The situation we're in

I'm having a hard time getting a feel for where we are in this economic mess. Is it still getting worse? Have we bottomed out?

But in Obama's news conference Monday, he brought up the example of Elkhart, Indiana where the unemployment has gone from 4.7% to 15.3% in one year!

(Video link)

It appears that the Senate and House have reached a compromise on a $789 billion stimulus plan. The plan was around $100 billion smaller than the Senate's bill, cutting some spending:

Despite intense lobbying by governors, the final deal slashed $35 billion from a proposed state fiscal stabilization fund, eliminated $16 billion in aid for school construction and sharply curtailed health care subsidies for the unemployed.

House leaders were apparently on working on restoring some of the school construction funding which seems like a good idea to me.

Also of note is the fact that around 9% of the stimulus plan comes from changes to the alternative minimum tax which Congress was planning on passing later in the year anyway:

But the final bill retained a $70 billion tax cut that would spare millions of middle-class Americans from paying the alternative minimum tax in 2009, which some Democrats decried as wasting a large chunk of the bill on something that would do little to lift the economy and that Congress would have approved regardless of the recession.