Escape From D.C.

That President Obama waited until Tuesday to sign the $787 billion stimulus bill during a trip to Denver speaks volumes. He wanted to highlight the bill's green provisions, not its "stimulus." It's strange that so few mainstream media outlets have pointed out the obvious: The bill Congress hurried to pass late last week without anyone having read the entire 1,434 pages will in fact not stimulate much of anything. It is a spending bill, pure and simple. Every dollar the government spends must either be borrowed, taken through taxation or printed. Any way you look at it, every dollar comes from the pockets of the people it will be spent on. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had this to say: "In the longer run, the legislation would result in a slight decrease in gross domestic product compared with CBO's baseline economic forecast." Get that? The economy, under this plan, will be smaller than it would have been, while adding $1.7 trillion to our deficits. Obama said there was "no disagreement" over the need for stimulus. In response, more than 200 economists, including several Nobel Prize winners, took out a newspaper ad saying: "With all due respect, Mr. President . . . we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance." Just as with global warming, it's a non-consensus consensus...IBD