I just heard Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News ask his business correspondent in frightened tones, “What if the stimulus package is too small?”  The correspondent uttered some mumbo jumbo, but did not come back with the obvious retort.

“Brian, what if you went to the grocery store and didn’t buy enough food?  Would you sit in your home and starve to death or would you go back to the store and buy more food?”

Earlier this evening the local news reported that there were enough local infrastructure projects to spend eight times as much money as Massachusetts is getting in stimulus funds. Given that, I don’t think there would be any problem putting more stimulus money to work should it be needed.

When it is very difficult to calculate whether a program is too big or too small, you can pick a size that is your best guess and then measure the effect as you go.  If it is too small, you can add.  If it is too big, you can stop before you have spent all the money.

Maybe the Bush administration would have assumed that they had it calculated down to the nickel and would just plow ahead without measuring.  Fortunately, the people in the Obama administration are far too rational to take that path.  In fact they want to put all the information out to the public so that there are as many eyes as possible watching what is going on.

With the way George Bush ran things, you really have to wonder what he learned at Harvard Business School.  How did they ever decide to grant him an MBA degree?