People are in some hard times, and congressional Democrats at President-elect Obama’s urging are putting forward a $825 billion stimulus plan that will provide $550 billion in deficit spending and $275 billion in tax cuts. When House Republican Leader John Boehner saw the plan yesterday, he reacted: “Oh my God.”

Many Republicans are wondering how Congress got to this point, where the federal deficit is already at $1.2 trillion, and they are on track to outspend the Great Depression’s New Deal.

Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation poses his 10 questions about the stimulus on National Review.

President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn’t sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?

The U.S. Treasury won’t just print $825 billion either.

Congress doesn’t have a vault of money waiting to be distributed: Every dollar lawmakers “inject” into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. If government borrows the money from American investors, investment spending drops accordingly. If it’s borrowed from foreigners, net exports drop accordingly. How does borrowing $800 billion from one group of people and giving that $800 billion to another group of people make us wealthier?

Then some lessons from history:

During the 1930s, New Deal lawmakers doubled federal spending — and unemployment remained above 20 percent until World War II. More recently, Japan responded to a 1990 recession by passing 10 “stimulus” bills over 8 years (building the largest national debt in the industrialized world) — and their economy remained stagnant. Why do lawmakers believe the same failed approach will succeed for the U.S. today?

One confusing aspect of this deficit spending is that free market economists like Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke started the snowball rolling. And President Bush helped them push the snowball along. Republicans are trying to regroup what they have left of fiscal conservatism – whether it’s a valid policy for these hard times or not.