Joe Klein praising Irwin Stelzer on his article in the Weekly Standard praising the general outlines of the stimulus package.

“Stelzer makes this point: if the Republicans really must exercise their reflexive political impulses, it’s best not to tinker around the edges with their criticism. They should provide a supple alternative. What would a full-blooded conservative stimulus plan look like? Go on, John McCain and John Boehner, make my day.”

Ok, I’m not John McCain, but let me ask Joe and other liberals, “Do we need a stimulus package”? Forget the entirety of Stelzer argument and Kleins is that if Government doesn’t do something we shall all be destroyed.

But will we?

First Setlzer is an economist who lives in socialist London and writes mostly for the Sunday Times UK. That said, his points are well taken on Obama’s stimulus, but again only from the stand that Government is the answer/solution to our current crisis.

And not that Setlzer is all praise either. Klein fails to get the joke which is contained at the end of the article.

“There you have it. Spend now, cut taxes now, and run deficits now. Build stuff that has a positive social value. Maintain faith in the currency by brokering a grand bargain to bring entitlement spending and therefore post-recession deficits under control. At the right time, call in all that extra cash that is sloshing around, thereby preventing inflation. And all will be well in this best of all possible worlds.

That, at least, is the theory of the Obama brain trust. But if hyper-spending by government freezes out at as much or more private-sector investment; if consumers, seeing tax increases in their future, rein in spending even more; if the government cannot impose its cost-benefit test on politically directed infrastructure spending–then Obama will not have kept his head when conservatives about him lost theirs.

Obama might have it wrong, just as many of his critics say Franklin Roosevelt had it wrong. But nitpicking around the edges of this recovery program won’t be enough either to derail or to lay the basis for a “we told you so” campaign in 2010 or 2012. That will take a coherent counter-proposal.”

In othewords, let’s spin the wheel on America’s financial future and see what happens?

Again, why?

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