Note that President Obama doesn't even pay lip service to making his interventionist plans short-lived. And by their terms, it's impossible they could be. This is an effort to restructure our economy radically toward the type of command and control model that has accompanied tyrannical regimes throughout history.

Nor does Mr. Obama express the slightest concern that his plan would further expand the national debt. Indeed, Democrats have suddenly developed permanent amnesia about their professed budget concerns, whose primary usefulness (as weapons against President George W. Bush) expired along with the Bush term.

To accept that deficits and debt were high on their priority list would require us to believe they'd fundamentally changed their age-old tax-and-spend philosophy and to ignore their persistent obstruction of entitlement reform. The Clinton budgets are no rebuttal. Clinton had to be dragged kicking and screaming to fiscal restraint by the Gingrich Congress.

Everyone knows government doesn't have the money -- even through tax receipts -- to fund this bill. Other than defense spending, which Obama unwisely plans to cut drastically in this time of war, Obama has no intention of substantially cutting other expenditures. Even if the bill as presently configured succeeds in jump-starting the economy, there will eventually be a day of reckoning over our increasingly unmanageable national debt.

If only government-planning liberals would be honest and admit they believe their ideas on how to spend the people's money are morally superior to those of the American people as expressed through the free market. Then, instead of dealing with the smoke and mirrors of the bill's proponents, we could point to world history to demonstrate conclusively that despite the sometimes-best intentions of social planners, command and control economies have only spread misery and never worked to produce the kind of prosperity that is only possible in a free market.

Unless this bill is dramatically overhauled, the Senate, instead of trying to massage it toward passage in allegiance to the seductive but dangerous goals of bipartisanship or just getting something done, should reject it outright.