A regular contributor to ND offers his thoughts on the recent stimulus package.


A few months ago, before the election, I said that the party on the outside usually gins up some scary scenario that tells the voters that if they don’t get elected, plagues, locusts and door-to-door salesmen will descend upon them. It seemed to work pretty well this time, thanks to the fact that fully half of the population is intellectually below average. All they had to do was convince a few percent to vote their way, and they’re in. It worked. We voted for change, and boy-howdy, we’ve got it. As soon as our new president was coronated – oops, I mean inaugurated – he turned the development of an economic stimulus over to an ex-hippie from San Francisco. Those kind of people always have made me nervous, ever since I stopped by a commune one time, and they told me that they were sharing toilet paper for the common good.

I got to wondering just how much money they were going to spend. For a hand that has to go over a 2,000-foot pipe tally three times, just to be sure, I found out it was a lot more money than most of us can imagine. For instance: If they spent 1 million dollars a day since the day Jesus was born, they still wouldn’t be done – that seems like a lot of stimulating.

Next, I wondered where they are going to get the money. Turns out that one of the few places hiring right now is the outfit that prints money. They’re running 24/7, and because my grandson is only a year old and can’t vote out these grifters, they put it on his tab.

All this made me a mite nervous, so I called Washington to find out if anybody could convince me that this deal was really a good idea. I got ahold of a junior assistant staffer in the basement of some troll’s office. He explained, in glowing terms, that this was all very complex, for the good of the whole country, blah, blah, blah, and I should trust them to do their best. I wouldn’t trust him to oil the chain on the bicycle I’ll probably soon be riding to work. After I asked him if there were any adults there I could talk to, he hung up on me. So much for responsive government.

Since our leaders can’t or won’t tell me what they are going to do with all that money, other than stimulate big government, I decide to do my own due diligence. The actual numbers are pretty murky, and vary all over the map, but I did find some interesting tidbits in this plan:
  • Millions and millions to save some mouse in San Francisco. What does this stimulate, cats?

  • Millions and millions for the National Endowment for the Arts. This, no doubt, will go to some painter who couldn’t paint “See Rock City” on the side of my barn.

  • Millions and millions to buy condoms. At least this is stimulation I can understand.
All this money-spending came about in such a rush that Congress didn’t even have time to read it, let alone understand it, in the name of “Hurry! The sky is falling.” But they passed it anyway. Being such an emergency and all, the president waited four days to sign it, using the Rocky Mountains as a back-drop, which, no doubt, represented the towering national debt. This is the guy who campaigned against his opponent by pointing out that our last administration ran up a $1 trillion dollar debt in 8 years. He tacked on another trillion in just 3 weeks. Now there’s government efficiency for ya.

Now a few other plans are starting to peek out from below one of the richest piles of fertilizer I’ve smelled in a while: They’re talking about nationalizing the banks. They want to computerize and centralize our health-care records – this on the way to nationalized health care. Anyone who was semi-conscious during civics class in the seventh grade knows this is called socialism. Even Vladimir Putin knows this and advised the current administration, “Don’t do it, look what it did to us.” This guy knows it didn’t work there, and it won’t work here.

Since I’m pretty much an optimist, I’ve been trying to find a bright side to all this stimulus. I continuously am reassured that we are going to fix the infrastructure. This means roads, bridges, things we all use in common, and I think it might even trickle down to some of our cities being able to have someone else pay for a new well or two. If so, we’ll get some work, paid for by people who probably never will drink the water. Oh, well, we’ll get to pay for whatever pet project they’ve dreamed up, after Washington siphons off a good chunk.

I’ve heard that times are so dire that some counties and municipalities may have to lay off some workers. I have decided to produce and sell to the government a solution for its labor problems. Since they probably will lay off the people who actually are doing the work, I’ve invented a device that will hold up a shovel, unaided, to free up a lot of the shovel-holders I see up and down the road. It will be a small, economical, wire bracket that I think I can market to the government for, say, $499.95 each. They can store it with the $200 hammers and the $800 toilet seats.

If times get even worse, and government has to lay off some of those people who sit before computers, confounding my existence, I will produce a bracket that holds a cup of coffee and a donut. Because this product is for middle management, it will cost more, say $1,249.95 each.

I already can see light at the end of the tunnel.

By the way, whoisJohn Galt? 
ND