Lesley Stedman Weidenbener, writing for the Louisville Courier Press, has an article entitled Debate is over how to use $4.3 billion.

Step one will be figuring out who gets to decide how to use the money. Most of it is already confined to particular purposes, most notably roads, Medicaid, schools, and unemployment. But, within the parameters set by the federal government, lawmakers will have to resolve philosophical issues. Republicans don’t want to spend the money in a way that increases operating costs. As an initial salvo, House Democrats have voted to use $700 million of the stimulus money to supplant state Medicaid expenses, freeing up money to be used on higher education.

Ben Zion Hershberg and Antoinette Konzthe, writing for the Lousville Courier Journal, provide more detail on some of the school spending in the stimulus bill.

So far, it seems that money will primarily be spent on roads and schools. One downside I’m seeing is that the need to spend the money quickly will trump the need to spend the money differently — so we won’t see this rare opportunity used to rethink our general approaches to transportation or education. But maybe I’m wrong. A lot of this seems to be up in the air so far. Why am I envisioning raw meat thrown to a pack of ravenous dogs?

The large number associated with the stimulus bill is being used as a boogey man with which to scare people. There are legitimate reasons for concern, but the number, taken in isolation isn’t one of them. I think I heard Boehner or someone talking about how the stimulus represents more than $2 million per day “since Christ was born.”

Leo Morris references a site that tells us “A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years,” before saying “when you see that actual enormous leap between a billion and a trillion, what the government is doing gets really scary.” That only works if a dollar spent by the government bears a relationship to a second. By contrast, as a counterexample, a mere drop of water has 1.5 sextillion molecules.

Now, if you assume — as our government officials currently are — that government spending can have a positive impact on economic activity and that the Gross Domestic Product of the economy is a reasonable way of measuring the size of the economy, then a more plausible comparison is government spending as a percentage of GDP. Another assumption (stacking one on top of the other gets precarious, I know — but this is a free blog, so you get what you pay for) is that World War II got us out of The Great Depression. World War II resulted in a 34% increase in government spending as a percentage of GDP (from about 9.8% in 1940 to 43.6% in 1943-1944). In 2008, the United States had an estimated GDP of about $14.58 trillion.

I don’t know if the real change (+34%) in government spending or the absolute amount of government spending (43.6%) was considered most important in getting us out of the Depression. As of 2003, we were at about 20%. A 23% increase in government spending as a percentage of GDP would mean about $3.3 trillion in additional spending. So, if any of this analysis is valid, it may well be that the $800 billion in the stimulus bill will be insufficient. (And, of course, there is the tiny matter of *what* we’re spending it on.)