From TARP to ARRP

Larry Summers channels Barack Obama in the Washington Post:

Our president-elect understands both the peril and the promise of the situation and the importance of responding to changing conditions. That is why his economic team is crafting a broad proposal, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, to support the jobs and incomes essential for recovery while also making a down payment on our nation's long-term financial health.

The rest of the article is little more than a concatenation of political clichés, which is depressing coming, as it does, from an administration which isn't running for any kind of re-election any time soon. This kind of thing has very little meaning during a political campaign, and even less once that campaign is over:

The Obama plan represents not new public works but, rather, investments that will work for the American public... Laying the groundwork for recovery and future prosperity will require shedding Washington habits... We must focus not on ideology but on drawing the best ideas from all quarters... Far from being an excuse for inaction or delay, the magnitude of the work ahead is all the more reason to begin that work.

In any case, it seems that TARP is going to end up either as a precursor to, or else simply a small part of, the much larger ARRP. You'd think that someone, somewhere, might have spent a bit more time coming up with a decent acronym. I'm not sure that Obama wants to go down in history as the Father of ARRP, even if it's a roaring success.