Want to roll up your sleeves and pick through the different versions of the economic stimulus bill? The Wall Street Journal has what you need.

Their online feature, “The Stimulus Plans: How They Differ,” has broken out all the spending in the House and Senate bills and noted the differences between the two. Amounts are listed in thousands on their chart, so $253,000 on the chart equals $253 million. (That’s a quarter billion dollars.)

We’re big on per-family and per-person spending numbers around here, so here’s what to do for a rough conversion of the WSJ numbers: For the per-family amount, move the decimal point to the left five places. $253,000 on the chart is about $2.53 for each of the roughly 100 million families in the country.

To get per-person amounts, divide the per-family number by three. (There’s more than 300 million people in the country, but whatever.) That’s about 84 cents per person in the United States that the House of Representatives wants to spend on “Repairs and security improvements at Department of Agriculture and agencies.” Go through the whole thing this way and you’ll feel nickel-and-dimed to death.

These numbers are probably not net present value figures like we discussed in our most recent post on the cost of the Senate bill. Reporting the net present value would bring the number down a little bit. Not all spending will happen this year and future spending is less expensive than spending today. (I’ll correct the record if I learn otherwise from the WSJ folks.)

Kudos to the WSJ for putting this together – not an easy task. If everyone slices and dices bills like this different ways, we might wake up one day and find ourselves back in charge of our government!