Three questions

Just as there is near-breathless anticipation of the Obama stimulus, there is also some skepticism from Greg Mankiw in today's NY Times. Mankiw writes that "If the stimulus package takes the form of bridges to nowhere, a result could be economic expansion as measured by standard statistics, but little to increase economic well being." Well, yes.

And "The way to avoid this problem is a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of each governement project."

Let me see. Who will be doing all this? And how many government projects pass such a screen? Can we have that conversation?