House Democrats did not do a very good job of incorporating conservative ideas into the stimulus plan. The tax cuts are insignificant and there is not much defense spending. But it turns out they did a perfectly awful job of encapsulating the President’s ideas. The Washington Post reports:

Less than half the money dedicated to highways, school construction and other infrastructure projects in a massive economic stimulus package unveiled by House Democrats is likely to be spent within the next two years, according to congressional budget analysts, meaning most of the spending would come too late to lift the nation out of recession.

A report by the Congressional Budget Office found that only about $136 billion of the $355 billion that House leaders want to allocate to infrastructure and other so-called discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010. The rest would come in future years, long after the CBO and other economists predict the recession will have ended.

This is precisely why these things never manage to provide any actual stimulus medicine. (You may recall that Obama economic adviser Christina Romer has written about the same phenomenon.) Republicans are making just this point:

But the CBO analysis appears to confirm the complaints of many Republicans and other critics, who have long argued that spending money on highway construction and other infrastructure projects is ineffective at quickly jolting a sluggish economy. The report was distributed to reporters yesterday by aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

The report also suggests that the House measure would violate Obama’s rules for the stimulus package; Obama aides have said they want the bulk of the spending to occur before 2011. Obama has pledged that the measure would save or create at least 3 million jobs over the next two years.

There seems to be room for improvement even if we accept the Obama administration’s policy premises. We shouldn’t be surprised that the bill so wildly misses the mark, because the House did what Congress usually does — larded up a spending bill with the sort of items that provide little long term, or even short term, economic relief. If President Obama is serious about achieving his own goals he’ll have something to say about that.

In retrospect it seems unfortunate that President Obama let the House run wild, filling the bill with items that don’t fulfill his own vision. Was this just a rookie error? We’ll soon find out.