Dan Gainor
2008-01-29 08:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Today’s word is “stimulus.” Government wants to spend $150 billion to keep the economy out of a recession that not everyone even agrees is likely. It’s an election year; it doesn’t have to make sense. Politicos hope the package will boost the economy. Call it stim-elation.

Washington wants to wait till June to give taxpayers/voters $600 checks hoping that we won’t throw the rascals out of office. (How could we? What other choices do we have?) Not everybody gets a check — only those making less than $75,000 a year. So it’s a stim-some-of-us package. Anybody who makes just a tad too much or more ends up paying for everybody else. (Under current versions of the plan, people who make between $75,000 and $87,000 get a partial rebate.)

You’re stimulated if you live in Mississippi with a median income of just $34,473 (2007 numbers). But it’s a rip-off for Marylanders whose state median income is nearly twice that at $65,144. In other words, the median household income for the Formerly Free State is nearly the cutoff point for the stim-somebody-else package.

This bipartisan package tries to spend our way out of fears of a recession. It’s like a guy who fears he might be drowning and decides to drink the ocean. It might work, but it’s a good bet that the ocean is bigger than his mouth or that even of a D.C. politician.

But we all love the stimulus package because we might get some money back from Uncle Sugar. Politicians hope those who get checks will spend, spend, spend till our daddy takes our credit cards away. Then, after the election, they can tax us into oblivion and hit reset.

It’s one of those ideas where everybody agrees — except for lots of people who really know economics. Economists — on the left and the right — point out flaws in the plan. But politicians are more concerned about politics than economics.

And too many ordinary folks continue to bury themselves so deep in debt that any handout today looks better than nothing. The Los Angeles Times profiled one such couple where the guy is $54,000 in debt and “each month, he spends nearly $2,000 more than he earns.”

“I’m at my wits’ end,” said the man. That much is obvious. His wits ended when he started spending more than he makes. But he’s living in the now. Until recently, you could find him going out to dinner or on vacation on the boat he partially owns.

He is a metaphor for our government. No one wants to admit we overspend — in Maryland and nationwide. No one wants to admit that none of us saves enough. No one wants to admit that some people simply got greedy and overborrowed or businesses overloaned.

Now no one wants to take responsibility. So government must bail them out by rapidly lowering interest rates and sending out checks — delaying the pain to another day.

That doesn’t stimulate results; it simulates them.

Dan Gainor can be seen each week on Thursday afternoons on the new Fox Business Network. He is the T. Boone Pickens fellow at the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute, a career journalist and media commentator. He can be reached at gainorcolumn@gmail.com