Times: Clearly, the first goal here is to stimulate the economy, which is the short-term goal. You want to get money out and you want to try to make this recession less deep than it would otherwise be.But given that you're going to spend $800 billion or $900 billion by the time the Senate is done with it, you want to try to also do some good. Yes, you could just dig ditches and then fill them again and that would be stimulus, but obviously wouldn't do any good, long-term good.And given we're spending this vast amount of money, it would be a waste not to try to accomplish some long-term good. That's the theory. The tension is that it is hard to accomplish long-term good and to spend it quickly. JEFFREY BROWN: Because? DAVID LEONHARDT: Because long-term good is often investments. You want to be careful with it. You don't just want to dig ditches. You want to think about where the ditches should go and what you should then do with this hole. JEFFREY BROWN: What they connect to and all, right? DAVID LEONHARDT: Exactly. And how do you spend the money in education? How do you spend it in health care?And so there are some projects that clearly can do both the short and the long term, but there aren't enough to spend $900 billion doing both short-term and long-term good, and that's where you get into trade-offs.