Obama’s stimulus looks nothing like Brown’s – whatever our PM might say

Gordon Brown’s trick is setting the parameters of debate, and fooling the opposition into accepting them. And in the next few weeks, he has a mission: to define the Obama bailout for the British media. He must teach them to see it as a Brown-style stimulus – thus allowing him to be quoted, without criticism, saying “this is almost exactly line by line what we are doing”. He wants to present himself as the master, and Obama as the young pupil.

It’s not true, of course. Obama is focusing far more on tax cuts than many sceptics (including myself) would have predicted – the scale of them is at least three times bigger than he indicated in his election campaign. He is now drawing fire from Paul Krugman – and that can only be a good thing. Whilst Larry Kudlow, a former Reagan adviser, admits there’s much in it for a supply-sider to applaud.