Anti-Stimulus Package

It’s disturbing that the stimulus package appears to be, in the words of one senator, only 7% stimulus. With means calling it a “stimulus package” really oversells it.

It’s depressing if unavoidable. Republicans would always be too terrified by budget deficits to give the gigantic tax breaks necessary to have a real impact. And it’s not in the Democrat DNA to do anything other than pay off constituencies, regardless of stimulative effect. The party of Jackson understands only the anecdotal and owe their existence to the paying off of interest groups rather than the attending to collective economic health.

Perhaps it’s just my mood, but it seems Creedence Clearwater Revival had a song with the ominously descriptive lyric “there’s a bad moon arisin’”. I’ve never had a job during a real recession (’82 was before my time) so this is brand new ground for me. Meantime I feel the pointless superiority over a silly MSM that has acted as though apocalyptic times were upon us every time there was the combination of a Republican president with a slight dip in the economy. But this, finally, feels like the real thing and we’re only on the cusp of it. The best and brightest obviously have little clue. The boy who called wolf, the MSM being the boy, is right for once. Peggy Noonan puts it best:

There's a sense among many, certainly here in New York, that we somehow had it too good too long, a feeling part Puritan, part mystic and obscurely guilty, that some bill is coming due. Hard to get a stimulus package that addresses that. (The guilt was part of the power of Blago. He's the last American who doesn't feel guilt. He thinks something is moral because he did it. He's like a good-natured Idi Amin, up there yammering about how he's a poor boy who only wanted to protect the people of Chicago from the flu. You wish you could believe it! You wish he really were what he is in his imagination, a hero battling dark forces against the odds.)

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head. I think it's in the DSM. When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party's never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef.