Well, it's done and President Obama's stimulus package is finally a fait accompli, but in its current form, I'm none too happy about it. Yes, there's talk about coming back to take another bite at this apple soon enough, so some or all of my concerns may be rendered moot, but the fine print on this thing leaves something to be desired, at least in my estimation. For one, I think the infrastructure aspect of it is far too meager. I also believe a we choose to put a man on the moon in this decade sort of speech was in order. And in keeping with that, I think the President has failed to frame his goals within an overarching vision, one that says, as part of our long range economic goals, we intend to get this country out of debt. It took us twenty years to create this untenable debt burden, beginning ironically enough when Reagan cooked up his'86 Bush-like tax boondoggle for the rich. It is not unreasonable to think our society could extricate itself from this mess in a similar amount of time. It is unthinkable to me that we wouldn't try. It is unforgiveable that the rich wouldn't be willing to pay their fair share. Lopping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% is about all you need to know about the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer over the last twenty years.

Back to the stimulus package, I would like to address my reasoning about the infrastructure issue first off. In 1991, the last time our economy tanked on this devastating level, I was forced through hard times to relocate from LA to Seattle. Everything in my life had fallen to pieces. I had lost two homes and arrived in Seattle the day before Halloween, only to be greeted by an eighty mile an hour wind storm. As I waited for the roof of my final piece of property to spin off into the Puget Sound, I thought, maybe I should have planned this out a little better. You know, show up in the spring, when the weather and general conditions are a bit more welcoming? Given the economic devastation I had just experienced in California, it seemed like a lousy idea to be pulling into town with winter bearing down. However, I soon learned the state of Washington had invested $4 billion dollars in an infrastructure stimulus plan and the effect on the state was nothing short of miraculous. Everywhere you went, there were huge public works in progress, bridges going up, water works, that sort of thing. The city of Seattle was a beehive of activity. In contrast, when I went down south for the holidays the following year, it was like a neutron bomb had gone off. An entire region seemed to have been abandoned. What people were left walking around had fear in their eyes.

To put the 1992 Washington state stimulus plan into perspective, it equated to roughly two thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the state. Extrapolate those figures onto a national level and we're talking $650 billion dollars for infrastructure alone. Oddly enough, I heard Paul Krugman making a point along these very lines on a talking head show a few weeks back, asserting that there were no magical powers ascribed to wars for ending depressions. Roosevelt could have easily ended the Great Depression before World War II. It was all a matter of scope and will. Once the federal government felt compelled to invest sufficient funds, the Great Depression disappeared. When queried how much Krugman thought was necessary in the present case for an infrastructure investment alone, he suggested somewhere between $600 and $800 billion. My point exactly.

Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, President Obama and his team have muddied the water by lumping together what are now those famous "shovel ready" infrastructure projects with a plethora of other budgetary concerns, opening their flank up to what would otherwise be shameless Republican archery fire. Consider the Republican's facing a straight $600, $700 billion infrastructure package, with a plan to build bridges, roads, schools and hospitals. It would have put the right wing's feet to the fire and forced them to show their true colors. Instead, Obama has given them a chance to frame his stimulus plan as just one more ho hum pork barrel bill, and the polls tell the story. The President remains enormously popular. His bill is not.

Again, part of the problem in my estimation is that President Obama has surrounded himself with men and women whose minds were baked in the same academic mold, in fact some of very Wall Street people who helped get us into this mess in the first place. No one doubts their smarts, but it would seem they are incapable of understanding the mindset of the average Joe and Jane on the street. Simply put, we're never going to fix this mess on paper. As I witnessed in Washington back in the early nineties, when people see public works going up everywhere, when they see the unemployed going to work on a massive scale, a sense of confidence sets in. They go ahead with that home remodel. They buy the new car. They buy the new washer and dryer. That was the difference between Washington and California during that period, and it was stark.

Fast forward to today. People are scared again, and they will not cut loose with their money as long as the fear of everything going south remains. And a $500 rebate check is not going to unlock those apprehensions. We need millions and millions of jobs, on a WPA scale, creating a sense in people's minds that everything's going to be okay. Of course, as Secretary Geithner so aptly pointed out in his news conference on Tuesday, the banks and lending institutions in general must be addressed, and the mortgage meltdown has to be a part of any long term strategy. I only wish Obama had made this first bite strictly about infrastructure investment. I think it would have been a much cleaner bill.

With all that said, I feel the greatest missed opportunity here is a failure to frame this enormous government expenditure within a broader vision. Where are we going with all this, President Obama, I want to ask? How about saying loud and clear, we're going to use this challenge to turn America green in ten years. According to all reliable scientific data, we have roughly that long before the entire world goes over a precipice. Again, this willingness to spend trillions of dollars is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and what better time to marshal our public will towards that end. This is no time to be nibbling around the edges. A great era of technological ingenuity is before us, which lends itself to a once in a lifetime opportunity to rebuild our manufacturing base, which lends itself to providing a viable framework from which to get this country out of debt. It seems to me it's President Obama's responsibility to stir the public's imagination and support on this sort of sweeping level. Rather than allowing this issue to be debated over condoms and sex education, rather than confronting the monumental problems our nation faces piecemeal, rather than erring on the side of caution, I, for one, want Obama to use this opportunity to galvanize our nation as Roosevelt did at the start of World War II. In that instance, the government had Detroit churning out tanks within three months. Why can't we have Detroit churning out 100 MPG vehicles within a year. It seems to me, once we frame the debate in these terms, the Republicans will be left to pitch in, shut up or eat their young.