Unstimulating Stimulus

The more I read, the more confused I get. The Washington Post says Mr. Obama can claim a victory because the final stimulus package is $14 billion more than he originally asked for. The New York Times says he made great sacrifices in the package in a “futile pursuit of bipartisanship”, and that he’ll almost certainly need to come back to Congress asking for more.

So which is it? Did he win or did he lose? It doesn’t really matter, of course, because we all lose. An 1100 page bill, which no one single person ever read before it was passed, can not possibly make any coherent sense in anybody’s universe. It can only be a hodge podge of unrelated things in which every congressman and his uncle tries to get some piece of the pie. It doesn’t matter how many trillions of dollars the government spends, it won’t do one bit of good if it doesn’t provide any incentive for people to invest in anything. In other words, a stimulus package that doesn’t stimulate cannot succeed.