First off, I'll offer a critique of the just-passed $800 billion package. The ultimate question is whether it will work or not. After six years of school, a master's degree in economics and $40k of student debt, my expert opinion is....maybe.

The empirical evidence on government spending providing the necessary boost to pull an economy out of a recession is pretty weak. Does it positively impact the economy? Yes, Keynes proved that. However, even the most optimistic of empirical analyses paint it as an extremely slow, clumsy economic policy tool. We're talking 18-24 months before you can measure a significant positive impact, and by that we may hopefully be on the upturn anyway.

So were Republicans right in that tax cuts are the magic bullet? No, similar story with that. You can do the calculus and prove that tax cuts will stimulate an economy (I've thankfully forgot how), and there are empirical analyses that show that they do have an impact. BUT, again the time frame is quite long and the impact is surprisingly muted. One theory is that people know that today's tax cuts are tomorrow's tax hikes, and thus people just pocket the money. Regardless, it's not a very good policy tool for short-term stimulus.

But there is hope. After Keynesian theory and Friedman's neo-classical school of economics, the (arguably) third biggest idea in 20th century economics is rational expectations. In the context of today, it goes something like this. YOU may know that the stimulus package won't help much, and I know that too. But if we think everyone else is dumb enough to believe it, then the stimulus should work. Our confidence grows given the stupidity of everyone else, we start spending more money, and ta-da, you have economic stimulus. So in a sense, we just paid $800 billion for a great big headline, and if enough people think it will work, then it will work.

Big problem, given that, is that we had a whopping 3 Republicans sign on to this. Three. In other words, roughly half of America thinks this is bullshit. That's a problem. Frankly, I think Obama should have vetoed this thing and sent it back for more Republican support. But we'll see. Good thing for Obama is that eventually things will turn around, and he can proudly point to his stimulus package as the thing that turned things around, regardless of whether or not it actually did.

So, we finally get to my stimulus proposal. Given that the evidence for economic stimulus is weak, I argue that we'd be better off reducing the downside of losing your job and making it easier to find a new job. Here's how we do it:

1) Universal health insurance - Why are people with perfectly good stable jobs scared shitless (and not spending money)? For a family of four with a single income, the loss of health insurance is probably the #1 thing keeping them up at night. We pay taxes, the govt offers huge tax breaks to corporations to offer health insurance, and we get health care not having a clue as to how much it will cost. You call that capitalism?!? Bullshit, end the charade, and make people feel less terrified about the prospect of losing their jobs.

2) Extended unemployment payments (again, the goal is to make losing your job less scary)

3) Subsidized job and skills retraining for those that lose their jobs. Education too.

4) Full tax credits, maybe even incentives, for moving expenses. You live in a town with 25,000 people that just lost their major employer and your job? We need to encourage those people to move somewhere where jobs are more plentiful. Capitalism is about the mobility of labor and capital, and people tend to forget about the benefits of labor mobility.

5) More subsidized child care for those that do get jobs

6) Infrastructure improvements...recession or not, our country needed a significant upgrade to its infrastructure....roads, railways, airports and energy. If it takes a economic stimulus package to get it done, I'm all for it.

Okay, I'm done. A little less than 1,400 pages, but for now it'll do.