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Obama Team Aims to Keep Stimulus Under $1 Trillion By JONATHAN WEISMAN
President-elect Barack Obama's economic team is crafting a stimulus package to send to Congress worth between $675 billion and $775 billion over two years, according to transition officials, and it expects a final price tag even larger.
The transition team has conveyed the figures to Capitol Hill, where the package is likely to grow as it works its way through the House and Senate. An Obama adviser familiar with the planning said the package could top out around $850 billion. Democratic leadership aides said it could easily exceed that before the package gets back to Mr. Obama's desk in final form.
"The biggest fear is that people will do too little," said one Democratic leadership aide, "like a start-up that fails because it didn't do enough."
Obama aides hope to keep the package below the trillion-dollar mark, a psychological threshold that could carry political consequences, as they fear being accused of adding too much to the country's long-term budget deficit.
Obama advisers and Democratic aides in Congress are accelerating their work on the massive economic recovery package this week, ahead of Mr. Obama's two-week holiday in Hawaii and the break between the disbanding of the 110th Congress and the forming of the 111th. Both sides in the talks want a package ready when Congress returns Jan. 6, so legislation can reach the House and Senate floors before Mr. Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration.
Even before the details are known, a coalition of liberal groups and labor unions on Thursday announced a major campaign to get the package passed before Inauguration Day, arguing that the new president should not have to expend political capital to rescue the economy left behind by his predecessor.
The coalition includes unions such as the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club and umbrella group Americans United for Change, which helped sink President George W. Bush's effort to add individual investment accounts to Social Security.
The broad parameters of the package are known already. It will include a tax cut designed to pump $50 billion to $100 billion into the economy almost immediately; around $100 billion in aid to state governments, primarily to temporarily assume more of the cost of Medicaid, in hopes of staving off benefit cuts or tax increases; and funding in five main areas: traditional infrastructure, school construction, energy efficiency, broadband access and health- information technology.
But, in pursuing the largest fiscal stimulus since the Depression, Democrats are likely to add many more categories, legislative aides say.