From off-the-record conversations with some of Sen. Barack Obama's advisers, it looks as if it will come in two tranches worth a total of some $500 billion, to be deployed in the first two years of the new administration.

The first tranche, worth around $150 billion, is likely to be presented and probably passed within the first 100 days. It includes an across-the-board extension of unemployment benefits, an increase in food stamps and the announcement of an immediate infrastructure investment in modernizing the creaking national electricity grid.

The second tranche is focused on infrastructure, a sharp increase in alternative energy, science and medical research grants, and new federal money for higher education through Pell grants and targeted subsidies for science, engineering and language programs.

The money, which will add to the budget deficit, will be justified under Obama's phrase about "the fierce urgency of now" and by the glaring need for major investments in the dilapidated U.S. infrastructure. The Association of Civil Engineers has identified $1.6 trillion in urgent spending to repair bridges, roads, ports, airfields, sewage and water supplies, and the electric grid.

There are two main difficulties. The first is the absorptive capacity of the U.S. economy, with likely shortages of skilled labor and engineering capabilities, and the inevitably slow process of getting the work program defined, agreed to and designed.

Some priorities, like bridge and sewage repair, are pretty clear, and many states and municipalities have programs ready to go, but there are likely to be bottlenecks of specialist equipment and skilled workers. The kind of construction worker who can build a house is not necessarily equipped to lay transmission lines and build cofferdams for bridges or water-treatment plants.

The second problem is the need for national-level strategic planning. Existing plans for port and railroad modernization suffer from the fact that a large proportion of freight rail traffic still has to pass through the bottleneck of Chicago. A problem with tricky political implications of neighborhood resistance to alternative routes that will take time to resolve, it also points to the need for a coherent and coordinated national transportation plan. That also will take time, particularly since it logically should be coordinated with the NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico, who also have new ports and road and rail plans that will feed into the U.S. network.

The challenge for the planners is to work out where the country gets the biggest bang for each buck invested and to identify what works most quickly. The classic Keynesian concept of investing in infrastructure tends to pay off late; in a year or more in jobs, and then in the long years ahead for the new roads, ports and schools.

What is interesting is that the planners seem to be using a playbook that emerged from hearings in July before the House Committee on Small Business, a calculation of the impact on GDP over the next year that can be estimated from various measures.

For example, the calculation suggested that a direct lump-sum tax rebate has an almost neutral effect. One percent of GDP given away leads to a 1.02 percent increase in next year's GDP. Cuts in the corporate tax rate or in capital gains taxes, or making the Bush tax cuts permanent, have a negative effect. They cost more than twice as much as they get back. A payroll tax holiday, by contrast, gets back $1.29 for every dollar spent, since it makes it cheaper to hire labor.

Even greater returns come from other planned measures. Food stamps return $1.79 for every dollar spent, because of the knock-on effect through the food industry. Unemployment benefits return $1.64 for each dollar spent, because the money is directly and immediately spent on food and goods and services, and has a multiplier effect on farmers, retailers, wholesalers and so on.

Infrastructure investment returns $1.59 for each dollar spent, as the money circulates through architects and engineering companies and construction workers who buy steel and cement, and their paychecks buy groceries and go into bank accounts and help keep the overall economy moving.

Direct aid to the states gets $1.36 in returns for each dollar spent, which may not be much but is a whole lot more productive than tax cuts. Moreover, many states have deferred building and maintenance programs planned, designed and ready to start almost as soon as the money is available.

The problem here is likely to be the U.S. Congress and the understandable determination of each individual member of the House and Senate to have the money spent in his or her home district. At best, the result will be dreadful delays; at worst, much of the money could get frittered away in boondoggles and bridges to nowhere. So one option would be to send up a stimulus bill designed to look like the U.S. military base closures system that avoids the congressional infighting by being voted up or down as a package, without giving Congress the option to micromanage the spending.

Even if an Obama presidency has big Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, as President Bill Clinton did in his first two years in office, he is likely to find, as Clinton did, that tackling a supposedly friendly Congress can be even tougher than tackling the recession.

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