Obama's first month in office

Does anyone really know what the blizzard of plans that Obama has put forward in his first month in office really entail, other than a massive increase in the size of government and government spending? I doubt it. Certainly not the legislators who have voted and will be voting on these various plans. I don't believe a single one of them read the full spending bill that just passed before voting on it.

This rush (panic really) to legislate is tragic, perhaps catastrophic. Nancy Pelosi's ludicrous claim that every month that passed without the passage of the spending bill would cause the loss of 500 million American jobs is emblematic of the lack of serious consideration these proposals have received.

The military says that speed kills. In the legislative arena, speed leads to the frantic passage of bills written by nameless staffers and passed by elected officials who don't even know what is in them. What we do know is that all of this, if passed, will cost a staggering amount. And President Obama's proposals to pay for all or even most of this new spending are voodoo economics on stilts. And it will be with this for a very long time, even if it turns out we don't like it.

Mark Steyn sums this up better than I can. He certainly does it more wittily.