The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) -- America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It's the military doctrine of lightning force - fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage - applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
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