A Republican’s version of economic stimulus is to take a fat wad of bills out of the right-hand pants pocket and shove it into the left-hand pants pocket while drooling.
(If you recognize that last paragraph as a polite euphemism for autoerotic economic stimulation, please don’t tell anybody.)
George Bush’s idea of a rescue package is for Daddy and his friends to save him from military service, bankruptcy, or jail. After all, he’s not some undeserving welfare cheater is he? Is he?
So it’s no surprise that the Republican idea of a stimulus and rescue package would do little to stimulate the economy and nothing to rescue the folks who most need help.
What is surprising is how timidly the congressional Democrats caved in to this twisted distortion of what they had promised to do. No increase in food stamps (Both Bernanke and the Congressional Budget Office liked that idea – real help, and real stimulus). No extension of unemployment insurance. No help for people facing foreclosure or unable to pay skyrocketing fuel and heating bills. No aid for strapped state governments to save people’s jobs and create new ones. No job-creating acceleration of public works projects, desperately needed with or without a recession to repair our decrepit bridges, electrical grids, water and sewer systems.
Just trifling rebates, and most of that to people who don’t really need it and won’t spend any more because of it.
It’s small and bitter consolation, but the result may well be a truly miserable recession which, by November, will stimulate voters to throw Republicans out of office by the reeking, oinking carload.
Cross posted from The Horse You Rode In On