The silver lining to the faux-stimulus bill

It looks to me like the "stimulus" bill that passed the House is rapidly losing support. That's not surprising, since it was so absolutely awful. If this disgraceful display of politics run wild does not cast serious doubt on the seriousness of Congress and the intelligence of our new president, nothing will. And that is the good news, because only something this bad can mobilize support for something that does make sense. The Senate needs to do its job now, and recast this effort to help the economy using reason, experience and logic, rather than pure partisan politics. Above all, our senators need to focus on the fact that simply handing out money to favored constituents and creating vast new spending programs that will take years to deploy is the worst possible way to stimulate the economy. True stimulus needs to focus on changing people's incentives to work, invest, and take risk. That means tax cuts, not tax rebates, and any changes should apply to anyone or any company that pays taxes.

If we're lucky, the debate in the Senate might last long enough that we discover that a stimulus bill is not really necessary after all.

Ben Stein reminds us just how awful the current bill was:

Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.

Only ten per cent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.

This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000. We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.