Our new president didn’t like that description, and he derided it at a dinner for Democratic members of Congress on Thursday night. “So then you get the argument, ‘Well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill,’” Obama said sarcastically. “What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point!”

The Democrats laughed along with their party leader, but Loose Cannon can report faithfully (because I was looking in the mirror while the president spoke—don’t ask why) that a quizzical frown formed on my face. In my understanding, government spending during a recession is supposed to prime the pump, get the economy working again, not be the pump. Republicans aren’t arguing that the Democratic bill will go too far. They fear it won’t do enough. Why? Keep reading.

One thing that happens during a recession, and it’s certainly happened in this recession, is that families curtail their discretionary spending. We’ve been told for decades that we Americans don’t save enough, but we’re sure saving now. That’s part of the problem. Why are we not spending? Lots of reasons: Because 3 million people who were employed last year at this time have no jobs, because those of us who are working worry about job security, because our houses and retirement accounts have declined precipitously in value, because…well, it just seems like a good time to be financially prudent in our private lives. And that’s the rub.

The economy is circular. Not cyclical—it’s that, too—but circular. If people stop buying new cars or computers, business orders fall. When their inventory runs out, companies idle or slow their means of production. They cut their advertising budget, their showroom hours, and, finally, their own staffs. Presto!—even more unemployment. On top of that dynamic, what you have this time is a decline in the stock market so profound that supposedly recession-proof entities, ranging from big charities to wealthy universities are cutting back, too. I’m at Stanford University this week. Its endowment plummeted, and so it instituted a round of budget cuts, some of them entail, yes, job losses. And so it goes. This is where Washington comes in, hopefully. But what should the federal government do?

Now, we’re back to the type of stimulus package we need. I attended a seminar earlier this week hosted by the Hoover Institution. We heard from four very smart economists. They didn’t agree on everything, but they all agreed on this: This recession is so deep—and getting deeper—that if Washington wants to make a difference it has to do something very big. And it has to take actions that spur spending immediately. What would constitute such actions? Well, an immediate moratorium on state sales taxes was one idea they all thought might work. Washington would repatriate the lost revenue to the state capitals; meanwhile, Americans contemplating whether to buy that new computer, plasma TV, or hybrid automobile would know that they’d be able to obtain it at six or seven, or eight percent (depends on your state’s tax rate) less than they would next year. This would spur spending more efficiently than the income tax rebates in the current stimulus package because you only get the tax break if you actually spend money.

Some economic journalists who ought to know better derided that approach as little more than instinctual Republican tax-cutting. Well, I suppose that the free-market sensibilities of the Hoover Institution are well-known, but this idea comes out of groundbreaking research a young Harvard economist did in the 1980s. His name? Lawrence Summers.

Summers, former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, now heads the National Economic Council in the Obama White House. Tax-cutting is obviously not the only thing we need at this time. Public works projects have their place, especially those that can get in the pipeline in weeks and months, not years. We also need our elected officials  in Washington to get serious. Obama quipped today that everyone thinks they are an economist these days. That’s not so bad. It’s that everyone wants to be a politician that has me worried.

Stanford economics professor Michael J. Boskin, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush (41) administrations, noted at the seminar I attended that in times like these the default political positions are thus: “Democrats want to help people, and Republicans want to help the economy.” That struck me as reassuring. When the two parties work together—when Democrats remind Republicans that these are real families suffering through this recession, not statistics, and when Republicans remind Democrats, yes, but we want to do something that actually helps these families, not merely express our solicitude for them—well, then the GOP and the Dems can make beautiful music together.

Is that what happened late Friday night, when the White House and the Senate reportedly hammered out a deal, one with enough Republican support to prevent a filibuster? Perhaps. Let's see the details of the stimulus when it is finally enacted. In the meantime, Barack, don’t waste your time taking your show on the road. Everyone knows you give a beautiful speech. Talk to people like Orrin in private. You already won the election, now you must help the two parties work in concert.