Stephen Bainbridge sums up the argument, from Right and Left, about why an “economic stimulus package” is a really dumb idea.

Megan McCardle on Clinton’s tax plan:

I don’t want to hear any more about how the Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility; none of them are planning to close the current deficit, much less deal with the now-seriously-it-really-is-looming entitlement problem. Their tax code changes will claw back only a small fraction of the revenue lost in the Bush tax cut. If you are surprised, it is probably because the Democrats and the Republicans have a different definition of the tax cuts going “mostly to the rich”. If you mean, “which individuals got the biggest benefit from the tax cuts?”, rich people did, because they pay the most taxes; that is the definition Democrats use. But if you mean “which class of people got most of the money?”, then the answer is “the middle class”. There just aren’t that many rich people; it costs a lot more to hand out a modest amount of cash to 200 million than to hand out a lot of cash to 500,000. So when Democrats repeal only the tax cuts on the top one or two brackets, this may be symbolically rewarding, but it will not actually generate that much revenue for the treasury.

Democrats are, of course, planning to spend every bit of the money from their tax increases on new spending, plus it looks like some more. You may now return to forgetting that you ever thought you cared about the budget deficit.