Our Opinion THE ISSUE: A tug-of-war over the president's stimulus plan WHERE WE STAND: Even $825 billion can only go so far We should have seen this coming: There are now concerns that the huge economic stimulus package proposed by President Barack Obama last month may not go as far as many people had hoped.

The $825 billion contained in the plan was originally intended to provide funding to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. But the proposal for the largest public works project in half a century is being sliced and diced to the point where it could produce more disappointment than success.

When the stimulus proposal was announced last month, a lot of people started daydreaming about the big transportation, energy-conservation and environmental projects they think are most needed but have never come close to getting adequate funding.

After all, these extreme times have given rise to a climate in which traditional notions about constraints about what the federal government can and should spend money on have been shattered. The idea that grave economic times call for extreme measures has become widespread.

The $700-billion bailout for the financial industry led the teetering U.S. auto industry to beg to be included.

Now the new president's stimulus proposal has state and local elected officials, advocacy groups and unions tossing around some really big sums in their discussion of the potential for being able to spend enormous sums of federal money. Amid all this heady talk of huge expenditures of federal money, however, the scope of what the president and his advisers originally envisioned has broadened considerably and that's a danger.

A number of the nation's governors announced a few weeks ago that they wanted their own bailout - $1 trillion spread over 50 states. Other officials have urged that stimulus money be used to help states with education and health-care costs.

Just this week, the airline industry called for using billions to completely overhaul the nation's air-traffic-control system.

You see where all this is going.

The details of the plan are still emerging, but as reported in the New York Times this week, it's becoming clearer that a lot of people are going to be disappointed.

As more and more demands are being made of the new administration, it has had to add more and more spending lines to satisfy more members of Congress and make the stimulus package politically viable.

Because of that, it's looking less likely that the big projects people say are immediately necessary - developing high-speed rail, rebuilding the nation's deteriorating bridges, upgrading the electric grid, addressing the increasingly dire shortages of water in the fast-growing Southwest - are going to get the funding they need to get done.

In fact, only about a third of the money in the overall stimulus bill as it stands now would go toward enhancing infrastructure. Those would be largely smaller, less ambitious projects focused heavily on road and highway construction rather than on mass transit. The rest is destined for tax cuts and aid to the states to help them with their epic budget crises.

The Times reported that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $1.6 trillion is needed for infrastructure improvements alone.

Several governors and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have banded together to press for increasing the spending for infrastructure. They say the plan, as it now stands, won't accomplish anything like what was talked when it was announced.

Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, a member of the coalition, told the Times last week, "Anybody who thinks - if the president-elect thinks, or the team thinks - that this is the answer to America's infrastructure needs is in a different universe."

Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, a transportation advocacy group in the tri-state area, called it "a drop in the bucket."

The stimulus package is certainly needed: The nation's worst economic sickness since the Great Depression calls for strong medicine. But most of the money should go to carefully chosen projects across the nation that will produce jobs and begin to jolt the economy quickly. As it stands now, it's being spread too thin and is being targeted to too many lesser priorities.

Even an amount as big as $825 billion only goes so far.

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