We need a new, bigger stimulus plan. Fast. Congress ought not think too hard about it. Or read it. Or put it up online, for goodness sake. Just cobble together another 1,000 — or even 2,000 — pages, with lots of spending and thus lots of jobs created. And if this stimulus doesn’t work? “We have a responsibility to act,” President Obama argued in the face of news the unemployment rate jumped a half percentage point in February to 8.1 nationally. “It’s premature to say we need another stimulus,” offers Mark Zandi at Moody’s Economic.com, an advisor to Democrats, “but the economy is performing much worse than when [the $787 billion stimulus legislation] was signed, and the odds are increasing that we’ll need a bigger policy response.”  Zandi adds that policy has thus far been a step behind the recession. “It’s important to get a step ahead.” Indeed. Most of all, if this new, bigger stimulus doesn’t work, we must stay the course, ready to enact an even newer, even bigger one. How big? Big enough. “I don’t know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be a big number,” said Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama's favored economic advisers. The first stimulus was big, of course. Huge — as the next stimulus shall be, because as Goolsbee put it, “The point is to, kind of, get people back on track and startle the thing into submission.” Quiet, please. Our leaders are urgently working to “fix” our economy. Who knows how many trillions they will need to borrow or print or confiscate from you, and then spend as only they know how, to provide the precise proddings of stimuli to “get the money where it’s needed.” Are you out shopping yet? The one thing we know for certain is that we cannot just do nothing. Some might call this an economic “correction.” Well, we cannot allow ourselves to be corrected. If we don’t act forcibly to “shock” the economy, wrote the president before the his first stimulus, “Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Continued... |