There was a great deal of doubt that Bush would sign the fiscal stimulus bill that Pelosi has been advocating for a lame duck session of congress. 

That is, until today.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke advocated today an additional immediate stimulus package, and the white house indicated its openness to a stimulus.

As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out in his NY Times opinion piece last Friday, any stimulus package should include infrastructure spending.  The usual argument against infrastructure spending is that by the time construction starts, the slump has past.  Not this time.  Krugman points out that all indications are that the slump will be prolonged and that substantial government spending on infrastructure will provide sustained stimulus to the economy. 

Earlier this week I advocated spending on a national grid for bulk transmission of electricity.  Yet there is spending on Green Stimulus that can be achieved much more rapidly.  There is a huge need for training and paying people to take such courses could be done almost immediately.  Skills needed cover a broad range from energy conservation to transmission and generation system installation.  For example, there aren't enough skilled installers of solar panels for electricity and hot water.  Photo voltaic system installation requires a superset of skills beyond what a licensed electrian understands.   Regarding transmission- the national High Voltage DC electricity network will be a coast to coast web of lines requiring substantially more lineman and high voltage power construction crews than the nation currently has.  Unemployed construction workers should be attending schools on the skills needed for retrofitting buildings to substantially reduce energy utilization.

So training can be rolled out immediately.  Students would be paid to attend the courses, and that alleviate load on unemployment benefits currently weighing on the states.  The second part of the stimulus would be authorization of projects- offering low cost loans to build solar panel factories, and contracts for large numbers of panels.  These would be offered to homeowners as something that is paid back via their electrical bill- they pay their electrical bill as they always do, but all electricity generated from the panels goes to pay them off.  In 10 to 15 years depending on how heavily sunlight hits their corner of the country, the panels would be paid off.

Installing this number of panels will require a large workforce of installers, and large numbers of PV factories.  However factories can be built in 6 months- about the time it will take to get enough trained installers in place.  Because usage of solar at the home and business does not require the national transmission network, there is no need to wait for the national infrastructure to come on line.