Your neoliberalism is showing.

Restating in laguage without euphemisms, your options are:

1. Reduce government revenue (most likely necessitating cuts in aid to the poor) to give money to those who already have plenty.

2. Ruin the balances of our entitlement programs in exchange for handing employees a little bit of cash apiece and letting employers clean up hand over fist.

3. Save (admittedly sometimes irresponsible) borrowers from the depredations of unscrupulous lenders.

4. Social security benefits are already not nearly enough to survive on, so let’s shrink them some more for the benefit of affluent bond investors.

5. Who cares about human-caused global warming or the millions of Americans who can’t afford to go to the doctor? Lets not spend anything on them so that the economic climate is better for (already affluent) investors whose machinations caused the very crisis they now complain about…

The only remotely sensible idea is #3. Where were you for past two decades when everyone with more than seven brain cells realized that making the investor class more wealthy neither “trickles down” to everyone else nor improves the economy as a whole? The US tax burden is not too high, it is too low to provide the services citizens need, and it is poorly distributed. Take these other miserable ideas and take a long walk off a short pier.

And all the commenters complaining about a pork-based stimulus, two rebuttals:

1. The main problem with the stimulus was actually its small size, compounded by the pointless $250 billion or so of tax breaks, which meant that the actual pump-priming spending was lessened to the point of only being a drop in the bucket of our economy.

2. During the pointless giveaways of hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the previous administration, where were you? When we spent millions on abstinence-only sex ed (an approach shown to be totally ineffectual) or boondoggle military contracts to KBR and Blackwater (so that their contractors could rape service-women with impunity: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_ id=9342 or http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3 977702&page=1) I didn’t hear a peep from you all, so our current whining strikes me as motivated more by politics than a deep and heartfelt concern for the tenants of democracy…

Clinton inherited an economy that was emerging from the long night of the Cold War. He was also disciplined to a significant degree, and for most of his term, by an opposition party in control of Congress. He did not have the latitude to author fiscal and monetary policy for most of the time he was in offce, and deserves no credit for the economy during his term. Recall that he was the first to use the “worst economy since the Great Depression” formulation, describing an economy that had been recovering since late 1991. Not his worst lie by far, and he does not hold a candle to what the Chicago crowd does every day now, but it was the one that got him into office.

James, did you miss the lessons of the last 16 years?

Clinton’s tax policy did not tank the economy. On the contrary, the longest expansion of the American economy on record. And the deficit disappeared. Bush’s tax cuts, on the other hand, did little to stimulate the economy. Jobless recovery. Stagnant wages.

Although, I do like the do nothing option…