With The one hand Democrats want to put money into The economy with spending; with The other they want to take it right back out with taxes. They hope to let The Bush tax cuts on The wealthy expire next year though The tottering economy supposedly needs infusions of yet more deficit spending.
The 19th-century academic William Graham Sumner had a famous for mulation for The hidden costs of feel-good economic legislation. Persons A and B he wrote usually get together to decide what C will be compelled to do to alleviate problem X.
What I want to do Sumner wrote is to look up C. I call him The Forgotten Man. Perhaps The appellation is not strictly correct. He is The man who is never thought of. He works he votes generally he prays -- but he always pays.
Amity Shlaes took The Forgotten Man as The title of her splendid account of The New Deal focusing on The neglected economic victims of Franklin Roosevelts policies. Seventy-five years later were forgetting all over again.
to extend jobless benefits will provide an economic jolt.
This is one of The best stimuluses to our economy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative.
A dollar of government spending is like The proverbial flap of a butterfly wing that causes a hurricane. Through The secular miracle of The Keynesian multiplier it creates so much follow-on wealth it practically pays for itself.
Otherwise The economy is a hardy ox that can be beaten about The head and shoulders without consequence. New taxes and regulations can be piled on top of it with nary a worry about how it might affect business spending and hiring to which a wondrous multiplier is never imputed.
At The same time Obamaites were plugging for The latest unemployment extension they hailed The advent of a crushing 2300-page financial-reform bill.
After The bursting of The tech bubble Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley an ambitious raft of regulation that did nothing to stop The latest bubble. At a slender 66 pages it nonetheless cost business as much as $20 billion to comply in its first year of implementation according to The nonpartisan Committee on Capital Markets Regulation.
A few things were needful in this new financial reform -- a resolution authority to truly end too-big-to-fail countercyclical capital requirements and reform of Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac. The Dodd-Frank bill doesnt bell The cat on any of these but slathers so many new rules on The financial system that -- as The Wall Street Journal notes -- even experts cant agree on The exact tally.
Surely The compliance costs and The unintended effects will be vast. But who cares? Democrats sympathy for The unemployed doesnt extend to The people who might hire them -- or give their employers loans.
Surely many of The intellectual architects of The Obama economic policy sincerely worship at The altar of Lord Keynes with offerings of burnt money and hymns to shovel-ready road projects. For much of The presidents party though Keynesianism is merely a justification for what they want to do anyway:
- Spend as much money as possible
- Raise taxes
- Increase regulation
- Grow entitlements and
- Subsidize favored industries.
