One of the ways I keep track of dubya's christian college administration crusade against science and scientists is through University of Maryland Physics professor Bob Park's weekly newsletter. It comes to me via e-mail every Friday, but I just discovered (by...duh!...clicking on the link at the bottom) that it's also available on the intertoobz. So Bob Park goes immediately into my sidebar favorites list. Here's the first item on his list for this week:

1. STIMULUS: HOW COME NOBODY THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE?
In case you didn’t notice, your 401k is shrinking. Don’t worry – President Bush has a plan: send a check to every family in America. People are supposed to spend it on the shoddy merchandise they didn’t buy at Christmas. Where is the money coming from? From taxes we paid to end Iraq’s WMD program. It worked perfectly; there is not a WMD to be found in Iraq. No one could think of anything except war to spend the stimulus money on (like maybe health insurance for children, or fusion energy, or the International Linear Collider) so Congress agreed to the President’s plan to write everyone a check. After decades of public-service announcements telling people to save, we can now expect to be told the opposite. So much for the laws of economics. The program would be more environmentally friendly if they cut out the middleman. Instead of every family, send checks to every business. Operating on a government subsidy would free business from the need to produce more useless crap to sell.

That's good stuff, innit? I've been doinking around for a few days now trying to write a post on this so-called stimulus package. I started with a simple logic exercise, trying to reason how injecting an extra Christmas shopping season into consumption-crazy America's retail year will somehow rescue an economy that has for years been riding an artificial high created wholly from extensive borrowing by the American people and insane, deficit spending by their government. I've not had much luck connecting those dots. This childishly simplistic and naive plan seems to go something like this:

1) Borrow money from the Chinese to send out checks to millions of Americans and encourage them to spend their way out of the problems caused by all their previous excessive spending.
2) Magic happens, millions of upside-down mortgages right themselves, foreclosures and bank losses disappear as the economy stops circling the bowl, and dubya rides off into the trickle-down economics sunset.

This is dubya once again doing what he does best—nothing. Kicking the problem down the road to the next administration, all the while claiming to have fixed it. Over at No Comment, in a post titled How Bush's Fiscal Mismanagement Created A Recession, Scott Horton reaches the same conclusion:

But the cute fix is just what President Bush has in mind. He wants to mail out checks to a large stratum of the economy in a move designed to bolster consumer spending. Economists are anything but agreed that it will serve this end. Much more likely, it will simply magnify the already devastating treasury deficit, which is a key part of the current problem.
Bush doesn’t really intend to do anything to avoid the recession. He is aiming to push it back a few months in an effort to create the public impression that the recession will be the responsibility of his successor.

I'm sure the right-wing noise machine is already at work, finding ways to blame our collapsing economy on the Clenis and/or our next president, but in the end dubya is going to have to wear this one. I'm betting this will eventually rival the invasion of Iraq as dubya's biggest failure, regardless of his efforts to pass the buck.

The flurry of retail economic activity created by this stimulus package will, I'm sure, provide some bogus numbers for officials to point to as a sign of progress, but like a flock of starlings that swarms into the air, spinning and churning and whirling like smoke from a chimney, those numbers must settle back to earth. Then what?