In this year’s predictions entry, I stated that I thought a number of things would jump the shark this year:

Q: Name 3 things that will officially “jump the shark” in 2009:
A: American Idol, Top Chef, Blu-Ray

What I hadn’t figured was that the Federal Government would do it before even Blu-Ray did.

The fact that this stimulus bill is beyond a joke is reflected in the polls, in the behavior of Nancy Pelosi, and in every serious analysis of the bill I’ve seen. Daniel Henninger puts it well today:

Is the bill in Congress now a strong-form stimulus or a weak-form stimulus? If the latter, then it’s a waste of money. Martin Feldstein, an early supporter of stimulus, now says that the bill’s effects are weak and need a redo even if it takes a month or two.

If the Obama team won’t consider this, then why shouldn’t one conclude that their case for stimulus, as Mr. Obama suggested with his famous “stimulus is spending” remark, is indeed the crude cartoon version of Keynes, who suggested digging and refilling holes?

If this is true, that “this detail or that detail” don’t matter, then a number of conclusions follow:

The whole congressional effort is an irrelevant sideshow; only the final spending number matters. The economics don’t matter, because the real political purpose of the bill is to neutralize this issue until the economy recovers on its own. Much of its spending is a massive cash transfer to the party’s union constituencies; a percentage of that cash will flow back into the 2010 congressional races. The bill in great part is a Trojan horse of Democratic policies not related to anyone’s model of economic stimulus. Finally, if this bill’s details are irrelevant to the presumed multiplier effect of an $800 billion Keynesian stimulus, GOP Sen. Susan Collins’s good-faith participation in it looks rather foolish.

That’s the sophisticated way of putting it. The regular guy way is “That’s just blowing money up a wild hog’s ass.” But what strikes me about the wild hog comment, indeed everything I’m seeing in the reactions of nearly everyone around me, is everyone has resigned themselves to it, they don’t give a crap, and they’re planning for life under these weird, new circumstances. So while we watch Fonzarelli Obama prepare to take his magnificent jump across the shark, the country lets out a collective groan, dumps their stock portfolio and tries to change the economic channel as best they can.

For some people that means hunkering down and saving, for others it means buying gold and silver bars to bury in their basement. For others its all out survivalism time. For the economy as a whole, I suspect it means a growth in the black market, the underground economy that doesn’t get reported in to the government, that simply bypasses the whole nutty charade, unlicensed, in cash (whatever form that might take), and away from the capricious and greedy hands of Uncle Sam. After all, when the Secretary of the Treasury can’t be bothered to pay his taxes in full, why the hell should the rest of us, especially when our very savings are being taxed through blatant inflation in order to prop up Blue-State banking interests?

Forget it.

I suppose there’s some possibility that some of the states might want to rebel against this crap. But I suspect we’re witnessing the real beginning of the end here. If they were at all serious about this crisis, they would have started with reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But instead they’re trying to re-inflate the housing bubble caused by those two entities instead, at the expense of literally every other part of the American economy.

This certainly isn’t what I had been hoping for.