Whether you’re a capitalist or a socialist, you can’t avoid “opportunity cost.” If we had instead spent $800 billion on nuclear reactors we could have more than doubled the contribution of nuclear to the US electricity supply from 20% to over 40% … maybe then we’d have the juice to fuel those electric cars Obama wants us to drive.

Here’s a question for the group: Did Obama get rolled by Pelosi – Reid, or did he get exactly what he wanted? I believe the latter, and that Obama is clever and Machiavellian. He’s no Bambi. The Stimulus Bill gives Obama a huge war chest to act the role of a profligate big city mayor, but with his own dollar bill printing press. Much of this money will bailout states and cities … expect a heavy political hand in how it’s distributed. Favored states won’t have to worry anymore about balancing their books. Obama will give them the funds so they can keep increasing their spending.

The current recession will likely be over by the end of this year — unless our big banks are totally toast — so Obama can use funds from the Stimulus Bill to “make it rain” for favored constituencies going into the 2010 elections. If the economy doesn’t totally suck in 2010, the Democrats will retain control, and be positioned to do even more damage.

We can’t trust the Democrats in control of House, Senate and White House … but neither could we trust the Republicans. The Prescription Drug Benefit was actually bigger than the Stimulus Bill by some measures, just to name one thing. There are literally something like 200 House Republicans who voted for the Prescription Drug Benefit who are still in Congress … but now say they are indignant about the Stimulus Bill. Both parties are the enemy of our future, I’m convinced.

A question for Mercy Vestel: I tried aligning myself with “the backward religious types” but we got a dysfunctional party happy to support a buffoon in the White House. The Republicans didn’t deliver, and in fact accelerated the trend of fiscal profligacy. Obama & Co has just seen that bid and wants to “go all in.”

We need to put a lid on the growth of federal government in all ways. That’s the small “l” libertarian answer. Unless we do the federal government will suck up more and more of the annual pie … and will only be stupid and political about how it distributes it. Most voters won’t care … and will even embrace this … so long as they’re getting some kind of check from the government. Because economic growth is almost entirely driven by the private sector … which will be starved for investment resources … growth will be anemic at best. Without growth, future social spending commitments will be even more unsustainable.

The potential crisis from this stretches out later than 2010. As a rich nation we can afford to make a few trillion dollar mistakes … but we can’t make it an annual habit. Much of the Stimulus Bill is set-up to be recurring, so expect future versions of it … and annual trillion dollar deficits to continue. This is unsustainable, but I’m not sure of exactly how and when it will break down.

As a nation we’ve dealt with worse. But this daunting … and to me, maddening … as it’s mostly self-inflicted.

Per our Constitution, we’re supposed to have a limited federal government. We now have anything but. That big sucking sound you’re hearing is money and power being vacuumed into DC from the rest of the country.

The more that power and money go to DC, the less accountable it is. I actually think my town government isn’t bad. The voters have recently twice turned down bond approvals for school fields because the school board had larded it up too much. We even had a tie vote for mayor in 2005, so my vote actually counted!

If we’re going to have a tyranny in DC, I’d prefer to be ruled by the Chinese Communist rulers than our own. Our rulers make dumb, short-sighted decisions … Republicans and Democrats both … the Chinese leaders at least are smart and have vision.

Three weeks into total Democrat control and we’ve already blown the entire cost of the Vietnam War (inflation adjusted real dollars), the entire cost of Iraq war, three years of Bush era deficits. We’ve got credible attempts at protectionism, boosts for trial lawyers and the sort of big labor support policies that put the Great in the Great Depression.

We’ve got the return of welfare as we know it, the continuance of corporate welfare in the guise of energy policy and by the way, no plans to cut a single dime of the spending that happened in the last eight years, unless you count tax cuts as spending.

Basically, we have Bush policies plus an addition 10% of GDP consumed by the federal government, but I’m suppose I’m only looking at the negative side. At least now we don’t have to worry about those crazy folks on the religious right ending taxpayer funding for stem cell research or taxpayer funding of abortion in the third world.

I hope all of you big government libertarians are getting a lot of cocktail party mileage out of your pristine ideological purity that allows you to avoid aligning yourself with those backwards religious types and to stay above the fray with cute lines about Coke and Pepsi, because it’s really screwing up the country.

-Mercy

You might want to look into Popular Mechanics observations on “shovel ready” projects which I wrote abouthere.

The Mayor’s List for Fort Wayne were as Nobrainer suspected . . . prokects rejected by local voters.

On an entirely different matter, you may enjoy my latest post on a wee inconsistency between Marxian economics and Marxist ethical critique.