CBO analysis finally lets us get to the bottom of the much-disputed question of whether or not the recovery package is genuinely fast-acting. For the remainder of FY2009, we’ll have about $185 billion in tax cuts and new spending, and for FY2010, we’ll have about $400 billion in tax cuts and new spending. That adds up to 74 percent of the total cost of the bill, meaning that the congress has essentially hit President Obama’s goal of spending out 75 percent of stimulus funds in the first eighteen months.

From one perspective, it’s unfortunate that the House leadership couldn’t persuade any members of the opposition to vote for the recovery package. From another perspective, this is as it should be. The country faces serious issues, and it would do enormous real harm to real people to further water down the bill in pursuit of excess votes.

Meanwhile, though the bill is disappointing in some respects it’s very good news. CAP’s Michael Ettlinger explains that with this bill passed we can now see light at the end of the tunnel of the economic crisis and Daniel J. Weiss and Alexandra Kougentakis take a look at the exciting clean energy provisions of the package. Next, we’re going to need to try to clean up the financial system and start thinking about how the regular budget process can plug some of the holes in the recovery package.

One of the odder aspects of recent American politics has been the bipartisan fervor against so-called “earmarks.” These are, it’s true, a less-than-ideal method of budgeting. But the U.S. budget process has a lot of flaws and I see no real reason to think that earmarking is high on the list. But John McCain and Barack Obama both hate ‘em and now they’re public enemy number one, so the Obama administration has made a big deal out of its earmark-free stimulus. But I wonder, has this really been a good feature on net?

As is well-known, in order to secure the votes of the handful of Republican Senators necessary to overcome the 60-vote hurdle, Obama had to make some non-trivial concessions. Those concessions have made the stimulus much less effective than it otherwise might have been and will lead to hundreds of thousands of people being unemployed who could have been engaged in productive labor. Suppose that instead of making this sort of large, substantive concession Obama had just been able to offer pointless pet projects for Pennsylvania and Maine. It seems to me that because those projects would have had locally concentrated benefits you could have made the deal worthwhile to Sens. Specter, Collins, and Snowe for a much lower bottom-line cost and ultimately better-served the public interest.

In other words, simply eliminating the most effective means of buying votes in the legislature doesn’t eliminate the practical necessity to do it. It just ensures that the vote-buying gets done in less efficient ways.

James Kirchick writing about China’s plans to launch a “Chinese CNN” to join the existing English-language propaganda networks from Russia (Russia Today) and Iran (Press TV) remarks:

Of course, there’s no scientific way to gauge whether or not these efforts will work, but I’d like to think that most Americans (if not most Europeans) will not be won over by the crude propaganda of countries that kill journalists and threaten to (or actually) launch unprovoked attacks against their neighbors. Never mind the cheesy production values and propagandistic mien of these stations. As long as countries like China, Russia and Iran continue their internally repressive and externally aggressive behavior, I don’t see how spending massive gobs of money on TV will improve their reputations.

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. I mean, who wants to watch a propaganda channel? There’s already lots of English-language television channels a person could be watching. I’m more sympathetic than most U.S. observers to the Kremlin point-of-view and even appeared once on Russia Today, but I’m never sitting on the couch saying to myself “gee, if only my cable provider carried an English-language Russian propaganda channel!” It’s just a stupid idea on its face. It’s worth noting that al-Hurra, America’s effort to launch an Arabic language propaganda public diplomacy network, has floundered from the beginning for basically the same reason—it doesn’t matter what your message is if nobody’s watching.

In all these cases, countries could, of course, improve foreigners’ perceptions of them by changing the actual policies that lead to the bad perceptions. But alongside that you would, of course, want a communications strategy. But what a country needs to do is go to where the audience is. That would be foreign governments engaging more directly and effectively with English-language media in the United States and American officials engaging directly with al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other popular Arabic-language media.