Besides, all of this stimulus money is going to corporations, not individuals. Wall Street is paying out massive bonuses, while Main Street is stuck with exploding mortgages and high unemployment. How many jobs are they claiming to create for $154 Billion? Instead, they should give companies a tax break for each new employee they hire.

My vote is for the Government to put their own house in order, before they try to figure out what is best for the economy. They don’t have a very good track record in regulating the economy. And, the only jobs they know how to create are Government jobs.

That is how it should work. Build up surpluses when things are good to draw them down when things are bad. The story of Joseph and the Pharoah’s dreams from the Bible is based on this exact principle.

How I wish organizations could do this. And with the access to easy credit, now individuals can’t seem to do it anymore either.

American finances are being handled abysmally from top to bottom. It’s such a sad state of affairs. One wonders if any financial sanity can ever be returned without the near elimination of credit. Credit has not been used to invest but to spend beyond people’s (and the govt’s) means. When credit is used to invest in the future it can have great outcomes. When it is used to buy now what you can’t afford until the future, it’s like cancer. Most americans are not responsible enough to be allowed access to credit and as a result they have financial cancer. And we demand our govt behave the same way and give us goodies without paying for them and thus the govt has the same cancer that the rest of us do.

The government should have made job stability and job creation its #1 priority in the initial round of massive stimulus. #2 priority should have been real estate market stability. A very distant third should have been Wall Street interests.

Instead, we got the complete opposite: Wall Street was the wounded soldier who received immediate care, real estate markets tanked, and people got laid off or “underemployed” at levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Of course, when you lose your job and home, this undermines your confidence and ability to buy products, new investments, etc. So consumer confidence plummeted.

Had they kept consumer confidence high, Wall Street would have done all right on its own. It did not need a bailout, although the government SHOULD have saved Lehman to prevent the crashing house of cards that ensued.

Moral of the story: middle class Americans were ignored. Now many of them are jobless. And $154 billion won’t do much to help. Most of that money will be gobbled up by big contractors. Sure, some folks will get new jobs from these contractors, making $7.15 or $10 an hour. But that’s not enough.

Government needs to provide businesses, small and large, with massive one-time tax incentives to take on new workers full-time — instead of relying on freelancers and temps, as they are doing now. This will get people back to work, will give biz owners temporary relief, and will ensure that the work is at least SOMEWHAT market-driven (i.e. people working at a company that needs more staff, and not just a 1,000 ditch diggers employed by a large construction contractor).