Bailout Fatigue

One good thing about having been off for a week and a half getting my flooring redone is that I'm without a TV at the office and unable to watch the news shows (there being a dearth of anything else worth watching during the daytime) and having to listen to talking heads go on and on about the Economic Stimulus Package (the ESP, for short). It's getting uglier by the minute, at least according to the talking heads on all the various channels.

I'm just a poorly paid prosecutor, so I really don't understand all this mess other than it seems the Dems want to spend lots of money we don't really have and the Big Elephants would rather see rioting in the streets and the collapse of our economy rather than see Obama "win" one. It's gotten so bad that Andy Card, W's former Chief of Staff, was whining on Fox News about how shameful it is that Obama (gasp!) ISN'T WEARING A JACKET IN THE OVAL OFFICE! A sure sign of the decline of our society; terrorists and Vlad Putin saw that and, I'm sure, have been emboldened to test our young President even further.

While I don't necessarily like ALL the pork that the House Dems put into the ESP, I think Obama was right the other day to rather laughingly say, "You know, it IS a stimulus package; you HAVE to spend money to have a stimulus, don't you?". Lord knows we've got enough crappy roads and bridges, enough lousy schools and other programs that have been laid waste these last eight years, to warrant the spending on them to help things out a bit. The Big Elephant answer is, of course, to cut taxes, cut taxes and, yes, cut taxes. That'll get things moving...oh, wait...that's what they've been doing over the last few years which didn't exactly help our infrastructure much, isn't it?

I think any tax cuts or rebates will simply be put into savings and not spent on fripperies like new kitchens and flooring (as I've been doing lately) to help the economy. The high end of the tax base needs another tax cut like I need another chin and the middle to lower end of the base need something more than a cut--they need jobs and cannot wait for the Big Elephant dream of everything trickling down to help them.

Me? I've done my part to stimulate the economy; I'm waiting for everyone else to get off their butts.