Some folks in ObamaLand are talking about a new stimulus bill.

Obama’s first stimulus plan cost around $800 billion and change. You are hard pressed to find an economist who will tell you that this $800 billion played any meaningful role in an economic recovery. Remember Dear Ruler telling us that if we didn’t have the stimulus bill unemployment would remain above 9%. Were you paying attention on Friday? Unemployment is still above 9%.

Let me tell you how this stimulus plan was developed. It’s just this simple: Obama comes into office with a mandate to do something to bring us out of the recession and to get people working again. There was a problem though. Obama had no clue what to do. He had no experience he could draw upon to develop a recovery plan. He did have a mindset though, and that mindset was that government is good and the private sector is bad, so whatever was to be done had to strengthen government and involve the private sector only to the degree absolutely necessary. So Obama went to Nancy Pelosi and simply told her to get the Democrat caucus together and instruct them to dust off any and all spending plans they’ve been proposing or considering over the past few years and put them into a giant spending bill. Keep it under one trillion dollars, and we’ll present it to the people as a stimulus bill. Whether or not it really contributes to an economic recovery will be beside the point. The plan will give Democrat members of congress the ability to go to the voters in their home districts with “Look at the money I brought back to our district” newsletters and speeches.

And so it goes--the unions benefited, the public service workers held on for another year, but in the end it did nothing.