It would seem that the first wave of stimulus work has hit the streets (quite literally). Am I the only one not thrilled?

I typically avoid being a blog of political commentary, but the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into we’ve been dragged into has reached the last straw. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what kind of political affiliation you have…60 jobs for 6 months is not any sort of recovery. It’s a temporary bailout for those 60. I would love to see the CNN followup: “The original 60 stimulus workers: 7 months later.” This isn’t recovery. It’s not a stimulus. It doesn’t stimulate anything except the rhetoric that’s been going on for the last 6 months.

Obama and friends can now claim “see, we’re fixing it!” when nothing is being done. It’s nothing more than a feel-good stimulus, and that’s all this massive bailout/stimulus/etc plan has to be. It never actually has to create or fix anything, nor does it have to show any sort of real discernable progress. All it has to do (and all it’s intended to do) is make the average American believe it’s working. As long as people think “it’s getting better,” then the politicians in Washington have secured their re-election. And lets be honest: that’s all they’ve ever cared about. Looking at the new Recovery.gov website, I see a pretty website. I’ve yet to see a single thing of substance (and their timeline noticably lacks a “point you will actually notice a change” milestone).

Washington needs to realize that this sort of thing doesn’t help a damn bit, beyond trying to keep the American public from rising up and setting Washington (and Wall St) on fire. To be honest, that’s starting to seem more and more attractive of an option. That, or mass executions of CEOs. Neither will help the economy, sure, but they’ll definitely make us all feel better about it–and they don’t come with a pricetag of ∞.

[EDIT: A little birdy told me of a very similar post, which is a must-read]