Stimulus or Stimuless?

This started off as a political blog, a place to pontificate endlessly about what I thought was the best approach to governance. I used to write about all things political. You could name a topic and I could knock out 700 words for or against it barely breaking a sweat. However, I see by the last election that my efforts were in vain and the people did what they do best, they screwed up. They elected a ‘know nothing’ as President of the United States and leader of what’s left of the free world. I say “they” because I didn’t vote for the guy.

Barack Obama is a community activist who last week said with a straight face that business people should not count on making profits. And the fact that he didn’t get laughed off the world stage tells me we are in trouble not only as a country but perhaps as a species. Not only did people not laugh, as a matter of fact, a good number of people swooned in his presence and marveled at his brilliance. I am here to tell you that the economic downturn is the least of our worries. To paraphrase the comedian Ron White, ‘you can fix the economy, but you can’t fix stupid.’

So, instead of the daily dose of dazzling political commentary I have posted some of my recent literary efforts as I try and break into the author business. My timing could have been better as I see in the news where a lot of literary agencies are going out of business and the publishing houses are laying off editors in droves…the very people I want to send my work to. That is why I felt okay putting some of my writings on this blog. It isn’t as though it was all down at the printers being made into books.

I do have political opinions about current events. It’s just that I am having a problem stretching, “I think the stimulus package won’t stimulate” into 700 words. I could go into what constitutes economic stimulus and how most of the stuff in the awkwardly misnamed stimulus bill won’t stimulate anything other than the deficit this year and the national debt for years to come. As a matter of fact, it would seem to me that if you have properly identified the problem as a downturn in the national economy, in order to fix it, you would be looking for ways to not spend $900 billion instead of way to spend it. Usually when I have personal economic problems the first thing to cross my mind isn’t to borrow as much money as I can and spend it on stuff that I can’t use for 4 to 6 years out. That would be dumb.

I think it is interesting when some Republican points out just how moronic this new bill is, the answer they get from the Democrats is that Bush did the same thing with his economic stimulus bill. I had always thought that our mothers had taught us the lesson about “if George jumped off a cliff, I guess you would too” when we were little kids. I agree that the only thing worse than getting ready to spend $900 billion in borrowed money is having already spent $750 billion in previously borrowed money. But the fact that we did it is not an argument for doing it again only bigger. It is as though we are not doing the dumb thing George did only because our cliff is higher.

So I will use this blog as a place to put my attempts at literature and occasionally pipe up and point out something really dumb the government is doing. Unfortunately the people have elected the government. So I have to be careful what I say about the people if I ever want to be a bestselling author of serious literature. While the people who would appreciate my literary musings are generally smart people, this last election shows that their numbers are waning. Plus, if the stimulus bill does what it appears to be designed to do, most smart people would do well to save their money for food and heat and forgo books. If course when the heat goes off because it is environmentally taboo to burn fossil fuels, books might prove a pretty good source of fireplace fuel once the lawn furniture is gone.