Stimulus vote today?

Presumably, we'll be saddled with an additional $900b debt, of which only a tiny fraction will be able to make up for the decrease in consumer spending, and a still smaller fraction of that going towards the infrastructure development the country will so definitely need to grow out of this.

If I were an advisor to Obama, I'd have him call a joint session of Congress to have two economic teams, conservative and liberal, Hayekian and Keynesian, battle it out. Each side would elect a leader, who would be able to give a 45 minute PowerPoint presentation, replete with graphs and pie charts and other visual aids, to promote their vision of what is the best interest of the United States based on their own doctrinal vision. A theoretical primer, if you will.

After the presentations, packets containing each team's proposals, based on real world figures, would be presented to the Senate to include, exclude, and modify into a real stimulus bill.

THAT is goddamn compromise.

I'm convinced that most of Congress has no fucking idea what's going on. The stimulus is purely political. This is the crux of the problem, thus, why we're spending so much money on things that will not fucking do anything, even in theory, to promote economic growth. They don't know how to do it, because they don't understand economics. They're just throwing money at the problem, to make the bill "big enough," and calling it a day. Political bullshit at its finest, and ultimately, its most countereffectual, which is the same thing.