Here's Cornell University economist Robert Frank making the case for repealing the Bush Tax Cuts:

The U.S. government's first priority must of course be to stimulate spending as quickly as possible, deficits be damned. But it's important to get the biggest possible stimulus for any given deficit. To that end, it makes sense to stick with Obama's original timetable. Eliminating the Bush tax cuts right away would make it possible to generate a much larger immediate increase in total spending.

A robust finding in behavioral research is that people are extremely reluctant to accept cutbacks in their standard of living. With few exceptions, high-income taxpayers earn substantially more during their lifetimes than they spend, generally bequeathing the surplus to heirs or charities. If these taxpayers faced slightly higher rates, they would have ample resources to maintain their current lifestyle, so most of them would continue spending as before. The only consequence would be that they would leave smaller bequests.

The additional revenue from eliminating the Bush tax cuts would pay for larger temporary tax cuts for low- and middle-income families than the permanent tax cuts that are currently planned. And because these families spend most or all of their post-tax income, the immediate effect would be an increase in total spending roughly equal to the additional revenue from repealing the Bush tax cuts.

Or, the extra revenue could be used to raise benefits such as unemployment insurance and extend them more broadly. That would lift total spending by almost the full amount of the additional revenue.

Still another option would be to increase grants for city and state road maintenance crews. Here again, 100 percent of the distributions would be spent immediately.

But the additional stimulus would not stop there. When someone spends an extra dollar this way, others receive an extra dollar of income, some portion of which they spend, creating still more income for others. Appearing before the Senate Budget Committee last month, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, testified that because of this multiplier effect, each dollar of new U.S. government spending would generate roughly $1.50 of additional demand.

In brief, there would be a lot more stimulus for any given budget deficit if the Bush tax cuts for top earners were scrapped immediately and the resulting revenue steered to people who would spend it.

The other aspect about Nancy's moment of clarity is that we are actually having policy debates. As much as this San Franciscan loves the fog, it is refreshing to see the fog over Washington lift.