Say Anything Blog

When politicians start talking about “acting quickly” that’s usually a prompt for taxpayers to bend over and grab their ankles.  Obama’s rush to pass his “economic stimulus” spending spree is no different.

President Obama may not yet be hitting the road to promote his $825 billion economic recovery plan, but he is taking to the airwaves and the Internet to build public support for the massive spending bill making its way through Congress. Obama’s weekly radio and video address to the nation Saturday is aimed at convincing ordinary Americans that the measure will actually produce jobs and tangible benefits as it jump-starts the moribund economy.

Officials also announced that Obama would underscore the urgency of the economic crisis by joining his economic team in an unusual Saturday morning meeting at the White House.

“If we do not act boldly and swiftly, a bad situation could become dramatically worse,” Obama said in his pre-recorded statement. He also promised that the three to four million jobs that he’s promised would be created or saved through the spending measure over two years would produce results and not be mere makework.

I think the real problem Obama has is that if Congress doesn’t act “boldly and swiftly” to pass the spending he wants the public might realize that the economy isn’t going to collapse without government intervention.  That it might actually rebound without needing questionable “stimulus” of massive amounts of government spending.

And they might just figure out that only about 3% of the stimulus is actually to the sort of infrastructure projects he’s been talking about with the rest going to free condoms and subsidized abortions and CFL light bulbs.

The Democrats want to use this much-hyped economic down turn (which is bad, but isn’t worthy of the comparisons to the Great Depression that many have been making) as an excuse to spend money on a wish list of things they wanted to fund under Bush but couldn’t because of his veto.  But if they don’t act quickly they’re going to lose their opportunity.

Which is why Obama and the rest are in a big damn hurry about it.

The best move for Republicans here is to stall for as long as possible.  Time will eventually kill this “stimulus” nonsense.  All our leaders who still care about fiscal responsibility need to do is gum up the works and keep the left from pushing through an emergency spending package that we don’t need nor can afford.