Stimulus Plan Needs Better Ideas

You can't spend rhetoric. Especially empty rhetoric. President Obama was eloquent trying to sell his economic stimulus program to the American public in Elkhart, Indiana, and Fort Myers, Florida, last week. And one homeless woman he met eventually did find lodging, but since that hour, hundreds more families have lost their homes.

Meanwhile, during congressional hearings last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner violated the first rule of public speaking: If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything!

And then both fell into the trap of assuming that if you throw enough money at a problem, a solution will emerge. That's the basis for creating a stimulus bill that only stimulates the spending appetite of the Friends of Democrats, who were left out in the past eight years of the Republican spending orgy. ...