Griper News: Pelosi Wants Bigger, Greener Econ. Stimulus

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has increased the size of the economic stimulus package she will support when Congress reconvenes next month, saying it will need to be $500 billion to $600 billion.

That’s up from the $400 billion to $500 billion that House Democrats had been expecting. Pelosi gave the figure during an interview with Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt.”

“This week we had our most recent presentations from economists to tell us what – how robust such a package should be in order to have an impact on the economy, to turn the economy around,” Pelosi said. “Economists told us that the package had to be strong enough, half a trillion, $600 billion, somewhere near that.”

Pelosi said the package would not be like “a 1930s public works project” but instead would have such modern components as broader access to quick Internet connections and greener forms of energy.

Expect the GOP to suddenly become deficit hawks, after years of spending money like a drunk in a strip club. Their economic theory has been bass-ackward for years; govt. should spend money when times are bad and grow surpluses when times are good.

Huffington Post has Obama thinking even bigger:

President-elect Barack Obama's economic team is considering an economic-stimulus program that will be far larger than the two-year, half-trillion-dollar plan under consideration two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the team's thinking.

And, no, that's not socialism.