Stimulate Me!

The Stimulus Package, so called because it stimulates Republicans to utter even more absurd statements than usual, has now been well and truly emasculated, so it's vote-ready in the Senate, and will be improved out of all recognizeability in a soon-to-appear-in-a-cable-teevee-show-near-you House-Senate Conference. The part that most stimulates me is the part where I can get a tax break for buying a new car! Any reasonable person, looking at the cars passing by on the street, might well conclude that there's already enough cars to go around. In fact there are More Cars in the United States today than there are people licensed to drive them. Therefore, what we need is more cars... It's the same reasoning as the tax break intended to increase Home Ownership, only different.
The way the Stimulus Bill has been bashed and bent seems like a rather desperate attempt to stem the changes already well underway, caused by the impossibility of continuing to endlessly increase the overconsumption of finite resources. It contains lots and lots of provisions to "Restore The Economy" to the status quo ante - rampant overconsumption fuelled by increasing debt. This is what is known as "Wealth Creation". All based on the twin ideas that the Rich Don't Have Enough Money, while the Poor Don't Have Enough Debt. That radical-liberal idea of a Green Economy has been summarily tossed overboard it seems. Future Fear has won out. Business Will Be As Usual 'Til Further Notice it seems. One had briefly hoped that rather than "Limiting Government", we might have set about "Limiting Consumption". Maybe Next Time.