Over the last few days I’ve been trying to take stock of an essential element of the current stimulus debate: namely, Hill Republicans have been getting a lot of air time and minimal press criticism for a series of arguments about the stimulus that are in most cases transparently ridiculous. For instance, I heard several House Republicans yesterday making the straight up argument that the renovation of the Capitol Mall wouldn’t create any jobs or stimulate the economy. Well, obviously any major building project creates jobs. Nothing could be more straightforward. Whether it’s the best long-term use of the money, in the sense of whether the building project will have spin-off effects creating greater productivity and growth over time is a decent question. And looking at what’s in the bill I find myself wishing that more of the more was being spent in a more concentrated fashion — largely on infrastructure projects. But every major building project creates jobs.

Next, since there are no controlled experiments in recessions and depressions, there’s no really concrete and dispositive evidence about what policies end or don’t end severe economic downturns. But there’s a more focused question: how much spending into the economy you get for government spending versus tax cuts. And on this point there’s a lot of evidence, all of which points to spending as being more efficient. And that’s even more the case in a severe downturn when tax cuts to businesses don’t go into further business reinvestment because everyone’s afraid to invest into a down economy. See more on this point in this post from Elana Schor at TPMDC.

A subsidiary point to this one — to the extent that tax cuts are on the table, Republicans are going nuts about any tax cuts being rebated to people who are not paying income taxes. Now, again, you get more spending in the short term from people who have no choice but to spend virtually all their income. Very elementary. And it’s just another case where if you look at the criticisms coming from Hill Republicans they show clearly that they don’t come from people who have any concern for stabilizing the economy but rather from people who want to maximize tax cuts to wealthy Americans. Simple as that.

And yet for all of this, most reporters seem to take these non-sensical criticisms completely on face value, grading on a curve, as it were, not giving these folks a hard time because they’re well-liked much as we might with a dumb jock in the physics class who gets a free ride because no one expects anything different from him.

Alas, there’s a good example of this in this headline piece from today in the Politico making the argument that simple doing nothing, a la, the Hoover administration in the early 30s is likely the best plan.

More examples of what I was talking about below. Rep.

Flake (R) was just on CSPAN moments ago talking about tax cuts in the Stimulus Bill. And he just made the argument that a lot of tax cuts in the bill go to ‘people who don’t pay income taxes’, i.e., they’re tax rebates. Now, this is another example of Republicans making transparently nonsensical points, making extensive use of the free pass on nonsense that appears to be their god-given from most of the political press in Washington.

There’s a decent case that one-off tax rebates aren’t as potent as spending in terms of pumping money back into the economy. The one from last year didn’t seem to have much of a punch. But whether the money goes into the hands of people who do or do not pay income taxes is a completely irrelevant point in itself. It’s only relevant to whether you can focus tax breaks on wealthier people — a political point.

What’s more, since people who ‘don’t pay income taxes’ are overwhelmingly people with low incomes, those people by definition spend more than those with higher incomes, if only because they have no choice. It’s just a straight-up nonsensical statement.

I’m now being lectured on CSPAN about the spending in the Stimulus Bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R), who’s still the target of an on-going criminal investigation because of his various earmark/lobbying scams.

Progressive Caucus: We got a lot of good stuff in that bill.

Meanwhile, our anonymous TPMCafe contributor says, face it, the stuff that’s really stimulus ain’t infrastructure investment and vice versa.

Not sure I agree with that — not in the narrow sense, where I suspect he’s largely right, but of what we really want/need this stimulus to accomplish. But take a look.

It may not be advisable for anyone to actually listen to the arguments House Republicans are actually making on the House floor. We’re just listening again to Rep. Flake (R) who appears to have

outdone himself in militant statements of economic nonsense. Earlier today we heard Flake claiming that tax cuts have no stimulus effect if they go to low-income earners who pay payroll taxes and not income taxes.

Now he’s explaining how capital spending on AMTRAK is also not stimulus because AMTRAK doesn’t run a profit. Again, total non-sequitur. I think rail is something we should be spending a lot more on. But you can certainly disagree with that on policy terms. But you can’t claim that that capital spending on rail stock and rail upgrades doesn’t provide jobs. Of course it provides jobs. And whether Amtrak is profitable or not is completely beside the point.

Where did they get this guy?

Actually, I forget. He’s a chief GOP spokesman on this whole issue.

Now Sen. Ensign is claiming that President Hoover tried to pump up government spending during the early days of the Great Depression.

Rep. Boehner (R) just said that the GOP alternative stimulus bill will create over 6 million jobs over two years with half the amount of money of the Democratic bill. Anybody have any idea where he got that number?

Eric Holder is denying that he made any promises to Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) and other GOP senators not to pursue torture prosecutions in order to secure their support for his confirmation.

From TPM Reader RS …

One point that been bugging me in the current stimulus package debate is the notion that scheduling infrastructure spending for 2010 or 2011 won’t have any immediate impact on the economy.

Economic crises are ultimately about loss of confidence, i.e., a lack of faith in the economy’s future. For this reason knowing that government money will be spent not only this year, but for years hence, is actually more stimulative than a quick launch of make-work projects whose effects, while immediate, would be quickly discounted as short-term.

Knowing Uncle Sam is willing to stimulate aggregate demand for years, not just for a few quarters, is just the kind of long-term reassurance companies need to plan ahead and entrepreneurs need to restore flagging animal spirits.

Bernard Madoff isn’t the only one. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spate of Mini-Madoffs, as the collapsing economy has exposed a slew of alleged Ponzi schemes and other scams in which money managers are accused of ripping off their clients. Here’s the rundown…

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.