I do have one tax cut problem... is it really $14 a check for a single worker or is that propaganda? Because if it's that small, the tax cut is best left out and kept by the Treasury. It would mean WAY more to the country in aggregate than to any one recipient of the cut.

1. Every department and agency in government is involved, which will energize creativity and commitment all across government.

There will be even more thrills if certain militant extremist Republican governors give us a control group by refusin’ to soil their paws with porculus:

In state after state across the country, cash-starved governors from both parties are anxiously awaiting federal dollars from the stimulus package that Congress passed just last Friday. One governor though who seems less than enthusiastic over receiving such a windfall is Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal. He stated publicly that he would have voted against the federal program, and has suggested he might not take much of the funding that in the coming weeks will become available. Is Jindal posturing to burnish his conservative image nationally?

http://www.bayoubuzz.com/News/Louisiana/Politics/Gov_Jindal_Puts_Louisiana_Legislators_In_Spot_Over_Stimulus_Funding__8407.asp

I find

http://www.star-telegram.com/texas/story/1212448.html

the other guy I had in mind has already apostasised to the Great Satan. Oh, well!

Happy days.

Reed:

You state with genuine clarity:

There hasn't been so much new to hit government in thirty years. At least for a time, the private sector will be breathlessly trying to cope with the utterly new dynamics of our mixed economy.

which is an outcome of the basic Reagan Revolution premise that he coined:

"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."

Of course as Tannehaus's essay attests that entire Right Revolution that consumed the American body politique for the last thirty years was about taking America back to before the New Deal. The issue for them was they never could actually not make government work, the New Deal government that was integrated with everyone's life. The New Deal did not complete its objective where in FDR's eyes was a cradle to grave social contract----this is not Swedish Socialism but it is a simple social contract of the modern industrial-capitalist society. Yet emotionally and philosophically the Right sought to regenerate society and politics in an reconstructionists framework. A past, mythical illusion akin to some foggy Brigadoon fantasy.

But fantasies die quickly when the realities of everyday crisis's are forefront and hostile to families and individuals. Governance must find a new sense of a contract with its citizens beyond the throws of the Cultural War that has held us hostage since 1968. Maybe in part the generation that saved the world from Fascism is now dying off each day or maybe it is that laissez faire economics finally came home to roost or all of the above but government needs act.

Here in the town that your able bodied son toiled politically the primary economic issue is not the unskilled who are long term unemployed---it is the college educated, professional level who is now stuck without a future or services. Here the ravages of anti-tax at its zenith have stripped the government to where even the County Clerk is found automatically transfer basic phone inquiries to other departments because he has had to lay off staff to the level of 1997---meaning there is no service at all. (By the way you did well with Nate!)

No government must grow beyond the ideas of a partisan fight whether it is the problem or solution and develop a social partnership of sustainable long standing solutions to real problems.

It the unapologetic ignorant ideologues of the past can't find a way to be part of the solution, let society build on their obsolescence like every age has beforehand.

Having been a former business owner and entrepreneur I know how breathless private industry can be trying to adjust and cope. Private industry needs stability and predictability, which will not be part of the global and US world for some time. Surviving will be thriving in a big sense, but understand that when I do the simple math that the asset values of our nation's wealth is now discounted a minimum of 1/5th and economic GDP activity will possibly erode by a minimum of a $1T where globally the the erosion could be as much as $3-5T this will be transformational in its own right, for one the $dollar goes much farther abroad than here so there will be a multiplier of misery and demand.

So don't rely on private industry to actually do much of the pulling, it might do some of the pushing but until real solutions are found and the place stabilizes there will be a lot of surviving.

I keep getting this terrible feeling that economists who are putting this 'stuff' together are really flying blind, which supports the argument that an economist is a guy who can't tell you tomorrow why what he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

One day we're heading into deflation - people are holding off purchasing large ticket items waiting for prices to come down further. The next day wholesale prices have inflated by 0.8 percent. So are we experiencing inflation or deflation.

And then there are the convoluted pro and con arguments coming from politicians and jounalists on the stimulus package and its baggage. George Will disses Rep Slaughter, "She is not the first politician to desire prosperity for the people so that they could be more bountiful taxpayers." Then another Republican is dissing the cap on CEO etc. salaries if their corporations have received bailout money. His argument is that bountiful pay means bountiful taxes and now is not the time to deprive the IRS of funds. Anyone notice a slight contradiction here?