Indeed, the largest single item in the package--$288 billion--is tax relief for 95% of the American public. This money is that magical $60 to $80 per month you've been finding in your paycheck since last spring. Not a life changing amount, but helpful in paying the bills.

I'll just blurt out my 'stupid, Fox-watching' question then--if its barely useful for paying the bills, how is it stimulus? Stimulus should stimulate, and frankly a little help paying the bills is hardly stimulating, especially if you are among the 15-20 percent or so (including those who are stopped looking for work and thus not counted in the official unemployment rate of 11%...) who don't get a paycheck with 60 bucks to pay the cell phone bill. I suppose its too much to expect a journalist to understand the real economy, but millions of jobs are forgoing creation simply because the entrepreneurs, who've already identified the market and have solid business plans in place, can't get the financing to execute them. I personally know half a dozen such men and women who are marking time, scrounging for the next buck, unable to fill their roles as job-creation machines because idiots like you thinks stimulus is a welfare check to buy flat-screen televisions.

The next highest amount was $275 billion in grants and loans to states. This is why your child's teacher wasn't laid off...and why the fire station has remained open, and why you're not paying even higher state and local taxes to close the local budget hole.

Again Joe--how does this stimulate the economy? This is for all intensive purposes, the taking out of a home equity loan to pay down credit-card debt. You keep your house for a while long, but ultimately you still have the problem. Most people, as the poll indicated, seem to understand that for Democrats, stimulus means stimulating votes. The economy renews itself and creates jobs out of a process of identifying new opportunities for windfall profits. Create a new industry and thousands of jobs follow. Pay an old fossil like you in a dying medium and its just money down the rat hole.

It turns out that what people are really upset about is all that wasteful money that has gone to political public works projects...except that the overwhelming portion of that money hasn't been spent yet. Remember all those "shovel-ready" projects? Well, they didn't exist. The big jobs-creating projects like the rebuilt "smart" electric grid, major highways and fast trains will come on line during the next year. (Although these projects might have gotten greater public support if they'd been chosen by a National Infrastructure Bank--a panel of experts, like the fed--that would have picked them according to their value added, rather than by the bozo appropriators in the Congress.)

The sure sign of being emotionally overwrought--incoherency. We know that all the green jobs were bullshit--that's why people responded to the CNN poll the way they did. However lets consider how stimulating these shovel-ready projects would have been if they had existed. Infrastructure is great, but without a vibrant, creative entrepreneurial class, properly financed, you have North Korea, with its empty eight-lane highways through Pyongyang.

I can't imagine this makes any sense to you, because as a journalist, you join the other gentry-liberals in that strange never-never-land where you don't have to produce anything of value to get paid. I on the other hand, don't eat unless I solve a real-world problem for someone. If I have a bad day and screw up, I am completely and utterly accountable. I might even get sued. I don't begrudge you your chosen profession--hey if that's what you like to do, you get paid and your happy doing it--great!--what a country. But make no mistake--some people create wealth and some people offer diversion. Right now the Sundance Film Festival is going on in Park City--a virtual ghost town at the beginning of the 20th century. You can still see the old miners shacks, now worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars as ski condos, terraced up the hillside. Let me ask you this--who left first--the prostitutes or the miners? Rather obvious isn't it. The miners generated the wealth that allowed the ladies of the evening to ply their trade as well as laundresses, banks and barber shops. When they went, the town went with them.

So two thoughts Joe:

1. Its not that the White House has done a terrible job of explaining their actions, its just that their actions are terrible. I suppose if you haven't learned humility at your age, you never will, but this is an opportunity to learn a little wisdom and repent of your left-wing foolishness.

2. 75% of the country doesn't watch Fox News, but they do know what is going on in their own lives. They know the stimulus was wasted because they understand the concept--and you don't.

It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you're a nation of dodos.

I completely agree, which is why I was so heartened when the Massachusetts race turned out the way it did. Abraham Lincoln or P.T. Barnum were alleged to have said:

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.