It’s a money party! (BOPM – Bring Other People’s Money)
Donald Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department of George Mason University claims that Obama’s “call for a new era of responsibility” doesn’t jibe with his desire to run through $800 billion in new “stimulus” spending. He uses Arnold Kling’s estimate of maybe 500 people deciding how this money is spent:
"The arithmetic is mind-boggling. If 500 people have meaningful input, and the stimulus is almost $800 billion, then on average each person is responsible for taking more than $1.5 billion of our money and trying to spend it more wisely than we would spend it ourselves."
And of course they have to spend that $1.5 billion in a couple weeks. More than a few movies have been made about this problem. Brewster’s Millions comes to mind. It never goes well, and they character never finds his problems solved with the spending of the money.
Neither will we.