There are the usual big spending programs aimed at permanently expanding the size and scope of the government. They include $4 billion for job-training programs, $1 billion for the Census Bureau and $4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which already has more money than it knows how to spend). And the bill aims to expand the Energy Department and the Education Department, when a better approach would be to shutter both.

All this has been sadly predictable for years.

In 2003, for example, The New York Times magazine did a feature story on the Center for American Progress, a new “think tank” founded by former Clinton aide John Podesta. The group was supposed to develop liberal -- or as they prefer to call them, “progressive” -- policy prescriptions. “We’ve got to fill the intellectual pail a little,” Podesta told reporter Matt Bai.

The CAP turned out to be a marketing machine, not an idea factory. It focused on attacking President Bush (mission accomplished) and ignored the work of developing big liberal ideas. So today, to judge by this bill, there still aren’t any.

Look at it this way: Obama’s correct that people voted for “change.”

But imagine if he’d told us that that his first action would be to ram through a $1 trillion spending bill. Would people have supported that “change?” Would senators such as Mark Warner of Virginia been elected if they’d admitted that ramming through an unprecedented level of deficit spending would be their first action? It’s doubtful, at best.

The country needs a change -- smaller government and a growing economy. The current stimulus bill, however, would only take us in the wrong direction.