This morning’s NYT tells us the White House and Congressional leaders are considering ways to "fix the safety net" for the several million additional unemployed they didn’t plan for in the first stimulus bill.

With unemployment expected to rise well into next year even as the economy slowly recovers, the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are discussing extending several safety net programs as well as proposing new tax incentives for businesses to renew hiring.

. . . But officials emphasized that a decision was still far off and that in any event the effort would not add up to a second economic stimulus package, only an extension of the first.

Well that’s great. No hurry. We’ve only got 9.8 percent to 17 percent unemployment, with prospects these horrendous levels will continue into the next year or so. Dean Baker:

If the Democrats in Congress agree that a full-blown stimulus package is not needed then they believe that it is okay that unemployment averages 10.2 percent next year, 9.1 percent in 2011 and 7.7 percent in 2012, at least if they accept CBO’s projections.

But never mind; the Administration thinks the most important message to get out there is that they’re in no hurry and are definitely not thinking of another stimulus to create jobs, because . . . well because that would mean they’d have to concede they were wrong and the economists who said we’d need a much bigger and more targeted stimulus to offset a "jobless recovery" were right.

So instead of telling it straight, they’re talking about the same questionable notions the economists who were right said were not that helpful the first time: business tax cuts and credits.

But the verdict on who to trust and who not to trust is already in, as folks pick over the bones of Ryan Lizza’s Atlantic article. Lizza describes how the Administration’s economic team made decisions and particularly how they and Obama’s political advisers talked themselves into an inadequate stimulus that only Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson could love. Remember those three.

Krugman does the "we told you so" on his blog, and DeLong, Dean Baker, and others pile on. The short version is this:

Christine Romer got it mostly right, given their forecasts at the time (which turned out to be way too optimistic). She calculated that with the expected fall off in GDP, we needed a targeted stimulus of about $1.2 trillion over two years. But fearful of large numbers and small-minded Senators, Larry Summers gave the President a choice between $550 billion and $790 billion, and Rahm/Axelrod argued to start with the lower and allow Congress to push it towards the higher. Except Congress watered it down and everyone gave away too much in ineffective tax cuts. Then Senators like Collins, Snowe and Nelson, et al, did their thing, held it down, and lopped off $40 billion to rescue state budgets (leaving 50 anti-stimulus, job killing states), while cutting back on Medicaid assistance, school construction and so on. Krugman sums up the failure:

So Christy Romer’s math looked similar to mine: even given what we knew last December, the straight economics said that we should have a stimulus much bigger than the Obama administration’s initial proposal. And given what happened to that proposal in the Senate — we actually ended up with only about $600 billion of actual stimulus — what we eventually got was half of what seemed appropriate in December. And the actual news on the economy since then has been worse than was expected back then, so that the stimulus now looks way short of what we need.

Maybe that was all that could have been done, politically. But it does not sound, from the Lizza article, as if either the economic team or the political team thought much about the risks of finding themselves where we are now — with the economy still failing to deliver job growth despite the stimulus — even though those risks were completely apparent at the time.

But heaven forbid we call out the people who got it wrong and tell the American people what needs to be done now. Instead, we’ll extend benefits a few more months and try some of the ineffective things we rejected back then, because that’s all we can get approved when we allow people like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson to decide the fate of millions of American jobs and whether essential state teachers, health and safety workers get layed off.

But at least we haven’t put the fate of health care reform in the hands of these same . . .

And it should always be said that while they may support extending unemployment benefits, the rest of the Republican Party is completely useless; they’re not even responsible enough to play the "loyal" opposition.

More:
Bob Herbert, Does Obama get it?
Dean Baker, How to game the business tax credits for new hires