John Cole linked to perhaps the stupidest blogpost of all time (so stupid I can't even link to it in good conscience) ... but THAT blog pointed to the latest offering by Hooverian Walter E. Williams and highlighted this little piece of wisdom:
In stimulus package language, if Congress taxes to hand out money, one person is stimulated at the expense of another, who pays the tax and is unstimulated. A visual representation of the stimulus package is: Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper. You would deem him stupid. That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new President proposes for the economy.
My first inclination was to mock Williams once again ... then I put on my chemical engineers hat on, and was impressed by the wisdom of his analogy, if not his conclusions.
A perfect case of ideology blinding someone to wisdom that's right in front of them.
Now, it's not perfect. $800 billion isn't like buckets of water - it's like putting a major suction in one end of a pool, running the water through a large pump, and spraying it into the other end of the pool through a firehose.
Why? Because the idiots who rented your house for the last 8 years told everyone they'd be saving money by turning off the pumps and letting the water mix naturally. If they ever added any fresh water, they just poured it gently on the surface to avoid it mixing too deep. As a result, it's green, it's nasty, it's stagnant - and left on its own it's only getting worse. Have you ever heard of stratification? Of a thermocline? Of eutrophication? I'm sure that Bush hasn't, because those are science, and science gets in the way of one's core beliefs. But suffice it to say - the water at the shallow end will sit nice and warm on the top ... the bottom water in the deep end will get colder and denser and stay at the bottom ... and whole thing will turn into a foul mess that nobody in their right mind would try swimming it. Amoebic dysentery, anyone?
At that point, you have two options - drain the whole damn thing and put in fresh water, or circulate the water at a lot faster rate than the pools own pumps can do so, while dosing liberally with chlorine, and hope for the best.
That's what this stimulus bill is. Just turning on the regular recirc pumps on won't do it - the ooze threatens to clog your filters and render the mechanics unworkable. You got to take drastic action to get oxygen circulated to the bottom layer, and to disinfect the top layer, and even if you're successful there's gonna be a lot of work left scooping out the sediment before the pool is "healthy" again.
Isn't it time that everyone who talks about more tax cuts as a solution just be laughed out of the building?