The Stimulus and the Bank Bailout are DIFFERENT THINGS

At a local political meeting last week, a number of Upper West Side Dems were complaining about the failures of the Obama administration to "get anything done," and that all that's been accomplished is bailing out the greedy bad guys at big banks.

Not only only does this kind of talk back up GOP talking points and demoralize progressives, it's also flat wrong. The public, many Dems included, have a tendency to conflate the bank bailout and Obama's stimulus package. These are completely different programs.

The bank bailout, or TARP, was signed into law by President Bush in the fall of 2008, and loaned funds to troubled financial institutions. The stimulus package was passed by Obama, and had nothing to do with bailing out banks. The chart below lays out what the stimulus money is going for:

Note for a second that huge blue more-than-quadrant of the pie - $275 billion of the stimulus went to tax cuts, equal to about $1,000 per person in the US. The Obama administration made the decision to cut payroll taxes (which everybody pays) over the course of an entire year, so that people would get the money slowly and spend it as they got it, for a maximum stimulation of the economy - instead of sending a big check (with an accompanying letter from the Prez of course) which most people use to pay off credit cards or mortgage, which has a much smaller stimulating effect.

Also take a look at the $41 billion for local school districts and $79 billion for state fiscal relief - almost all of that money went directly to making sure that teachers, cops, firefighters and other state and local government employees kept their jobs. That's around 500,000 jobs saved over two years.

Now take a look at the $20 billion for health IT (information technology), $32 billion for transforming the energy transmission and generation system, $10 billion for scientific research, $6 billion for expanded broadband and $10 billion for mass transit. Pre-2008, this was only-in-your-dreams money for progressive domestic projects. That's a huge, $88 billion dollar investment in our nation's R&D, energy and transportation infrastructure that's going to have an enormous payoff down the road (on top of the immediate jobs it's providing).

Contrary to the Glenn Beck's of the world, this is not some huge giveaway to big corporations or to the lazy poor - the stimulus bill combined massive relief for working families with an enormous investment in America's future. And, surprise surprise, it's actually working. A USA Today survey of 50 prominent economists found that the stimulus saved 1.2 million jobs.

So before you complain that the administration only cares about banks, and that Obama hasn't done anything, make sure you know what you're talking about.