Shhhh. Don’t call it a second stimulus.

With unemployment approaching 10 percent, some politicians are talking—quietly—about the need for more government spending or tax cuts to juice the anemic economy. But after the bruising fight at the beginning of the year over the $787 billion stimulus bill, followed by the donnybrook over health care reform, and with all the money from that first stimulus still not spent, the politicians aren’t willing to call what they’re talking about a second stimulus.

Business groups are mostly lukewarm to the idea of more stimulus. To the National Association of Manufacturers, it’s ridiculous to be talking about a second stimulus when more than half of the first one hasn’t even been spent. To the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the politicians are talking about the wrong tax breaks if they really want to get the economy rolling again. And the nation’s largest business group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is getting ready to roll out its own campaign to promote free-market ideas it says will create 20 million jobs.

The business groups reflect skepticism about the government’s stimulus spending so far that’s shared by small- and large-business owners surveyed by the City Business Journals Network, an advertising affiliate of Portfolio.com’s parent company, American City Business Journals.

Only 7 percent of owners of businesses with four to 499 employees surveyed for Portfolio.com thought the stimulus package was getting into the right hands to make a difference. Just 27 percent of the heads of businesses with 500 or more employees surveyed thought the same.

But politicians are working on more ideas anyway. The specter of double-digit unemployment with midterm elections coming in a year can focus the political mind.

The Democrats are looking at ideas: from giving a tax break to businesses that create jobs, sending more aid to the states, extending unemployment benefits, and spending more on infrastructure. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is even entertaining a Republican proposal that would allow money-losing companies to use losses now to get refunds for taxes paid in the past five years. But getting much of a commitment to any one program is pretty tough.

“There are a number of ideas being discussed, but no decisions have been made yet,” said a Pelosi spokesman, Brendan Daly.

Republicans, calling the current stimulus a failure, are advocating tax cuts that include allowing small businesses to take a tax deduction of 20 percent to free up funds to hire new employees. The Republicans are also calling for cutting the 15 percent tax rate to 10 percent, and 10 percent to 5 percent. And they’re calling on the Democrats to abandon current health care reform and climate-change restriction efforts, saying both initiatives will kill jobs.

But, as with Pelosi on the refund issue, Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia says he could get behind the Democratic idea of tax breaks for businesses when they make hires.

Neither side has come up with cost estimates for their ideas. “We’re not at that point,” said Minority Leader John Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, when asked to estimate the cost of the GOP tax-cut proposals. Nor have the politicians on either side of the aisle outlined a plan to pay for any of their proposals.

“Our general response to that is that they ought to spend the money that they’ve got in their current stimulus plans,” said Hank Cox of the National Association of Manufacturers. “They’ve got a lot of money that’s been authorized to be spent that they haven’t spent yet. A lot of that money has just been going to the states. We’d like to see some of these practical things that we need, the smart grid, the medical-records technology.”