“I don’t think there’s any question that our priority over the next month should be this economy,” Cantor told reporters on a conference call. “We stand ready and willing to stand with the president and produce a bill that will generate results.”

The No. 2 House Republican jumped on Vice President Joseph Biden’s remarks on Sunday that the administration misread how bad the economy was. Cantor noted that the Obama administration had warned of dire economic figures when it made the case for an stimulus plan earlier this year.

“They didn’t misread the economy ... What they did is miswrote the stimulus bill and got the prescription wrong. ... The first attempt at a stimulus bill did not stimulate the economy.”

Cantor said that he’d like the meeting to focus on how “to go about redirecting some of the moneys authorized in the first round that haven’t worked” to Republican proposals for tax cuts for small businesses.

“Where do we go from here?” Cantor asked, later adding: “We ought not to be cranking up Washington’s spending machine.”

But Cantor doesn’t want to nix all the spending from February’s stimulus. He is trying to get stimulus money for a high-speed rail line from Washington, D.C., to Richmond, Va., a project he said could generate 185,000 jobs in Virginia. Even with his support for the rail line, Cantor said the larger stimulus package was a mistake.

“I don’t see any inconsistency there,” he said.