Boner of the Day

NEW YORK, New York -- No, this isn't anything that John Boner, House minority leader, did -- at least not directly. The day's boner move is the compromise reached between the competing House of Representatives stimulus bill and that put together by the Senate.

Here's the boner move, as reported by the New York Times:

Despite intense lobbying by governors around the country, the final deal slashed $25 billion from a proposed state fiscal stabilization fund, eliminated a $16 billion line item for school construction and sharply curtailed spending to provide health insurance for the unemployed.

The final agreement retained a $70 billion tax break to spare millions of middle-income Americans from paying the alternative minimum tax in 2009. Some Democrats decried the provision as a costly addition that would not lift the economy and that Congress would have approved, regardless of the recession.

Why's this bad? As the Wall Street Journal -- the nation's most conservative big paper -- writes: "A dollar sent to a state government to prevent layoffs or cuts in services yields a $1.38 economic boost, according to models used by the White House and Congress to calculate economic benefit. By contrast, the bill's inclusion of a measure to slow the expansion of the AMT will yield only 50 cents of stimulus for every dollar of avoided tax, the models predict."

So at the insistence of the Three Most Powerful People In The World -- bench-crossing Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe -- stimulative funding was replaced with a measure that taxpayers lose half their investment on, and that measure would've probably been passed in another bill later on, as happens every year.

Here's the upshot: "To win Republican votes, the final stimulus package is considerably leaner than what many economists say is now needed to jolt the economy, given its grave condition."

The question now is, what timeframe do we replace "day" with in "Boner of the Day"?