President Obama has not yet decided what mix of proposals to include in next week’s jobs address. Specifically, he hasn’t chosen between a plan that has a chance of passing and a plan that would have less of a chance:

And yet, behind the scenes Obama and top aides had yet to reach agreement on the major tenets of that plan, and it remained unclear whether the president was looking for narrower ideas with a realistic chance of passing the Republican-led House or more sweeping stimulus proposals that would excite his liberal base and draw contrasts with the GOP [...]

Obama offered few hints Monday.

“I will be laying out a series of steps that Congress can take immediately to put more money in the pockets of working families and middle-class families, to make it easier for small businesses to hire people, to put construction crews to work rebuilding our nation’s roads and railways and airports, and all the other measures that can help to grow this economy,” he said.

Obama said the plan would consist of “bipartisan ideas that ought to be the kind of proposals that everybody can get behind, no matter what your political affiliation might be.”

First of all, we already know what kinds of proposals are in the running. Really only one – the FAST program to fix up public schools – in any way approaches a kind of public works spending program of the New Deal era. You could maybe put the “cash for caulkers” idea in that box, but I think that would leverage private companies to do the work with some kind of tax incentive. Everything else is pretty much the usual mix of supply-side, tax-based stimulus. George Miller introduced a bill that would give $61.5 billion to state and local governments so they can avoid layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters. Nothing like that will be in the Obama plan, at least if the initial reports are correct.

So the idea that there’s a distinction between “narrower ideas” and “more sweeping stimulus proposals” at all is unclear to me. And that’s especially true when you consider that there isn’t a single program that spends any more than a dime that House Republicans are willing to accept. They plan to spend the fall on a quixotic quest to kill regulations from the EPA and the NLRB. Following the dictates of an Obama address on jobs is the furthest thing from their mind.

Once you realize that – and surely the people who have been negotiating with Republicans all year understand this – the idea of creating the perfect bank shot of programs, like the payroll tax cut for example, to attract Republican support that isn’t likely to arrive seems fanciful. On the one hand there’s at least some question of whether the payroll tax cut works well as stimulus; it certainly could be designed better. On the other, Republicans aren’t going to vote for any stimulus regardless (some would disagree on this point, but the GOP has certainly remained pretty rigid even in the face of a proposed tax cut). So clearly public works spending is far preferable to these half-measures; instead we’re telling states not to replace road signs, let alone the roads.

The best measures Obama could announce, of course, are the ones that he can implement without Congress, which have an actual chance to work. That isn’t a very long list, but they involve using unspent resources from TARP and TALF, or the GSEs.